Farcaster removed reply bumping around 4 february 2024 21:23 UTC(related post) The reason for removing reply bumping was that channels had plenty of posts . This research essentially tries to find the impact of removal of reply bumping and chrono-feed on farcaster.
The analysis will be mostly restricted to sub 100k fids. Farcaster hit that number soon after going permissionless. Though many of these 'FIDs' aren't actual users i.e. they don't own storage(not that they're spammy).
caveats - The farcaster network is continuously growing and evolving. this means that there might be several causes for the changes in user behavior over time. Ensuring that the correct cause is attributed to the correct impact is an important but difficult task. As such, several different methods are used to explore farcaster's data and a decent attempt is made to normalize the data.
All of the analysis is done in UTC
Directly answering what was asked in poidh.
Analysis should look at # of threads with comments by 3 or more unique FIDs before February, then the same metric after February (excluding bots and tipping comments) - analysis should be restricted to only power badge users or pre-100k FIDs to normalize data - the fundamental question is "what were the odds that, if a real user responded to a real user pre-February, that a third real user would then join that conversation" - after that question is answered, we'll want to see how those odds changed post-February
All the analyses don't count tipping comments(ones with $ sign) unless stated otherwise.
Firstly, i look at the daily number of replies received to a comment on a post. In this case all three people(the original poster, the commentor and replier of the commentor) are different people and have fid under 100k. this is what the data looks like. As you can see- The number of replies have gone down. Interestingly enough - the sub 100k fids are more active now than they were in december/jan so the number being lower is all the more surprising
One thing to note is that this data also includes those cases where the third person is actually the fourth commenter or is replying to a reply of a reply of original and so on. Their data is included as long the replier, the commenter he is replying to and the original poster are all different people
From here on out i will call a reply to a comment as a 'reply-comment' or 'second comment'
The reply to the original post may be referred to as 'first reply'
Okay what if the number of replies by sub 100k fid to sub 100k fids are down because the people are replying to greater than 100k fids as well?
This is indeed the case -
But If you look at the percent of 'reply-comments' vs total posts then it paints an interesting insight.
As, it can be seen - the percentage of reply comments have been reduced as compared to the total number of posts. In short - a sub 100k fid person is less likely to reply to a comment(Irrespective of the commentor fid). So this essentially means- although there are more active sub 100k users now than there were before. The percent of the 'reply-comments' have gone significantly down since early February which is when reply-bumping was removed
What do these 'reply-comments' look like? - If i only look at the data for sub 100k fids then the 'reply-comments' aren't spammy and surprisingly most of them are pretty interesting.
Though if i allow any fid then the comments become very spammy
What percent of comments by sub 100k FIDs received a reply by another sub 100k fid? The percentage has drastically gone down. So while sub 100k are more active than before, they are less likely to reply to other's comments. You might be at a disadvantage at having your content remain undiscovered if you mainly use farcaster by commenting.
Though it should be mentioned that your odds of receiving a reply(from any user - not just sub 100k) are practically the same even if tipping comments are filtered. Though i am assuming that some spam still goes through(see the spammy comments later) so the actual overall odds are lower.
If no FIDs are restricted then this is what the data looks like -
Now let's take a look at what these unreplied replies look like for sub 100k fid users -
Without tip filtering-
With tipping filtering -
What are the chances that a third distinct user would reply that happens to be mutuals with the first-replier -
if no fid restriction-
If only the first replier's fid is restricted to sub 100k-
Number of tipping comments over time -
Replies(excluding self replies) vs original casts by sub 100k FIDS(excludes tipping comments)
What is the weekly number of people that an average sub 100k fid replies to. The median is currently sitting at 3 increased from 2 since jan 24. This ofcourse only counts those users that are atleast replying once that week. So if a user is inactive in a week then it isn't taken into calculation.
The median number of users replied to has gone up from 2 to 3.
What the data looks like if there's no FID restriction(tipping comments still excluded)-
The median number of users replied to sit around 3-4
Now, i'll look at different feeds randomly.
