Welcome to Episode 6 of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show, a podcast for the Farcaster middle class.

Our hosts unpack their FarCon experiences and dissect the use of Cast Actions to produce useful transparency and feedback loops around algorithmic curation metrics.

As the season wraps, BeavChris and BArt-Head offer a transparent look at their journey, blending financial discussions with anecdotes, making this finale a compact yet comprehensive guide for anyone involved in or interested in the evolving world of decentralized networks and digital content.

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Transcript

BeavChris

Clearly I am back from FarCon and decked out.

BArt-Head

Hello, BeavChris! You look different.

BeavChris

Yes, I'm finally one of the cool kids. Imagine me as Steve Buscemi, me with a skateboard. How do you do, fellow kids?

BArt-Head

Hello, fellow Farcastooors.

BeavChris

Let's start our show. So we're streaming on Unlonely, minting on Zora on Base, blogging on Paragraph, which has now merged with Mirror, with the help from Descript and ChatGPT, we're sharing clips on Drakula, and our presence is managed by @cameron at Seemore.tv.

BArt-Head

Welcome, everybody, to The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show.

BeavChris

Welcome. Art, you did not go to FarCon, so I want to know, what trouble did you get into while we were all busy frolicking?

BArt-Head

Yeah, thank you so much for bringing me to FarCon in spirit, in paper, on a stick. I am jealous that you got to meet so many people in person, IRL, including people who traveled so far from South America, from Spain, from Japan. What was the farthest that someone had traveled?

BeavChris

Oh, I don't know. There were quite a few people from Poland, Singapore. I would say Chile is pretty dang far to me as well. All over the place.

BArt-Head

Yeah. And thank you to our Canadian friends for braving that border transfer.

BeavChris

Yeah.

BArt-Head

I was at home. I streamed some of the FarCon events. Like the live events that was really cool to see Unlonely on a phone streaming live to the entire internet. I watched the feed, which definitely felt different. I was very excited to see some of the Farhack results and things that people had created and on a meta level, it's also interesting to observe what builders choose to work on within some constraints of a short period of time, but also with an opportunity to carve out some time from their day jobs to add to the Farcaster ecosystem.

It's quite exciting to see this dev community, this builder community, this creator community come together and identify in a decentralized way what is needed.

BeavChris

So you were participating in Farhack remotely essentially?

BArt-Head

No! I was just watching.

BeavChris

Oh, but you also built something this week though. Coincidentally?

BArt-Head

Yes, I got a little FOMO. I built a small cast action. I'll mention it, it's the Airstack Social Capital Value Metric.

BeavChris

Yet another way to judge ourselves. Great.

BArt-Head

Yes. It's an un gamable metric, so that's really fascinating. The higher the score, the better you are as a human being. The more worth you have for your individual cast. And as well, they are paying, I believe, one to one, their Airstack Not A Token.

BeavChris

So yeah, tell me more about your building process, like why did you decide to build this particular action frame? Okay, so I like, made fun of you by deleting your fart action and replacing it with this new social whatever token thing.

BArt-Head

It's called SCV, Social Capital Value.

BeavChris

And immediately used it on your cast where you announced this new frame and it gave me like 0.5 or something , and I was like, aha, your cast is shitty. But then later I came back and it went up to 56 or something like that. I think the question I have is to me a number with no range and no metric is really confusing. So if you can tell us a bit more about how to even use this action and how to judge ourselves in this new way.

BArt-Head

Yeah. So this comes from the AirStack team. They've been thinking about feed discoverability for a very long time. And one way is to say for each cast that goes out, for there to be a score on it, which is generated by community engagement. So if you have more likes, more recasts, more replies, those are good things for your social capital. And if you have positive interactions with other people in the community, who generally have pro social positive contributions, your cast has added to the community's social capital.

So this score should move over time. Ideally, it goes up. If it turns out that the cast has really negative content that destroys social capital, that should somehow be reflected in the metric as well. So there's no cap in

BeavChris

It already has comments in the chat. And as usual, very much like Art, I'm like, I can't tell whether these are sincere or sarcastic.

So let me read them out to you. Geoff says they are 1000 percent ungameable, LOL and positive contributions sure sounds like a science to me lmeow. So wait, I can't tell just is this trolling comments or is it like sincere comments?

BArt-Head

I think it's both and we can get into

BeavChris

but he also says artlu gets me so you are correct

BArt-Head

The meta challenge for decentralized social is how do you differentiate between good content and bad content.

If you are in communist China, it's pretty easy. It's the Chinese Communist Party that determines. If you are in a free society it's really hard. One attempt is the power badge concept, which is a way to leverage relationships and say that a person who has established a reputation for being someone that other people want to engage with, things that they happen to put out should be elevated.

The SCV tries to make it more granular based on the content of the cast itself, not just the personality that said it, and it depends on the community's reactions.

BeavChris

Yeah, the thing is right now, if someone already has a lot of followers and all that, says something, and then if another person who is newbie says the same exact same thing, they would not receive the same score.

BArt-Head

That's correct. And the reason I built the cast action is so that it becomes very easy to see the individual level scores, and to follow and observe them over time, so that people can have it at their fingertips and propose improvements or observe ways that it's going. So that there's a positive feedback loop on the design of the metric.

One UX element that I tried to include is there's a frame that goes with the cast action. So the frame has links to the description of the algorithm as well as links to different things. And the action just gives you a very targeted view of the calculation. And there's actually a whole ecosystem built around this concept of Not A Token, which helps ideally with discovery.

