Justin Hunter @polluterofminds wrote a good blogpost that I have some thoughts about in longer form:
A lot of you aren’t gonna like this one https://polluterofminds.com/blog/falling-out-of-love-with-farcaster/
A blog post by Justin Hunter
I get critiquing "not going down the RSS+ path" is not the primary thrust of this article, but since it was called out: RSS should be renamed Really Shitty Syndication. I have more I can say on this (see RSS addendum below), but since it's not the meat of the article, I'll nix it for now and just say: Do we really care that much about the XML schema when talking about RSS? The openness part of RSS completely failed. The only reason podcasts still use RSS is because we don't have sufficiently cheap audio adblocking...but we're starting to see the paywallification start already with Substack podcasts. If X402 succeeds, maybe RSS as an open protocol has a second shot.
Re: Gambling. The main protest of Justin's article appears to be the fact that the main Farcaster client (formerly Warpcast app) has leaned into people launching (1) random coins (I assume this means clanker tokens & maybe Zora/BaseApp content coins), (2) prediction markets, (3) speculation (nebulously defined). First off, I fundamentally disagree with #2, prediction markets are one of the best features of crypto IMHO. As for the rest, I was going to say this is an old concern going back to the launch of $DEGEN when we didn't even have a in-app wallet. But when reflecting on it more, I think it's actually a variant of "Eternal September".
Eternal September was when AOL turned on their USENET gateway, and an influx of new users with boorish norms started flooding the zone. When DEGEN first launched, I found it incredibly annoying, specifically the "10 $DEGEN" comments under every post. I found the low quality userbase that it injected trying to farm the token also annoying. I also do find "over-monetization" annoying: see Lens where every post is NFT spam. That being said, DEGEN tempered over time. The clanker meta was hot for a minute, and has eased back quite a bit. Tipping culture is still here, though I don't like sending a tip with literally every 'like' (maybe I just need to reduce my $ tip/like rate). I do find some miniapps annoying with the notifs (looking at you $EGGS [and I just disconnected Amps b/c it's now just farcasteradmin.eth pumping projects I don't care about, sorry friends, my likes are no longer for sale]).
But here's what I do like: I loved the weekly $1 tips when that was a thing. I love collectible casts. I love long casts with Farcaster Pro. I still like channels. Anoncaster is still a very cool concept even if mothballed for now. Farcaster rewards are great even if I'm not getting much. Griv is fun to use today even with 0 monetization or incentives to use it. Are we getting the most cerebral, insightful Substack content? Maybe not, but we have efforts though @firstdraftclub & @paragraph, and this is hard for any short-form social media app, Twitter has mostly failed at this too (Bluesky might have a better shot through leaflet.pub, but it's mostly just ATProto ppl discussing ATProto at the moment). We have some awesome photographers on here in /itookaphoto even without a major photo-specific app. The anti-spam actually works here when users (or the app sponsoring them) have slashable skin-in-the-game (aka it's [weak condition] non-zero cost to attack and [stronger condition] negative expected value to attack the network). It's not discernible how much spam is being blocked because of <insert survivorship bias airplane.jaypeg here>.
How can Farcaster grow beyond crypto? I'd love for the highest-value Type II thinking content to be here. Great podcasts, articles, photography, design, zines, scientific research, macro/micro economic analysis, foodie restaurant recs, review articles on tech & everything else. Communities for /parenting, history, and every niche interest in-between. Hyperlocal channels for every college, city, and neighborhood. Also the stuff that is important but less fun to talk about: politics, war, etc. I want FC to land somewhere in-between Reddit without the ragebait and Substack without the platform risk. Network effects are of course the hardest thing to grow, just like network-assets like Ethereum. But it can be helped by making everyone on the network an evangelist (see the new FC referral program & BaseApp).