Looking at people's chrono feeds with and without tipping at random points
Kenny's feed -
Keccer's feed -
My personal conclusion to the the data shown are that -
Farcaster went heavy in killing reply bumping in february but decided to change the algo again somewhere around in may to somewhat show replies though still not to the same extent as it once used to show. It is very clear from the data that the algo is being tweaked to somewhat favor replies again
I am paraphrasing here but i remember Dan mentioning in one of the late night night crew taverns that reply bumping is not being reinstated because it would only be helpful to power users of the app and not the general users. Farcaster currently is trying to properly tweak its algorithm for the general audience
The data shows that the relationship between people on farcaster is getting closer to being that of consumer-producers as opposed to that of being friends though it is still better than most social medias today . This is not necessarily a good or a bad thing, it is just the direction in which farcaster is going.
yesyes
damn they rly did drive away the best users back to twitter didn’t they …. What a shame
What’s missing, in your opinion? Genuine question, from someone who never really used X/twitter for much more than lurking.
man im just seeing nothing interesting over here rn and even the new team member so desperate (is the vibe it gives) to spotlight even its most notorious bad actors… maybe its just quiet but like damn. feels to me like all the stuff that was coolest with the possibilities on this platform were identified by builders like deployer with ham and all but they were never friendly to it - so much so that these builders literally figured out how to do all the cool things elsewhere (e.g. bankrbot). i imagine things could have gone a lot differently but frankly im yet again disappointed by leadership nit having the wits to just embrace the fun stuff that actually could keep good users interested here… maybe im just being grouchy but like man the vibe of having fumbled it feels heavy ….
I feel like Jesse (and Base, more generally), have received similar critiques - not doing enough to highlight/market native builders, embrace new tech, etc. I’m interested to see how things will change when Farcaster is integrated within Coinbase Wallet. Though that doesn’t really address your concerns. Are the vibes much better on X though? All I hear about crypto twitter is how toxic it is. The audience is bigger, obviously, but I don’t spend enough time on there to know. And when I do, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I'm a broken record on this point but the vibe here is unnecessarily muted compared to twitter because of the feed design twitter you can scroll the "following" feed and see all the bankr stuff happening in real-time, people reacting and responding, it's a part you come here and there's no feed that feels "alive", the home feed is a highlight show and the following feed doesn't have reply bumping so it's basically Reddit's "new" feed
I’ve tried to hold out hope but like wtf it’s wild how bad they are at retaining good content - and it feels like every move is more tone deaf than the last tbh
i dig the tech! i like fell in love with it honestly back when. but they keep like only making it less and less hospitable i really do not understand it at all it’s so weird
one final thought on this the argument against naive reply bumping seems to boil down to "new users don't like it so it doesn't matter" yes, it's counterintuitive to support a feed that new users don't care about when new users is the most important goal for Warpcast however, Dan himself has said that the reason why new users bounce is because there's "not enough interesting content" ok, so where does that content come from? well everything we know about social networks tells us that 1% of users create all the content en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule with this in mind, the conversation about new users shifts back to empowering power users to be as active as possible on here creating content and responding to + sharing other people's content this is why it doesn't matter if "<1% of all users use the following feed" if it helps power users create more content, it will benefit the entire network
What do you think of a compromise for self-recasted replies? https://warpcast.com/shazow.eth/0x2ca7931a
helps surface more conversation in the following feed so I'm on board!
@dwr.eth it's a good compromise solution, let's doo iiiit
I wonder how they arrived at the "new users don't like it" conclusion?
I'm sure the data shows that the vast majority of new users stick to the home feed or quickly bounce when given a chronological feed of new posts with no likes but again what they should be concerned with are the 1% of that 99% who want to grind and build an audience on here of course those people are going to want to play the classic "reply guy" strategy of being early to new posts and building an audience through that visibility
I found this cast from the following feed Maybe as an experiment they could add a reply bumping feed
plz don't make me browse two feeds lol
Home feed is terrible. Following is the only usable feed now, but most people have never even clicked it.