You can imagine, and there exists, a leaderboard of SCV receiving casts. So then the whole community can see that if you had a feed that was ordered by high SCV, how does that look compared with a trending feed based on likes, recasts, engagement in other ways?

Right around the same time that AirGraph [Ed. Note: Airstack!] released SCV, Nook introduced their own attempt at a trending feed, where they use metrics generated by OpenRank.

OpenRank is another different attempt, which, as I understand it, It's based on Google PageRank.

BeavChris

Okay. And what I know about it so far is that Cameron is 8 or something ridiculously high on OpenRank. So I'm like, okay I like Cameron and his number is high, is like low, which is high. So therefore it is not a bad metric, but I have not checked myself yet. So I have, I'm not, I have not been mad yet.

BArt-Head

So I have checked mine. I believe my number is in the 150s.

BeavChris

Oh, that's really good! Right?

BArt-Head

Thank you...I don't know if this is a troll or not.

BeavChris

Yeah. The audience, Geoff, you did the top 60 for FarCon, and yes, I was sad. I was like, oh, I didn't even make it on the list. So I think that's how these metrics go. I only like it if I'm somehow on it and really high. And I'm like, meh, it sucks if I'm like really low. But like the idea of using this to have a better trending feed is interesting to me because right now it's Trending just I'm just like, this just sucks. This is all gamed. Oh, Geoff wants to clarify that I don't want to be on that list. It's a negative signal. Oh thank you. I think.

BArt-Head

There are things that are signals and there are things that are anti signals. But one of the meta things is that I think cast actions allow for virtuous feedback cycles as well as transparency which we will not get in other centralized social networks.

And in other decentralized social networks, we may or may not get as much permissionless, decentralized innovation. And the acceptance of these innovations will depend on the community. But the permission for coming up with it is absolutely free and open.

BeavChris

And the more metrics we have, In a way, it makes them more nuanced. And you don't feel as shitty if you're low in one of them.

BArt-Head

Because we all contain multitudes. Our value is not one number.

BeavChris

Who knew?

BArt-Head

So if decentralized social teaches us this, That's great.

Also think if we end up in a world where there are a hundred competing metrics, that tells me there is no metric. There should be a handful of winning metrics at the end of the day, not hundreds of them.

BeavChris

And I feel like the true metric, which of course it depends on what you're going for, but the one that appeals to me the most that I've seen happen to friends is like new business opportunities.

And it's not related to follower numbers or even likes and those kinds of things. It has to do with whether you're making a visible impact on the community. And I think like that to me is a much truer metric than any of the numbers that we can come up with.

BArt-Head

Yes. So maybe there's another different metric, which is connections made at FarCon that lead to valuable contributions to the ecosystem. That's something interesting.

Now, the last thing I'll say about the SCV cast action is that I could do it permissionlessly. Ignas from Airstack said publicly, I couldn't figure out how you did it because the APIs are not released yet.

BeavChris

What? How did you do it?

BArt-Head

So I said, I looked into your GraphQL schema and found it and was able to extract it with a lower level API, which they have made public. And to me, that is an absolutely great use of public, transparent, permissionless data.

BeavChris

So did you like use a browser and right click and inspect and then follow the URLs? Is that how it worked?

BArt-Head

Unsolicited advertisement, but the Airstack Data Explorer is quite well thought out. You don't need a browser, but you use their Explorer. It even includes an AI assistant. Raising my hand to confess I cheated and asked the AI how to do it.

BeavChris

No way!

BArt-Head

It gave me a good clue, and then I was able to put it into the cast action.

BeavChris

Wow! This is like freaking amazing. You are like the power user of AirStack. Oh, man.

BArt-Head

They did not even know this.

BeavChris

Yeah.

BArt-Head

I did not even know this. This is my first time playing with the AirStack APIs. And I found it great. Now we have two cast actions. There's the official one from the team that shows you how much Not a Token each cast has earned.

And then my cast action shows what is the raw SCV metric? And right now the payout ratio is one for one. So the numbers should be exactly the same. So we have an independent verification, that what they show in their APIs is consistent with their accounting elsewhere.

BeavChris

So why do they call the token, Not A Token.

BArt-Head

That's a different question. Maybe we need to get the AirStack team on here to describe it. All I know is it's called Not A Token.

BeavChris

Okay yeah, so everyone, now you can earn, Not A Token, maybe it's just to troll everyone by having us say it that way, by having good Social Capital Value casts. Yet another way you can be judged.

BArt-Head

And the pitch is, it's not gameable. For the people in the chat,

BeavChris

Yes, it's not gameable.

BArt-Head

Let's go game it. The transparency lets us improve it, figure it out, make it really useful.

BeavChris

Okay. There was another

BArt-Head

BeavChris, what did you get up to?

BeavChris

I think I was up to meeting all sorts of people at FarCon. And in fact, one of my lovely memories is meeting Gudmund and Kyle, who's @banta at FarCon separately, and then they were both mentioning that. Oh, we want to build something at Farhack, but I don't know what.

And by the time I saw them again, they built Powerlift, which is a way for folks to discover those, or for people who are on the edge of getting a power badge, figure out how to do so in a way that contributes to the ecosystem. I haven't had time to play around with it yet, but I thought that branding would look really good. So it was really nice to see. Yeah.

BArt-Head

Powerlift!

BeavChris

Which as an ex powerlifter, I was like, Oh, I like the name.

So it was really nice to see how fast people made friendships and then are able to build together. And actually over here in the notes. You mentioned there's an artistic tension between content to help newbies and content to make a change. When building, it's way easier to merge the two. And I was wondering what you meant by that. It sounds really deep.