RSS addendum: Look, I grew up on Google Reader. I remember browsing Gizmodo, Lifehacker, ArsTechnica, Slashdot, and Engadget on an iMac in the back of my 8th grade classroom. It was great, until it wasn't. First, there is a lot of equivocation, hiding-the-ball, and motte-and-bailey that happens when debating RSS's success & failure. Yes, RSS as an "XML standard" is still around. Yes, you do serve RSS XML to be ingested by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcatchers. But the open (non-paywalled) ethos of RSS has completely failed. If you open an RSS reader today, it went the way of USENET: spammy AI generated headlines trying to get you to click and get you out of the RSS reader and onto their website, so they can better monetize (usually with a paywall b/c adblockers are too good now). RSS readers have become basically useless. Many claim the Facebook Newsfeed helped kill RSS, and while I partially agree, I think RSS for text content would have died anyway as the need for monetization via intrusive ads & paywalls increased. But why is RSS still used for podcasts and not for news articles? Because adblocking software works trivially well on HTML articles and technology to trivially block audio ads isn't here yet. Once that happens, you can expect the same paywallification of podcasts like we saw with news. Substack has now branched into podcasts. Consider the oxymoron & irony of a private/premium "Really Simple Syndication" podcast feed. RSS literally only "works" as intended when paywalled or with dynamic audio ad insertion that can't easily be blocked. Again, if X402 might revive RSS, but it's mostly making the paywall UX seamless and less of a jab in the eye.
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Justin Hunter @polluterofminds wrote a good blogpost that I have some thoughts about in longer form:
A lot of you aren’t gonna like this one https://polluterofminds.com/blog/falling-out-of-love-with-farcaster/
A blog post by Justin Hunter
I get critiquing "not going down the RSS+ path" is not the primary thrust of this article, but since it was called out: RSS should be renamed Really Shitty Syndication. I have more I can say on this (see RSS addendum below), but since it's not the meat of the article, I'll nix it for now and just say: Do we really care that much about the XML schema when talking about RSS? The openness part of RSS completely failed. The only reason podcasts still use RSS is because we don't have sufficiently cheap audio adblocking...but we're starting to see the paywallification start already with Substack podcasts. If X402 succeeds, maybe RSS as an open protocol has a second shot.
Re: Gambling. The main protest of Justin's article appears to be the fact that the main Farcaster client (formerly Warpcast app) has leaned into people launching (1) random coins (I assume this means clanker tokens & maybe Zora/BaseApp content coins), (2) prediction markets, (3) speculation (nebulously defined). First off, I fundamentally disagree with #2, prediction markets are one of the best features of crypto IMHO. As for the rest, I was going to say this is an old concern going back to the launch of $DEGEN when we didn't even have a in-app wallet. But when reflecting on it more, I think it's actually a variant of "Eternal September".
Eternal September was when AOL turned on their USENET gateway, and an influx of new users with boorish norms started flooding the zone. When DEGEN first launched, I found it incredibly annoying, specifically the "10 $DEGEN" comments under every post. I found the low quality userbase that it injected trying to farm the token also annoying. I also do find "over-monetization" annoying: see Lens where every post is NFT spam. That being said, DEGEN tempered over time. The clanker meta was hot for a minute, and has eased back quite a bit. Tipping culture is still here, though I don't like sending a tip with literally every 'like' (maybe I just need to reduce my $ tip/like rate). I do find some miniapps annoying with the notifs (looking at you $EGGS [and I just disconnected Amps b/c it's now just farcasteradmin.eth pumping projects I don't care about, sorry friends, my likes are no longer for sale]).
But here's what I do like: I loved the weekly $1 tips when that was a thing. I love collectible casts. I love long casts with Farcaster Pro. I still like channels. Anoncaster is still a very cool concept even if mothballed for now. Farcaster rewards are great even if I'm not getting much. Griv is fun to use today even with 0 monetization or incentives to use it. Are we getting the most cerebral, insightful Substack content? Maybe not, but we have efforts though @firstdraftclub & @paragraph, and this is hard for any short-form social media app, Twitter has mostly failed at this too (Bluesky might have a better shot through leaflet.pub, but it's mostly just ATProto ppl discussing ATProto at the moment). We have some awesome photographers on here in /itookaphoto even without a major photo-specific app. The anti-spam actually works here when users (or the app sponsoring them) have slashable skin-in-the-game (aka it's [weak condition] non-zero cost to attack and [stronger condition] negative expected value to attack the network). It's not discernible how much spam is being blocked because of <insert survivorship bias airplane.jaypeg here>.
I find the spammy tokentalk very easy to ignore, and easily outweighed by occasionally opening the wallet tab and realizing there's money in there that I didn't add to it, it's like finding $20 in your coat pocket that you forgot. No other social media app does that for non-whale users, and that's already pretty special.
