Quality Writing is Systemic
In “Quality is Systemic,” software developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss offers a helpful framework for thinking broadly about the systemic conditions that produce quality software. The author makes a compelling case that:
“…a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals.”
I believe the same is true of quality writing. While individual performance plays a role, system quality matters more.
In this piece, I’ll apply this systems-informed perspective to some of the unmet needs of conversational liquidity providers (CLPs) in the Farcaster ecosystem.
Return On Attention Group Chat
For the past three months I’ve been stewarding an invite-only discussion group in Warpcast DCs called Return On Attention (RoA).
I had no plans to start such a group. But something emerged in the wake of “In the Farconomy, Hope is a Powerful Drug” — a personal piece I first published in Dec. 2024 and sent in DCs to a limited group of readers only.
The piece hit a nerve and spawned some great long-form discussions on creative labor, value flow, and writer monetization — conversations that became compelling enough that I decided to make the piece public and focus more attention on facilitating fruitful unfolding of whatever-this-new-thing-wanted-to-become.
It all seemed too embryonic and informal for Paragraph posts at the time, and I wanted a separate outlet for nascent personal writings inspired by the group’s conversations. So I quietly started keeping an online journal (Deep Worth: Notes on Creativity, Labor, and Value) using Notion.
This post you're now reading is the first I've released on Paragraph since I started keeping the journal.
Today the RoA group has two co-admins (myself and Trigs) stewarding a group of 38 members. We keep a low profile (limit membership, don't seek attention, avoid tokenizing, etc.) for several reasons:
To preserve the cozy-corner community atmosphere (e.g., slow and low-pressure posting cadence, social cohesion, intrinsic motives for joining/contributing, gift culture, etc.)
To give the group a chance to find its proper form on its own timetable, without the pressures growth can bring.
To allow ample time and space for careful reading, deep-dive writing, prolonged reflection, and consideration of complexity.
To protect the valuable attention, time, and labor of the CLPs from being usurped for low-signal, wasteful, or un-aligned purposes.
In other words, we prioritize return on our attention and recognize that quality writing (and good discussion) is a product of healthy systems.
Since the UI of Warpcast DCs is designed for short-form messaging, however, we often struggle with discussion threads. Convos are difficult to find, follow, and resurface.
We’ve been discussing the possibility of migrating the group elsewhere and, eventually, making some of our conversations public — hopefully in ways that could benefit the Farcaster network as a whole. We’ve identified two roadblocks:
We haven’t yet found a Farcaster client or other discussion forum software that aligns with our quality-writing-is-systemic approach.
We lack a sustainable economic model to fund the bootstrapping, moderation, and maintenance labor to establish a public branch for a small community that intends to stay small… without tokenizing the original community in a way that turns it into the product.
So despite the frustrations, RoA will stay in Warpcast DCs for the time being — and we do so out of respect for the oft-overlooked value CLPs can contribute when they're able to work in the right contexts.
We evaluate the health of the community from a systems perspective, so we won’t migrate elsewhere or take any of our discussions public until we find both a new home and an economic model that justifies the time and admin effort required to do it well. If we move too early, the risk of negative effects increases, including the possibility that we'll have to move multiple times.
Slowcore HQ — a Warpcast cozy-corner channel that also emerged through a Farcaster-seeded movement, and for which I also serve as an admin — recently went into hibernation for similar reasons.
Conversational Liquidity Providers are Underserved
In the RoA group, we've observed that deep-dive writers, channel moderators, curators, community-builders, lore-keepers, storytellers, knowledge preservers, and other CLPs are underserved in the current Farcaster ecosystem.
These groups of quality daily active users (qDAUs) collectively generate a great deal of network value, but even in the Farconomy — which is widely (and rightfully) considered the best place for experimentation with “programmable money” in social network contexts — they are still woefully underfunded.
Since the work of CLPs is currently embedded in systems that hinder “slowcore” conversations and lack suitable economic models, it often feels like an uphill battle to carve out space that might provide a better return on our attention.
With the right systems in place, however, the Farcaster ecosystem could potentially unlock much more of the untapped network value CLPs contribute. This could, in turn, attract more of those who appreciate long reads to Farcaster.
What might the "right systems" look like in Farcaster contexts? How could we optimize for systems that enable CLPs to collectively produce better quality writing?
While there may be many valid ways to answer these questions, in general we might say that CLPs need systems that enable reciprocity, continuity, and preservation of relevant context.