BArt-Head

Okay. So I wrote this down. I'm very good at writing blurbs that sound deep.

BeavChris

Are they deep?

BArt-Head

Maybe they're not as deep. So this is not trouble. It's not even interesting, but as everybody should know by now, this is Episode Six of Season One of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show. We planned for six episodes in season one, and we are actively planning for season two. One of the things we have to answer is a tension of what kind of content do we have to put out there?

And one thing that is clearly needed is content to help newbies, people who are new to Farcaster. Because we see a lot of value in the Farcaster ecosystem. It is designed to pull out that value and it is more layered and textured than other social networks that we are used to. And we continually run into those challenges.

For example, you have a signer and when you delete your signer, everything that you have signed with it in the past becomes invalidated. That's different from many other things. And there are technical reasons as well as design reasons for why that happens.

And so that's a little tricky thing, which we have learned in layers over time. And they just make sense to us, but for people who are newer or maybe have a different background, where these technical things don't nerd snipe them, they're still important and relevant to their Farcaster experience at some level. So one thing that's very useful is to go deeper into content to help newbies.

Another thing that we've done in season one is content to make a change. Where it's some kind of social commentary. And as a recap, we've spent a significant portion of our time talking about shadow bans. I feel we were not the only ones, but we emphasized talking about it. And just now we talked about the power badge and lifting up people with power, using power to expand the cool kids club and to help people navigate the rules that are there in a way that's organic, natural, and expresses the community's values.

And that fits in the lines of content to make a change. Neither you nor I want Farcaster to be a cool kids club. But if nobody acts to make it not a cool kids club, it may trend towards that because of decisions that are made to counteract worse outcomes, like being overrun with spam and noise and bad actors, scammy actors.

So we have to decide. Whether we lean in to the left, to the right, both, or try to thread the needle somehow.

BeavChris

This is why we need to have different seasons because we need a bit of time to noodle.

BArt-Head

Yes! And we will decide a theme for season two, or an approach for Season 2.

BeavChris

Right, right. And then Fufu asked, What factors made the decision to arrive at 6 episodes?

Actually at FarCon, I got to chat with Humpty who's like a pretty famous onchain artist creator person. And he was like, Yeah, I always work in 6 week sprints for all my projects. And then I said, Yeah, I think we've accidentally also arrived at a six week sprint. So it's more like we should call it like sprint one instead of season one. And then we'll do sprint two because we're accidentally so agile in our approach.

So so yeah and I see that 0xwizard.eth who's @know also said like some structure going to season two sounds cool. Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're trying to aim for. It's like we, With every season we're trying to iterate.

BArt-Head

We do want to take this episode to share some interesting information. And I was trying to think, what do people care the most about? And the answer, of course, is How much do other people make?

BeavChris

Oh yeah! We're getting into the meat of the episode half an hour in.

Oh man, so when Art proposed this, the joke slash serious part is always that I am actually the bad at math Asian. So the moment Art proposed this as an episode, I was like, you do all the numbers, I don't want to do any math. So a lot of this work landed on Art. And oh man, like seriously, I think someone needs to make a tool for tracking tips because we're so grateful for all of your tips and that is the hardest number to chase down.

However, we have solved this and Art will now tell you our costs and breakdown. Are you going to share your screen?

BArt-Head

So I am extremely good at spreadsheets. If there was a contest for who on Farcaster is best at spreadsheets, I would like to be at the top of that leaderboard.

I am awful at screen sharing. So I need to ask you to share the screen.

BeavChris

Oh, okay. Do I have it? Oh, I see. It's in the is it the one linked in our Google doc?

BArt-Head

Yep. There's a link to a Google sheet and let me say for the stream, an overview. We set up this as a brand account so that we could help with our accounting and make it very clear.

That may or may not have been the best idea. And we can go into that, what we've learned in the last six episodes, but it does help for accounting for sure. And so one of our costs was setting up @bcbhshow. One of our learnings was that we started off calling it BC underscore and underscore BH underscore show.

Or did we actually call it BeavChris and BArt-Head show? There was a really long name.

BeavChris

Yes our name continues to be judged.

BArt-Head

So we spent 500 warps to buy an account. We spent 2,500 warps to buy a channel.

BeavChris

Oh do you want me to, I can share the screen now if that helps.

BArt-Head

Yep, that's fine. We spent some ETH, about $40 worth, to buy the ENS.

The largest expense was the ENS. The second largest expense was the channel. The cheapest was the show. We decided to make a webpage, bcbhshow.com. And that was quite cheap. And we decided to pay Seemore.tv to aggregate our content across all the Farcaster adjacent platforms. And Seemore.tv would have worked for us very well with YouTube, Spotify, many different creator platforms. But these costs, I think, looking at them now, line up pretty well. The most valuable thing to us was the channel. The least valuable was the account. The ENS

BeavChris

By valuable, you mean the fact that our account doesn't have a power badge and we're just like struggle bus with the account all the time.

BArt-Head

Yes.

BeavChris

Yeah.

BArt-Head

That got us no distribution.

BeavChris

Yes.

BArt-Head

No, nothing useful.

BeavChris

I need to

BArt-Head

really except for

BeavChris

I'm judging this by adding a little sad face.

BArt-Head

Yeah

BeavChris

And oh, but the other thing is like I didn't point this out and I didn't add it. Remember we made an arthur channel because someone Didn't want to pay warps for a channel on principle. But then we were trying to decide what to do and at the time we didn't think to make a brand channel. So then we made an arthur channel but I think we didn't do very much with that. So we just like x that out of this especially all together

BArt-Head

Oh, my idea is I paid for the arthur channel.

