“When you are dead, you do not know you are dead.

It's only painful & difficult for others.

The same applies when you are stupid.”

-          Philipe Geluck

“When you are a bot, you do not know you are a bot.

It only makes meaningful engagement in Warpcast painful and difficult for you.

The same applies when you are a human without a Power Badge.”

-          Edward Carpenter

On Monday, I was a bot, but I did not know it.

I did the things which a human might do – I bought Warps and started a channel, /writeonchain - minted art from frends, liked and commented on the same. I posted photos of landscapes and my foster kittens.

I created memes from scratch, bought a subscription NFT to the /memes channel using HyperSub, and complained to @nonlinear.eth via DM when it did not work as promised to lift my ridiculuous contributions from the obscurity of slums of “Recent” to the hallowed halls of “Main.”

I created a Paragraph account, wrote a long article on the advantages of various Web3 writing platforms, and cross-posted it to my other Web3 writing platforms. I got scolded for my wife for spending too much time doing things that were NOT querying blurbs for my upcoming book IRL. I posted a photo of the blurbs I needed to send out in /commitments, and then I got 3/2 done and ended up watching Bridgerton. Extraordinarily non-algorithmic and illogical behavior for a bot, I admit – but I didn’t know any better.

Then, out of curiosity about why my casts seemed to have such low reach, I tried the “Bot or Not” action – and the “good” bot explained the problem. I was a bot – a bad bot.

Maybe it was right! Maybe I was not human – because my first reaction was:

So, I queried the wise humans and powerful humans on the platform with a post in /founders and a query to the creator of Bot or Not.

I got some useful feedback from my friend Kristin:

But I got no response from @sayangel or anyone else in /botornot – rude, yes?

Well, no.

I happened to check my DM “requests” a few days later.

Another “good” bot had decided that the original “good” bot’s DM to me was the work of a “bad” bot and had hidden it.

Well, OK… and that bot had decided that I was still a bad bot. But I could prove my humanity with a short CAPTCHA, so, existential crisis solved, right?

Wrong.

One of the several problems with the Warpcast app on Android is that clicking on the solution box in the CAPTCHA screen closed out the screen on the Android app.

In the Ash-bot’s mind, I would remain a bad bot until I could get to my laptop.

In my own world, I was busy nursing my wife through COVID, battling my own COVID caught as a result of the same, taking care of 3 foster kittens, and looking at a small farm where I wanted to grow sustainable vegetables.

Satisfying the Ash-bot’s curiosity would have to wait.

When I finally did get back to my laptop, I easily completed the CAPTCHA, and was told that I was a real boy (Pinocchio will be so jealous, I thought) – but my casts were still bland.

It seemed the Ash-bot was capable of subjective judgments. How very human.

But I didn’t have a lot of time to process my emotions – I was behind on writing a second post for the /writinghackathon about how to reach (and retain) the large Non-Farcaster audience – and one of the key issues, I thought, was how the current Warpcast system of Power Badges, $DEGEN tip distribution mechanics, the Main/Recent channel splits, and the erroneous labeling of some humans as bots needed to be tweaked in order to make the ecosystem more attractive to outsiders – and to make it a place where they would stay once onboarded.

I had some great discussions with @danicaswanson on the topic – all while doing more human things like testing negative for COVID, going to WICKED, nominating awesome female friends for an emergent NFT project, and keeping my streak in /itookaphoto going.

Apparently, my convo with Danica sparked some interest.

I’d suggested tweaking the PB system (currently driven, it seemed, by an algorithm no more transparent than any other social media algo) by giving current PB holders a time-bounded drip of PBs which they could award to accounts with whom they regularly interacted and derived value.

My suggestion did not sit well with some human PB holders.

My reply was that there was a “circular logic / Basttlestar Galactica problem here. We have PB accounts to weed out bots, but we know some PB accounts ARE bots. So we can't implement protocols more likely to bring in more human PB accounts because more bots might get in.”

That, I was told, was just the downside of being early. Me, a smol, non-badged account should not worry about such things and should just “Focus on helping the interesting accs to get their PBs instead.”

But it is, I observed,

I did get something useful out of this conversation – links to a guide for new users to better understand the ecosystem and to earn their Power Badge… Here’s another similar guide that I’ve also come across.

Meanwhile, more helpful advice was trickling in.

Just like that, my human credentials were again in question – this time, from what I assumed to be a human – but what, according to @ciefa.eth, could have been a bot.

The logical Vulcan was gone. Some very human emotions were beginning to roil, and I had to suppress the urge to let my inner Samuel L. Jackson loose on the keyboard. Instead, I drew a few calming breathes, and replied:

“That said,” I continued, “please don't make assumptions on how I naturally write. Go buy one of my books off OpenSea or Amazon, a poem off Objkt, read one of my Washington Post articles, my Paragraph or t2 posts.. Anything I've written on Medium.”

My interlocutor made an honest effort to mollify me, but there was just one problem.

At the end of our conversation, @y0b and I both acknowledged our belief in our shared humanity, and they provided a useful tip – add links to my off-Warpcast writing to my bio. Will the Ash-bot take that into consideration? Probably not – but it may inspire more confidence (or start some conversations) with the humans that I interact with.

For now, I stick by my guns – the current system of PB-by-algo, bots tarring both humans and fellow bots with the same brush, and inconsistent deployments of the Warpcast app across desktop and mobile platforms is holding the Farcaster ecosystem in general and Warpcast in particular back from achieving the goal of gaining and retaining engaged human users who make it their go-to app for prosuming quality content.

As for me? I’m still here, still human, still badge-less, and still bullish. Lets build.

p.s. Does my last line give the lie to my title? Technically, no… the week is not yet over. There is still time for the algo – or a human – to grant me the power of (if not Greyskull) than at least the purple badge.