Applying the Kaplan-Moss system-quality evaluation framework:
For cozy corners like the RoA group chat and the Slowcore-HQ channel, that might involve facilitating ongoing conversations spanning days or weeks (instead of prioritizing cast volume or engagement), making affordances for literary curation (e.g., customizable “writer playlists” of essays), and prioritizing leisurely reading over quick sound-bites.
It might look like dedicated spaces for FAQ pages, membership criteria, and a community code of conduct.
It might look like better affordances for indexing, archiving, regularly maintaining wikis or other knowledge bases, and re-discovering evergreen topics.
(For more ideas, see “Mass Monetizing Social Media” by RoA co-admin Trigs).
Socially, it might look like building a culture that encourages deep-dive writing, allows ample time and space for editing done by humans with high-level skills, and avoids pressuring writers to release work before it’s ready.
Psychologically, it might look like cultivating habits of treating any production issues that might crop up as systemic failures, rather than blaming or shaming individuals for their shortcomings.
If a group of skilled writers + editors + curators + maintainers collectively produces low-quality work or struggles with burnout and attrition, it might look like asking ourselves: where could we intervene to improve the reciprocity affordances of the existing systems?
Economically, it might look like network rewards models, or interventions to facilitate network capital efficiency and reintegrate lost forms of value back into the network. It might look like novel and experimental approaches to incentive alignment such as Impact. It might look like philanthropic experiments such as creators-in-residence or club goods to fund CLP labor.
Overall, it might look like a Farconomy that better facilitates reciprocal value flow to the four roles Tom Beck describes in “Curator Economy, Not Creator Economy” (writers, readers, critics, and librarians):
“..think about all the users across the 90-9-1 ratio… figure out how to share a platform's overall value with all its contributors, big and small… this means rewarding readers and curators alongside creators. […] For vibrant creative scenes to function, the value must flow to all four roles. Good work must be created, and it must be identified, amplified, and stored for the future. Only then can you create an environment favorable to readers, which increases the value of the entire scene.”
Unlocking the untapped network value of creative scenes and other CLP work calls for an approach that considers the complexities of systems driven by human factors as well as technical and economic factors.
Toward that end, Farcaster might consider spending less time on finding the “best” individuals (qDAUs), and more time on developing systems that bring out the best in a wider range of humans.
May a thousand quality-systems experiments bloom in the Farconomy.
Image: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay.
I actually have a bunch of opinions about this, surprise surprise! It harkens back to "Quality is Systemic" that has been referenced many times, and inspired the piece by @danicaswanson @matthewb brings a good point that in order to make it as a creator you also have to be a good storyteller, producer, community promotor, etc. He's describing the current system, quite accurately. But these are all production, distribution, and coordination problems. I think average ppl can produce high quality output with the right system to support them. This is why I'm here and what we do at Nearchos. Build systems to enable average people to create high quality results. https://paragraph.com/@danicaswanson/quality-writing-is-systemic
Thanks for sharing my piece in this context! As it happens I'm dealing with a whole bunch of low-level chronic failures-of-systemic-support at the moment, so I can attest that better systems are badly needed. Wish you all the best with this work!
I guess at the base of everything is: what is quality writing and who sets the criteria for it? 😎
I'll let you do it! 😆
That's the thing... the system works when you can do the job you're best at without even having to think about the job of the others. If you create content, you have to be integrated in such a system, where people who are good at promoting would promote you without you knowing how they do that and without them knowing how you do what you do.
I think we all lose out a bit by leaving creators to become an entire all-in-one production/distribution house by themselves with minimal support available.
I've been thinking about this stubborn how-to-get-writers-sustainably-funded problem for a long time, since it pre-dates crypto. It's actually become one of my main intellectual interests over the years. Without getting too far into the weeds, here are a few thoughts: What if Paragraph were to zoom out and focus more on the social layer from a systems perspective -- i.e., think of context, curation, and conversation as the primary paths to value creation, rather than individual writers? Could Paragraph help writers collectively build thriving creative scenes with network effects accruing to the contributors -- writers, editors, curators, preservers, and readers? One of the things that drew me to Paragraph in the first place was the quote-highlight feature, for example. Could Paragraph give contributors places to preserve quotes and respond to them in ways that might help draw others into an ongoing conversation around the work? Maybe in a mini-app?