BeavChris

Oh, okay.

BArt-Head

And BeavChris, you don't know this, but yesterday @dwr took some shots across the bow to say there's no name squatting in channels, and they're going to clean them up soon.

BeavChris

Yeah, but even /arthur?

BArt-Head

So I removed you as a co host, and I changed the channel. It is now a channel for The Arthur Show on PBS.

BeavChris

What?

BArt-Head

Copyright, Public Broadcasting System, and WBGH in Boston.

BeavChris

I didn't even know this.

BArt-Head

Yeah, so you have nothing to do with this. This has nothing to do with the BCBH show.

BeavChris

Okay, fine whatever, okay, go on.

BArt-Head

Yeah, the account hasn't done much for us, but we didn't pay much for it.

BeavChris

Okay. I feel like this is unintentional comedy.

BArt-Head

Yeah. So I think, I think these lined up pretty well. We have spent for infrastructure, basically zero by using our permissionless partners Unlonely, Paragraph, Drakula, we've gotten so much distribution, service, platforms for free. We haven't really paid for it by watching ads. We haven't done much of anything. And in fact, we'll see in our income that using these Web3 platforms has actually paid us.

It's allowed the community to send value to us. Directly, without a middleman of advertising and corporate structure taking its big cut.

What we did have to spend money on was Descript, StreamYard, which I think was well worth the money that we spent. We did an experiment with a video editor. So it was something like Fiverr, but even more loose. And I'm quite happy with that experiment. We can go more into that with anybody on the stream that is interested or in our group chat that's interested to find out.

BeavChris

Mm-Hmm.

BArt-Head

Including our editor who is on Farcaster. We did an experiment to learn about video editing and see what else could be done. And in reality, Descript is an extremely powerful platform, streamYard is an extremely powerful platform. And the last big line item on our costs is we spent some money for a giveaway at FarCon through FCNY, who are our friends, to try to get eyeballs on our show and to make it interesting.

BeavChris

Yeah, for this one, I want to speak a little bit about the giveaway experience.

BArt-Head

Sure.

BeavChris

So one tweak, I will make next time is I think you were trying to accommodate me being like everywhere. And we didn't have a POAP device which is the NFC thing. So we were doing like a password frame.

But that ended up being a bit complicated for people because that required them to like know the password, find the place to enter it, and actually enter it. Whereas those who were doing POAP giveaways, it was just like a one scan, and then like people, You know, just have to enter their wallet. And that was that.

I think in the future, and also these POAPs were really well designed both in terms of art and also like Evan from POAP and Isabel were literally everywhere all at once. It was almost like kind of creepy because they were like little POAP angels who were at every single event. So I think that's what I would change next time is to use a POAP-based system for giveaways, just because it's so much easier for both the organizer and the receiver.

So I'll give myself a mild happy face for that one.

BArt-Head

But to recap, we chose to go with a frame native experience over a POAP native experience. And I think even over

BeavChris

It's pronounced PO-AP, I've confirmed.

BArt-Head

There is, even like this morning, an active debate on what it is. How does Isabel say it?

BeavChris

Oh, I don't remember her exact pitch. But my impression as a user is that it is a little bit like Girl Scout badges. It's like a, it's like a memory. I think the way she pitches like, it's like a, it's like a memory that you can keep almost. Because like for her, if you meet Isabel, like every quarter, there was a different designed POAP that you can collect from her.

It's almost like an NFT with the way it's designed. So then you get to refresh that experience of meeting Isabel in person.

BArt-Head

I have several POAPs from Isabel. I value them. They're really cool.

BeavChris

Yeah. And their designer is really good.

BArt-Head

One other thing that's very close to us on Farcaster is Icebreaker. And they have a really cool metal card that can be used for tapping.

BeavChris

Yeah. And returning credentials back and forth.

BArt-Head

So there, there are many shots on goal, trying to do this sort of thing. And the frames are the earliest, like my understanding is they finalized the code either the day of or the day before.

BeavChris

And then also even like whether I had an icebreaker badge was like really touch and go because I had a Vibes Pass and they didn't print the custom badges in time for the dozen of us that had a Vibes Pass. Yeah, so it was like a password frame was like a sure bet. Whereas the POAPs was a little bit scrambly. [Ed. Note: youknowwhaddamean] However, I think for next time, definitely I want to get into this NFC world.

BArt-Head

The NFC world overlaps with the NFT world and it is overlapping with the onchain world of your social graph. It's really fascinating. But these are basically our expenses. I'd say out of all the visible assets of The BCBH Show, most of them are either free or nearly free.

BeavChris

And even for example, StreamYard and Descript, I feel by using them, I actually got a few referrals, including know who's on the stream. So actually, our costs are even lower, at least for the first few months.

BArt-Head

That's cool. I like that even these Web2 platforms include some referral rewards, which remind us of Web3 mechanisms. Maybe it goes the other way around. But yeah, the fact that Web3 exists means that these platforms that hope to service us have to meet us where we are and give back some value, bootstrap their communities, etc.

BeavChris

Okay, so how much do we make it? Oh, go ahead.

BArt-Head

Have I missed anything in terms of discussing our business cost?

BeavChris

Let's check the chat. Is anything that oh, okay. In the chat Fufu says spreadsheet hacking is a life hack. Didn't expect that brand accounts, accounting numbers crunch on the season finale.