How can Farcaster grow beyond crypto? I'd love for the highest-value Type II thinking content to be here. Great podcasts, articles, photography, design, zines, scientific research, macro/micro economic analysis, foodie restaurant recs, review articles on tech & everything else. Communities for /parenting, history, and every niche interest in-between. Hyperlocal channels for every college, city, and neighborhood. Also the stuff that is important but less fun to talk about: politics, war, etc. I want FC to land somewhere in-between Reddit without the ragebait and Substack without the platform risk. Network effects are of course the hardest thing to grow, just like network-assets like Ethereum. But it can be helped by making everyone on the network an evangelist (see the new FC referral program & BaseApp).
RSS addendum: Look, I grew up on Google Reader. I remember browsing Gizmodo, Lifehacker, ArsTechnica, Slashdot, and Engadget on an iMac in the back of my 8th grade classroom. It was great, until it wasn't. First, there is a lot of equivocation, hiding-the-ball, and motte-and-bailey that happens when debating RSS's success & failure. Yes, RSS as an "XML standard" is still around. Yes, you do serve RSS XML to be ingested by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcatchers. But the open (non-paywalled) ethos of RSS has completely failed. If you open an RSS reader today, it went the way of USENET: spammy AI generated headlines trying to get you to click and get you out of the RSS reader and onto their website, so they can better monetize (usually with a paywall b/c adblockers are too good now). RSS readers have become basically useless. Many claim the Facebook Newsfeed helped kill RSS, and while I partially agree, I think RSS for text content would have died anyway as the need for monetization via intrusive ads & paywalls increased. But why is RSS still used for podcasts and not for news articles? Because adblocking software works trivially well on HTML articles and technology to trivially block audio ads isn't here yet. Once that happens, you can expect the same paywallification of podcasts like we saw with news. Substack has now branched into podcasts. Consider the oxymoron & irony of a private/premium "Really Simple Syndication" podcast feed. RSS literally only "works" as intended when paywalled or with dynamic audio ad insertion that can't easily be blocked. Again, if X402 might revive RSS, but it's mostly making the paywall UX seamless and less of a jab in the eye.
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Daniel Fernandes
Daniel Fernandes
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I respond to some of Justin's points below: https://paragraph.com/@dfern.eth/re-falling-out-of-love-with-farcaster?referrer=0xA01f6D0985389a8E106D3158A9441aC21EAC8D8c
Good post, I appreciate the thoughtful response!
To the extent that culture of the initial user base determines the outcome of a new social protocol, both Farcaster and Bluesky are doomed. To the extent that the protocol design itself determines the outcome of a new social, Farcaster is doomed, and AT Protocol is starting to create its own gravity. Skate to where the puck is going.
Agree with the first part, would push back and modify the latter: To the extent that the protocol design itself determines the outcome of a new social, both Farcaster & AT Proto would be better off combining their strengths & complimenting their trade-offs to attract new developers.
💯 https://farcaster.xyz/boscolo.eth/0x7c141274
I think this is true, but I also think it will be much easier for atproto to integrate the good ideas from Farcaster than vice versa
"How can Farcaster grow beyond crypto? I'd love for the highest-value Type II thinking content to be here. Great podcasts, articles, photography, design, zines, scientific research, macro/micro economic analysis, [...] & everything else." Yes. Do you believe the current growth strategy is conducive to this goal?
Not especially, but what I was trying to get at is that it can't be forced, it's like pushing on a string. Maybe a more explicit vampire attack on Reddit and Twitter would work but that could also backfire and you land up like Bluesky (like Justin mentioned). There have also been some very scammy attempts as this in the past, namely BitClout. How does Ghost attack Substack other than competing on price? Very difficult.
We can't even get big ethereum community here reliably. For example, think of Bankless, I'd like to blame them more, but is it really good for their business to shift the bulk of their efforts here and not locking antlers with other ecosystems on Twitter? I'm not sure I can blame them in the current environment.
Regarding RSS, I think a counterpoint could be made that it depends on the content and sources. I’m using RSS for people’s personal blogs, not news or podcasts at all. If anything, RSS could spark a new way to approach social. Have some more thoughts below that many people are resonating with and starting blogs + rss feeds as a result https://bearblog.stevedylan.dev/resurrect-the-old-web/ https://blogfeeds.net
Discover insights from Justin Hunter's blog post, "Falling Out Of Love With Farcaster". The piece delves into issues like monetization challenges on the platform and the impact of pitfalls, such as overwhelming cryptocurrency activity and low-quality content flooding the network. Despite concerns, there are optimistic notes on what Farcaster can evolve into, hinting at creative potential beyond crypto. Reading deeper may inspire Hope for more diversified content dynamics on social media@dfern.eth brings this summary to light.