For reference, I wrote about what I mean by "from a systems perspective" in this piece. (Look at that beautiful preview pane! Great design work, @paragraph!) https://paragraph.com/@danicaswanson/quality-writing-is-systemic
I also want to highlight this concept of "club goods" from @trigs, and a comment in the same thread by @wanderloots.eth that brings to mind the possibilities for the quote-highlight feature: "We also need a way for referential rewards. Eg, someone quotes someone else, value should flow back to the original creator." https://warpcast.com/trigs/0xb79f4393 https://warpcast.com/wanderloots.eth/0xb83d8f34
That was indeed an interesting conversation, and I like the club goods idea. This is more or less why I have started my @trpplffct poetry grant fund. It's still a bit low profile, and I am exploring ways to make it work, but the idea is that funds are raised through (Degen) tips and donations, and distributed through small grants and onchain collecting. It is small, but it works. I have raised enough to run it for a bit over a year now, doing a one-poet grant and a collection budget per month. Now it's a one-person project, but if something like that can be done by a collective... What I have been trying to solve for, is the challenge I found in 'crypto art' circles that artists are very supportive of eachother, and often pump back their earnings back into the community, but mostly these earnings come from other artists doing the same. It's a limited amount of value that is pumped around, in stead of a steady stream that comes from outside to fund writing.
many good points in this thread - will come back to it. Quick thoughts before calls: Monetizing something that's free to get (here writing) is always hard. If it's not free it doesn't get reach. There're three angles I see: 1/ your writing has value inside then that's what can be monetized (think data nobody else has), probably not us, some companies possible or very good analytical work of individuals. 2/ your writing just creates "better app experience" for everyone - because it sparks conversation or provides something to read - then it's public goods and can only be rewarded by the network 3/ your writing has a community that values "You" and your journey and they're willing to pay you for sharing your journey with them - sounds great but is actually limiting, because you need to be very focused (clear to read for folks - what do you offer), if you write about broad topics and don't offer people "progression towards something" with their own life, then this model doesn't work
Thanks for the thoughtful input. I do think your #2 above could open paths to long-term sustainability for writers, at least in theory. But public goods funding is... challenging, to put it mildly. CLPs (conversational liquidity providers) whose work sparks good convos are significantly underfunded right now, and that's a systems-level issue, not a Paragraph-specific one. (Moxie tried to address this with everyday rewards, but ran into a number of issues). I like the way @vengist frames the problem: "Storytelling in general creates much network value, but only marketing styles have clear financialization paths. Many stories go untold, and/or the tellers of stories left without resources to continue." https://warpcast.com/vengist/0x43a2054c Another thing I keep returning to is the idea of mutualizing returns from relational work, as described in this piece on "post-cognitive income." https://www.combinationsmag.com/post-cognitive-income/ Anyway, just a few thoughts.
Yes, all of these examples actually only reinforce point 2. - I call it "public goods" but "network goods" is probably better term because I meant that the network (e.g. Farcaster or Paragraph, or Lens) acrues benefits from what you call CLPs. Only option to get paid for this part of work is to receive "public/network goods rewards" - no other sensible way to do it Of course, I may be missing something but I've been thinking about publishing since my first publishing company about 20 years ago. There's also a thin line in defining what is writing for fun, for value, for yourself and why should anyone care 🫠 - You don't charge your friends for jokes you crack in the pub or during dinner. - And they don't pay you when you tell them new story idea you want to turn into book, but maybe they'll buy the book. sorry, it's long rant 😊 have a great Thu!
I love the line of thinking! And we definitely want to bring back collectible highlights in some form. Beyond collectible highlights, I would love to hear what we could do to enable you to build a creative scene! Thanks for the feedback & sharing. :)
Thanks for returning to this thread! This is a good example of an ongoing convo that I'd like to keep fresh in people's minds so that casters (myself included) can keep pondering it and returning whenever they have something to add. Anyway... I have lots more I could say on possibilities you could consider for building a creative scene via Paragraph. It's probably worthwhile to write a full blog post. It's just a matter of freeing up enough time to write it... which brings us back to the catch-22 of how-can-writers-make-more-money-so-we-have-more-time-to-write thing again... lol. For starters, take a look at quotebacks if you haven't seen them already. Talked about this with @colin in late 2023 and would love to revisit this idea (or something similar). https://quotebacks.net/ https://warpcast.com/danicaswanson/0x80eca006
I love this line of thinking.. Colin refers to the idea as "remixing", which broadly means quoting / sharing, reacting, summarizing, etc. some piece of original writing. We had this feature at Substack called cross-posting, what was intended to spark this kind of behavior. We added a prominent button in the UX to get writers to cross-post to their publication, but sadly it never really got traction. https://on.substack.com/i/83370327/now-in-beta-cross-posts We've been thinking about whether we could enable the original writer of a post to offer some incentive for other people to remix their post. I'm a bit jaded by my past experience, but without some kind of initial spark & incentive, I would worry about adoption of any kind of quoteback / cross-post / remix feature. Curious to hear what you think though! And totally no pressure, but would love to hear your other thoughts when you find time to write them out :)
@christin just as we were speaking about it, what do you think about this?