BArt-Head

Thank you for joining our season finale.

BeavChris

Yeah. And Geoff said but where's the cost for artlu's makeup artists prior to each show?

BArt-Head

We forgot the cost of our wigs! That's going to change the numbers.

BeavChris

All right. Okay. So that is very effectively zero. Cause I printed this out myself. I forgot how much your wig was.

BArt-Head

I spent real US dollars.

BeavChris

Yes. For the freaking wigs.

BArt-Head

My Ryan Gosling makeover.

BeavChris

Yeah how much was your wig approximately?

BArt-Head

$20.

BeavChris

Okay, alright, $20. I don't know

BArt-Head

Everybody watch my face as Christin breaks my spreadsheet. Live.

BeavChris

Oh, surely this autocomplete will fix everything.

BArt-Head

Hopefully, yes.

BeavChris

I don't know. Hey, if your spreadsheet doesn't account for someone futzing with it, then it's not a good spreadsheet.

BArt-Head

Very good point.

BeavChris

Okay. So I just added it here in row 16 and then I autocompleted it.

I don't know whether this fixes or breaks it, but come on. Like what is this negative one thingy? Oh, I guess it's the, is it the profit loss situation? Okay. Anyway, it's 20. So if it's off by 20 we'll, we're doing this live.

BArt-Head

So we've gone through our costs. And the real cost is our time or opportunity costs.

But for anybody considering making content, your barriers in web three are extremely low. We didn't have to spend money to try to get our name out. We have the Farcaster social graph. We have leveraged our existing followers and friends and made new friends.

BeavChris

I think actually, when Adrienne and NounishProf were interviewing nonlinear on stage, Adrienne did boldly point out, because Jonny Mac was saying that, oh, look, how much money we've, I've made with Hypersub, anyone can do it. And Adrienne was like, yeah, but you're also frickin huge on Farcaster, right? And so is Ted. So I think there is also the implicit, the grind of getting a little bit of connections on a social graph first that really helps with starting a show.

BArt-Head

So you and I, we may appear to be huge to some people. I think we would appear to be quite small to others.

BeavChris

Exactly. Like Fufu says, we are squarely middle class.

BArt-Head

Wherever you are, there's room to go up. There's room to go down. And the cost should not be the limiting factor for most people.

BeavChris

For sure. Yeah, I think the actual cost of making a show these days is pretty low and I think if anyone is gonna do this from scratch I really think the easiest way is to make friends with one person with really good reach on Farcaster and ask them to help quote cast you etc. Just to get that initial ball rolling.

BArt-Head

That person could be us.

BeavChris

Yes, that person could totally be us.

BArt-Head

Can we take 90 seconds out and do an ad read?

BeavChris

Oh, sure, sure.

I'm looking at the, are you going to do the ad read? Oh, I should do the ad read. Apparently.

BArt-Head

Yes, first, a comment. With Episode 6, our Season Finale, I aimed high. I know we think the world of our last sponsor, that he is perhaps one of the biggest gets that we could possibly get on Farcaster. And for episode six, I aimed even higher and did not get it.

So everybody, thank you for listening to our show. Our sponsor this week is Farchiver.

BeavChris

All right. I'll.

Yeah Farchiver, the easiest way to save your Farcaster activity. As you may know, everyone's account is tied to storage, which pays each year for the network to preserve a fixed number of casts, reactions, and follows.

When storage runs out, those casts, reactions, and followers are pruned. But Farcaster is permissionless. Read, Write, and Own all your interactions. Oh, I guess this is a quote from Chris Dixon. You may right click, save everything and anything and own it forever on your own computer or in the cloud, or even pinned via Pinata IPFS.

Farchiver saves not only just your own casts, but everyone else's likes, recasts and replies to all your brilliant thoughts. You get a download link with a file you can browse forever on your own computer. Check it out at farchiver.xyz. Tell 'em BeavChris and BArt-Head sent you.

BArt-Head

Thank you for listening to our advertisement.

BeavChris

Yeah, I don't even know what Art was trying to get. So this will be my after show discussion with him.

BArt-Head

Maybe for episode one of season two.

BeavChris

Okay. All right. All right. We'll give it another shot. But yeah, speaking of sponsors, so that's the start of our profit section, right? The green section.

BArt-Head

Yeah, it turns out that sponsorship is a very important part of paying for the cost of a show. And so we try to do 90 seconds or three minutes. We price it at 0.1 ETH for the three minute segment. We are very grateful to beecurious, proxystudio, and Farcasteradmin for very graciously choosing to partner with us, to sponsor our show and to have us read for them or not for them in the case of Proxy Studio.

And these contributions go a very long way in the revenues of our show. If you hear a podcast with no advertising, then their revenues are coming in other formats. And some of the other formats for us, we're sharing now, but overall the advertising revenue is a significant part. Another choice we made was to go through Zora, which contains mint fees and referral rewards, including to our early minters.

So we put each of our episodes on Zora. I went through yesterday. It's very easy to do the accounting and see the creator rewards.

BeavChris

You didn't even have to, technically anyone can see all these numbers.

BArt-Head

Exactly. I opened six webpages. So these ETH amounts are here. Do you remember BeavChris, how much we thought would come from this before starting?

BeavChris

The Zora?

BArt-Head

Right, the mint fees.

BeavChris

Nothing. I wasn't expecting very much at all.

BArt-Head

Yeah, can you do it just a quick selection of the mint fees? And read out how much we made.

BeavChris

Okay, I need to a little something. This is again very horrifying for Art to watch.

