A short while ago, I added @automod to /cryptoart and wrote about it.

A Curated Cryptoart Channel

The Farcaster /cryptoart channel is working with automod.sh to create a more artist curated main feed. We need your help to improve the channel!

https://paragraph.xyz

After a few weeks, I have turned off Automod for the channel. I want to talk about why.

The flaws in the strategy

I had initially set the /cryptoart DAO OE contract as the key to get your content straight on the main tab. However, a significant number of our best contributors had missed out on those mints, so the main feed was of decidedly lower quality after the change.

Next we added a set of about 30 community members to the "curator" moderation role in automod. These people had the ability to use a "curate" cast action which would put any /cryptoart cast straight to the main feed. The 30 people chosen were the most active participants in the channel over the previous 3 weeks. However this didnt work as planned – less than a third of those people actively curated, and those who did only did occasionally.

In hopes of learning how effective our strategy was, I turned off moderation so we could all compare the curated timeline with the default algorithm. It was a decidedly better experience having turned it off.

The default algorithm is also flawed

Despite the improvements to the feed, there are some glaring problems. Some casters seem to have a ticket straight to the main feed, meaning not everyone has an equal chance at getting seen. New users and smaller accounts without power badges struggle to get seen. On top of all this, the feed only goes back 4 hours on a busy day, so its very easy for your cast to get lost entirely if you dont get immediate attention on it.

Some possible solutions

The top of the list is turning off the token-gate. Holding a 2 dollar OE is not a metric of a good caster.

One possible strategy would be to add numerous additional curators from the ranks of active community members. If we doubled the curator count from 30 to 60, we should see a more regular stream of content getting pushed to main. If thats not enough, we could add more.

A more dramatic strategy would be to token-gate the curation role. Its possible that this feature may be added to Automod, but of course I cant be certain of that.

Building our own moderator

Rather than rely on @jtgi to build everything our hearts desire, the most sensible thing to do is build our own moderation bot. That way we can experiment more rapidly without waiting for someone else to prioritize the features we want. The cost of running that kind of bot server would be roughly 50 a month which would come from our DAO treasury, funded by the OEs and some other upcoming projects.

Curation is important to /cryptoart

Our DAO council includes a variety of artists who share a distaste for censorship and gatekeeping. But either the Main feed is "gatekept" by the default algorithm or we continue to refine the way we curate it manually. Naturally we will continue to experiment with moderation. We cant do that effectively without feedback from our community, so please let us know what you like and dont like about the channel. We hope you feel comfortable making comments and suggestions. You can tag me (@mxjxn.eth) in the /cryptoart channel if you have something on your mind, or any of the other DAO council members.