@christin is a good example of the kind of trusted writer, curator, and conversational-value-creator whose work helps make the purple app such a worthy place to be! Exactly what I was talking about in my quote-casted response to Reid in the original cast.
"Could Paragraph help writers collectively build thriving creative scenes..." This. Really well said. After fairly recently being introduced to the concept of ergodic ecosystems, it's now clear to me that we're not going to solve the problem by making writers go it alone in competition with all the other writers. We need support to produce great work. For all its faults, trad publishing provided that support. If we were to bring writers, editors, curators, designers, et al. into an ecosystem, it would make the finished product better and, in theory, worth paying for.
The concept of ergodic ecosystems is new to me, too. Great nerd-snipe. I looked it up and I'll be thinking about it for awhile. I agree that systems that pit writers against one another competitively will not be a path to long-term sustainability. I often think about how the "iceberg model" might be applied to shed light on the systems that support writers below the surface. We need the support of pro editors, designers, curators, etc., to produce good work (the tip of the iceberg), but we also need underlying infrastructure like sustainable cash flow, healthcare access, unstructured time to think, and so on.
I always think of the aristocrat writers of the 19th century who had very little to do but write. All their needs were taken care of, so plenty of unstructured time to be creative and produce the epics we admire today. Perhaps UBI would unlock a lot of writing talent, but probably not worth waiting around for. I envision a sort of decentralized publishing org. Writers submit first drafts of their novels. The org has editors and curators which determine which projects get selected. Then the novels are polished and published. A pre-sale could, in theory, generate the capital to pay the writer an advance and for the services of the support team. Any revenue after publishing would be split according to a smart contract. Marketing remains the challenge, but maybe FC is a place where a book get generate 2,000 pre-orders at $5-10 a pop?
I really enjoyed @danicaswanson's article on thinking about systems for writing. Social media is designed to highlight the ephemeral. We all know why: it keeps users addicted and scrolling the feed (which can be sold to advertisers). But how might you design a social media experience that highlights persistence? 🤔 https://paragraph.xyz/@danicaswanson/quality-writing-is-systemic?referrer=0x33514A171B0eC657a0237Dd388fAA4f39eE2a2E4
Happy to hear that you enjoyed this piece, Tom. Thanks for sharing it. Much as I love Farcaster, it's definitely designed to highlight the ephemeral. That approach has its place, but I'd also like to see some alternative designs that cater to the "move slow and preserve things" ethos.
I wrote about why I think system conditions matter more than individual performance in producing quality writing, and why CLPs (conversational liquidity providers) on FC are underserved. Inspired by "Quality is Systemic," a great blog post by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, and by the members of the Return On Attention group chat. https://paragraph.xyz/@danicaswanson/quality-writing-is-systemic
Thoughtful & thought-provoking! Well written as always. Bookmarked for more reflection. 💜 🫡
Thanks for the kind words! Much appreciated.
@jihad relevant to your interests and questions you've been asking lately
Very excited to read this later!
> facilitating ongoing conversations spanning days or weeks (instead of prioritizing cast volume or engagement) this is was one of only things I miss from Reddit. I felt like posts had a longer relevance - on the scale of days, weeks, even months rather than hours. Gave time for ideas to simmer.
Indeed. "Time for ideas to simmer" is something I greatly miss from old-school discussion forums, too. I'm not a fan of the perpetual-now algo feeds that bury everything so quickly that it becomes "yesterday's news" and is largely forgotten in a matter of hours.
Yes! I find myself trying to come back to posts after I've thought about them, but then I forget who posted it or where... Also, are you familiar with Foster Writing? Their community has editors and CLPs (I think) to support writers and conversations. May be of interest https://www.foster.co/
Danica, you dropped a comment on my post last month. I read it today and then I scanned your profile, read this fantastic article on quality writing, and dived deep into your Notion document. Two words: loved it. So glad to connect.
I appreciate the kind words. Thanks so much. This made my day. (I'm glad Warpcast at least allows us to pin a cast on our profiles now, so we can call attention to older casts. That wasn't even possible on Warpcast for the first couple of years; everything just vanished into the exhaust stream). It's good that the Farconomy enables writers to get paid in novel ways that aren't possible elsewhere, but the Farconomy still has a long way to go if it's ever going to properly reward and facilitate the kind of network value that writers + CLPs create here. Looking forward to following your writing here!