BArt-Head

I can do it without a mouse.

BeavChris

Okay, so Zora is like $108. And then Paragraph is $4. And I really want to contrast this to web2 creation, because if we had put this all out onto YouTube, for instance you would make $0, because you really don't make a cent until you hit 1,000 subscribers and hit thousands of hours of watch time.

BArt-Head

But then you make millions of dollars!

BeavChris

Mhm. Yeah, exactly. The tail is like super, super long there, so we think it's very surprising.

BArt-Head

We think the Zora tail, we will make millions of dollars eventually when we have that scale, but we are getting compensated way, way earlier. I think I would have been happy going in if we made $50 on all of our mints across everything. That would have been a great outcome, feeling extremely rewarded. And so I am very grateful to episodes, and I'm quite happy that our fans have as their own assets these mints .

BeavChris

With YouTube, if YouTube were to de-platform you, like your viewers would lose access to that episode forever. This idea of ownership is actually really important especially as we get into more of these, as the world's getting more and more centralized in some ways.

BArt-Head

I would never say anything to de-platform my content.

BeavChris

But you don't have to, right? Right now, I watch lots of YouTube. People get demonetized all the time, and they're not showing anything that's even bad. It's either algorithmically determined, just like a stray bullet, or there are like nefarious parties who would use all sorts of copyright strike tricks to pull the episodes, for instance.

BArt-Head

But, I'm not a terrorist. I don't do anything illegal, say anything that would piss off anyone.

BeavChris

And you don't have to. I'm not watching that kind of content. I'm watching very cozy, cute content, and they still get pulled sometimes. It's really sad.

BArt-Head

So we really are happy with this choice that we made. We're open to hearing from our collectors how to make it, even more rewarding, more valuable, more interesting, but that was a very nice experiment for us. We'll probably continue it.

BeavChris

Yeah and I'm actually surprised that someone minted a Paragraph. So that's super, super nice. Do you want to talk about the Drakula tokens? I feel a little confused about that one because I thought I saw some transactions, but maybe not. And also didn't we earn like $BLOOD or something? Is that worth anything?

BArt-Head

So the next segment is Drakula. When we started the show, Drakula did not exist.

BeavChris

But the day it launched, I posted a clip from our show on Drakula and, we were talking about it, sharing critiques, also using it and finding the experience for a creator. I haven't used it very much as a consumer, but I have used it as a creator. So my thoughts are coming from that side.

There's three revenue streams from Drakula. The first is creator rewards. The second is creator tokens. And the third is $BLOOD.

And creator rewards are a very significant pot of money and value that gets distributed to creators. We applied for it and we were not selected to receive it. And it appears that they are distributing widely, that is, every week the people who receive it are not overlapping.

BeavChris

And then it's also related to our account issue, right? So we had created this brand new account to post under so that it's a separate thing from what me and Art usually post, but that impacted our ability to gain the creator award because this account has like no followers.

And it was a, with a whole like, Art did a lot of back and forth behind the scenes, but I think that if we had started off with one of our accounts, it wouldn't have been so not straightforward to get that award.

BArt-Head

I want to share this because I think the Drakula team did a really great job around it.

So BeavChris says we have no followers on our brand account.

BeavChris

Or, very few.

BArt-Head

BArt-Head values every single one of you! You guys are all individually valuable and extremely important, to BArt-Head.

BeavChris

I feel like this is gonna be the one part that's gonna get clipped for the Drakula episode.

It's gonna be like, you're gonna title it like, BeavChris shits on all her followers or something like that. I can already sense the troll.

BArt-Head

BeavChris has 20,000 plus followers. The BCBHShow account has fewer. And anybody who's been on Drakula has seen the big accounts get shown in the feed.

BCBH Show had a very hard time being shown to people. It was on us to drive viewership. So we tried and we did the efforts that we did.

I reached out in the background to the team and said to them, look @christin has many followers. People like her content. Can you help us out? Can you link our accounts? And they said, sorry, we don't have that capability. But we have given The BCBH Show a boost in the algo.

So they did their best to show our account and our clips to people browsing and to generate views. I did see that the view counts popped up after the change that they made.

BeavChris

Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

BArt-Head

We have gotten an unfair help because I reached out to the team. I would encourage other creators to engage with the Drakula team and raise concerns because they seem to be interested in making the creator experience better.

BeavChris

Okay.

BArt-Head

Now we didn't get a reward, but that's a big zero.

BeavChris

Yeah.

BArt-Head

We created some creator tokens, and I bought some, it's showing up in the accounting here as zero, but I think a portion of that value is probably going to my wallet. And so that's going to be between five and $30. It's like the total number of collectors of the creator token is so low, that there's not much value.

BeavChris

So I recall that there were a few more people who bought us like earlier and then maybe they sold us or something, which is totally fine. But I'm guessing that transactionally, like if someone makes a transaction based on our token, we don't get anything, right?

BArt-Head

If there's a transaction, we get some money.

BeavChris

Oh, okay.

BArt-Head

And if the token you hold goes up in value, you may sell it to crystallize some of that value.

BeavChris

Yeah.

BArt-Head

I remember I did buy fairly high relative to where we are. So hopefully my purchases rewarded our early collectors. And this is a way to get some value to your brand if you focus on it and work on pumping your token price.

BeavChris

Yeah I can see how if you're able to concertedly change the token value, then that rewards early people. But it seems a little bit tricky as well.

BArt-Head

It's not easy to make value appear out of nowhere.

BeavChris

Yeah, and then what about the $BLOOD? Is the $BLOOD worth anything?

BArt-Head

Blood only is worthless.

BeavChris

Oh.

BArt-Head

They're points.

BeavChris

What.

BArt-Head

They may become worth more later, but they're points.

BeavChris

Oh, darn it. I thought they were exchangeable for something.

BArt-Head

I may be wrong. If I'm wrong. Okay, we'll be happy.

Let's do $enjoy tips next.

BeavChris

Okay. Thank you all so much. I really appreciate that the tips that you know, we have all received as though because of the show and I know that it's many of you watching are the ones who are tipping us. So thank you.

BArt-Head

By the way, tipping is a very significant portion of the revenues of the show. And what it does is it supplements and replaces some of the sponsorship. In many cases, it comes from money that's kind of, sort of yours, but kind of, sort of not, which is an interesting dynamic. And tipping is evolving.

It's a very interesting space. My understanding of the background, is that @jacek built tipping in $DEGEN as maybe feature number five or six on his list of things that he wanted to include in DEGEN, but he built it because it was easy to build and it would have a very high return on possibly getting attention to the meme coin and adding value to the ecosystem.

More recently, they have reduced the tip allocations.

BeavChris

Yeah.

BArt-Head

Which, of course, everybody knows, and they've chosen to do so rather than try to solve very difficult problems of anti sybil, anti farmer, making sure the money goes to the people that have contributed the most to the ecosystem. If you recall, the degen tipping mechanism is extremely laissez-faire. A lot of things are allowed. And on the other side. It's extremely opaque. There is a list of disqualified wallets.

BeavChris

Yeah.

BArt-Head

The list grows whenever it grows. And wallets come off of that list whenever they come off of that list.

BeavChris

I feel like

BArt-Head

different communities. Oh, go ahead.

BeavChris

It was since ever since that ban hammer of the wallets, like the price drop, because a lot of these farmers are like, screw this, and then they sold and left. And then now I look at my wallet and be sad.

BArt-Head

I think that's what happened. People bought $DEGEN in order to participate in some extractive or positive sum activity. They see that extractive or positive sum activity is no longer available to them. And so they leave. I don't think that is irrational. And I don't think that's unexpected.

BeavChris

Your love of rationality.

BArt-Head

I actually love self determination. I think they choose to sell an asset that they no longer believe in. And that's the true free market.

But my point here is that $DEGEN does not appear interested in solving tipping. If they reduce the allocations, then they can afford to have tipping the way it is with low level leakage of value while still benefiting from allowing $DEGEN community members to tip each other and allowing the community to direct the airdrop in ways that the community feels is appropriate.

Those are all values that they hold. And at the same time, there are other communities who are very eager to explore tipping mechanisms. And so there are different experiments going out there. One of which is Enjoy. Another one is $NOGS, which is skin in the game. You have to tip something that you have. Whereas $enjoy, you tip something you don't yet have. And so there's different incentives embedded in there.

We received 9,000 $enjoy in the last airdrop. I believe we have more, but I'm not sure.

BeavChris

No, it's not, it's not um, airdrop. It's, this is tips received.

BArt-Head

We're sorry, in the last collection.

BeavChris

Right, exactly.

BArt-Head

Where the tips went into our wallet. By the way, everybody, our wallet is public, bcbhshow.eth. All these numbers should be consistent.

BeavChris

Well, the enjoy tips went into my wallet because the Zora account is tied to me.

BArt-Head

[silent scream] I see! Okay.

BeavChris

Well, what did you think I was showing you in the screenshot? Again, the joy of creator, like, administration. Yeah.

BArt-Head

I suspect we have more, because I feel like I've seen more.

BeavChris

Me too, something is not quite adding up so, so let's, let's go back and check that.

BArt-Head

And how much, BeavChris, is that worth, that 9,000 $enjoy?

BeavChris

According to you, it's worth $2. And it's very funny, because I think you had the math wrong, and you were all excited for a hot second.

BArt-Head

Yes, we were excited, because we had put the 9,000 In the $DEGEN column. So if you type 9,000 in the $DEGEN column, that's a lot more money.

BeavChris

Yeah. It's very nice though. I can't complain about free money. The fact that I have so much $enjoy in my wallet right now, it's already very enjoyable.

BArt-Head

Let's go quickly and just sum up the $DEGEN. How much $DEGEN did we get according to our accounting?

BeavChris

Oh, did you do that? Is it at the top? Is this what it is?

BArt-Head

No right above the enjoy, there's three rows. There's one for our brand account. There's one for your wallet and there's one for my wallet.

BeavChris

Yeah. But you didn't do the total yourself. I have to do it manually now.

BArt-Head

Yes. Yeah. Column K, add it up in dollars in column K.

BeavChris

I would not have laid out the spreadsheet this way, but mumble, mumble.

This much.

BArt-Head

Is that more or less than our sponsorship?

BeavChris

Depending on how much $DEGEN is worth on any day, it's about very similar.

BArt-Head

And if we say that my Farchiver sponsorship gets discounted because it's me paying, not someone else in the community. The community has paid us more in $DEGEN than

BeavChris

for sure

BArt-Head

anybody else right? Our fans are in fact the ones supporting the show. By way of $DEGEN tipping.

BeavChris

Mm-Hmm.

BArt-Head

So for me, some people are saying that the allocations were too high to start. And I disagree with that. I think by being high, they gave an opportunity for people to express their values. And send value in directions that are consistent with the community's will.

BeavChris

Yeah, it's a vote.

BArt-Head

And were some of that money misdirected or misspent? I would also say absolutely yes, but for creators, the fact that the value was some huge multiple of the value of enjoy is an absolutely great thing. And in some ways it makes the difference between content existing. And not existing.

BeavChris

Exactly. And are these top numbers the totals?

BArt-Head

Yes.

BeavChris

Oh, you sure? You didn't do any math wrong? Okay, cool. So are these numbers, are they meeting your expectations? Are they meeting our, I don't want to say similar shows, similar category of creation? Like how are we shaping up?

BArt-Head

You don't want to say this, but I'll say it. There was an interesting cast from @ted looking for a producer to join their Farcaster podcast, and she shared how much money their podcast was making. Everybody listening to this should know that we have pursued a slightly different strategy to monetize our podcast.

BeavChris

We don't have Hypersub, for example, and the economics and the upside downside of Hypersub are very different from our revenue streams. My understanding is they do not have advertising.

BArt-Head

And so by sitting through advertising, you have to tip less for the same outcome, or you have to subscribe less for the same economic outcome. I think in reality, in both cases, you get content for free paid for by some mix of the creator and their avid fans. And I think in general, the avid fans are happy to pay because they truly believe This content should exist.

And then there's different tiers of how much people believe the content needs to be in this world. And that's a true part of every artistic endeavor.

But this is our, these are our numbers. You may review these numbers by minting our NFT for this episode.

BeavChris

Yes.

BArt-Head

Or right click saving.

BeavChris

Yeah. Can I make this, I'm trying to make this so you can even take a nicer screenshot. Let's see here.

BArt-Head

Oh, I was intentionally not making it screenshottable.

BeavChris

Oh, you did? Oh, never mind. See, blame Art. I'm like, I'm trying to do you a service. Okay I feel like I can't decide whether this is like more or less than what I expected because , I was really shocked that we were able to even get the first sponsor.

BArt-Head

That's right.

BeavChris

Yeah, because we're a completely new show and this is very unprecedented in like the normal web2 creator world to be able to make any money at all so early on. So really deeply appreciate you all for watching and

BArt-Head

we really truly appreciate all the support. We're not sure if we could find a sponsor and we were able to find three.

BeavChris

I'm pretty confident we could have found two for this week, except I chose to go after one really big sponsor.

BArt-Head

And we did write down before we started our expectations or our goals and our dreams, so we can review that offline.

BeavChris

There's so many Google Docs. I think like Google Docs is really the MVP of this entire enterprise.

BArt-Head

Also free.

BeavChris

Yeah, it's awesome.

BArt-Head

In return for your private data.

BeavChris

Oh man, this is so funny.

BArt-Head

We have done about an hour of accounting. Thank you all for listening. We appreciate you all.

BeavChris

Yeah, and of course, I feel like, even on the GMFarcaster panel, when I was asked why do we do things only in Web3 onchain and not use the other tools, my first answer was, like, Because I want to suffer the pain so that others wouldn't have to. And of course ToadyHawk gave a much better answer of so that people can own the episodes, etc.

BArt-Head

Thank you ToadyHawk!

BeavChris

Yeah, Yeah. But I think like, that's it, right? We want to help you make a show as well. So let us know if you're interested in creating anything. We would definitely boost you the ways that we can and also show you or help you with some of the trials and tribulations. Because if we list them all, this is going to be like a three hour episode of all the things that went wrong.

BArt-Head

Yeah. The point of us sharing all this information is hopefully to help people make informed decisions. Also to help builders identify pain points as well as opportunities for making the world have more content that we think should exist.

BeavChris

Exactly. Okay. Should we wrap it up? This is our finale.

BArt-Head

Let's see if there's anything else in the chat.

BeavChris

Thank you so much, Grace, for clipping. I don't even know if that's which part you had clipped, but I'm sure it's funny.

Yes, we're encouraged to launch Unlonely tokens.

BArt-Head

Actually, we, so we did not explore Unlonely. We did not explore Hypersub. We did not explore several other revenue streams. And that's, an exercise left for the reader. It's also a possibility for season two.

BeavChris

Yeah, I think for season two, we have, or I have thrown lots of ideas at Art. What we can do to make things more interesting and to continue to try new tools and new strategies for creating content, for bringing up social commentary, etc. So please, although this show may not be on next week, we will still be onchain. In some format.

BArt-Head

Thank you all for listening. We appreciate you. The best way to support us is onchain by minting our episodes and Drakula clips. Please tip us $DEGEN and $enjoy.

To wrap up Season 1, BArt-Head and BeavChris have chosen very short pieces to leave you with. I'd like to read a passage from the Book of Acts, Chapter 20, Verse 35.

In everything I did, I showed you that by his kind of hard work, we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said. It is more blessed to give than to receive.

[BArt-Head crosses himself]

BeavChris

I bet you weren't expecting that. And so, I want to share a little Zen koan story. Actually I can't find it right now on my page, but essentially a student went to the Zen master and was like, Hey, how do I realize emptiness? And the Zen master then reached over and pinched the guy's nose and tweaked it really hard and the guy was screaming in pain. When I shared the story with Art I said that, you know, a lot of these like Zen masters are the biggest trolls in the world and a lot of my contemporary teachers are also like Dad jokes, trolling type people.

And it's because oftentimes trolling and at least like when people are in on the joke, it is a really a way for us to see the truth. And so that is the ethos of BeavChris and BArt-Head in short.

BArt-Head

Thank you everybody. See you next time.

BeavChris

Take care.

The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show, Episode 6