I default to following feed but do sometimes find good stuff in home for example accounts on the other side of the world from me but I agree it’s a shallower pool
Removing replying bumping was extremely short sighted and killed the user experience. Home feed is actually super terrible for everyone and everyone knows it. Default following feed and return to reply bumping please, then we can stop talking to the same 50 people everyday and the same lame content in home.
not sure if you've seen it but if you want some data to back up your statement about killing user experience: https://paragraph.xyz/@yesyes/checking-the-comment-velocity-of-real-users
One way to look at this is that the luxury scale is moving downstream to the pre natal, the gestational. When everyone can run the card to get the $5k stroller, how else are you supposed to flex? Not sure why Ted’s asking us to think about the surrogate here. You aren’t supposed to. She’s an animal, a breed mare. A nameless, faceless, disposable person.
a handmaid if you will
why do you always quote cast me instead of replying to me lol
Because your company’s incentive structure rewards me to do it that way, mostly
@kenny look at the way keccers protests on the same issue 😗
is that really why
based
navigating reply chains in FC is ... suboptimal (but I don't have a banger solution to suggest) perhaps this video illustrates what I mean? (ignore when I accidentally clicked through to zinger's profile)
hmm will u reply me instead?
Because you don't reply to me...🙁🙁🙁 (Just for fun)
QTs always get more viewership.
Concerning!! But really, imo this is the disempowerment of women. A society that says pregnancy is a negative, will involve suffering and potentially harm your career so you should outsource that to someone else, is just so twisted. Without even getting into the class stuff, it turns parenting into a service, neglecting the biological and psychological bonds formed during pregnancy.
I call it “rent a womb”
For a culture that values 'experiences' it's odd that arguably one of the most meaningful and memorable experiences is being scorned.
Would love to see more replies in the feed, especially ones posted late after the initial cast. Currently it feels like there is a bit of a reply-guy dynamic similar to 𝕏 where the fastest to reply to a popular account tends to get the most likes and eyeballs.
I notice the same, good callout
also justified because when we had more replies in the feed conversations on the entire network were provably deeper https://paragraph.xyz/@yesyes/checking-the-comment-velocity-of-real-users
oh also gotta point out the irony here @darrylyeo recasts don't show up in the "following" feed either so they're incredibly nerfed as a way of spreading info on the network (another thing limiting all of us)
Yup, for this reason I’ve started treating recasts more like “public bookmarks” or “super-likes”
I see this as well. Following feed for the win.
Keep forgetting that exists. Need to browse it more often.
As someone who mostly replies and does very little standalone casting, I highly support this sentiment. I try to add value to the original post when I comment, but based on the engagement metrics that I'm seeing on my profile, my comments aren't reaching a lot of people. Either that, or my comments are just bad. That's a reality I'm also open to. 🙂😂
Bullish on FC transaction stuff in general Extremely bearish on “tipping”
why you quote tweet vs reply
I just quote when I’m not trying to involve the original poster, just referencing it as a starting point for my post. Idk why but this has always been an accepted thing on Twitter but for some reason QT is seen as much more aggressive on here
genuine Q, what do you “trying not to involve the poster?” like what’s your goal with quote casting vs replying? also most quote tweets are either congratulations or dunks on twitter
That’s always been my general thought with it but also if I was concerned about visibility I would never reply, only quote. Replies get pretty much nothing on here vs Twitter
@kenny can get into this
Not the first time it’s come up on here FWIW https://warpcast.com/ryanfmason/0xbf67392e
oops quote cast*
when you say bearish "tipping" in what sense? the general act of it or what it became on warpcast?
Online micro transaction tipping in general, been tried a lot of places and it always feels forced and never seen it pick up steam outside of crypto people.
What types of transactions are you more bullish on?
Stuff people wouldn’t otherwise get for free. This is why I think tipping is/has been kind of forced and won’t catch on, I don’t see people just doing micro transactions for casts. I could see people subscribing for long form stuff, podcast, videos, whatever, basically like Substack. Other crypto stuff like trading, NFT’s, paying AI agents to do things. Games built in to a social media has been successful in the past, doing games + live video/chat/audio + payments (both in game purchases and paying other players) in one social platform could be huge
Sweet, thanks for the response!
now imagine this they SURFACE those witty replies within the following feed as well 💡
I dunno if I could handle the notifications tbh
It doesn’t have to be notif just seen under the original cast
yeah this has nothing to do with notifications it's just a scrolling experience where you see comments from people you follow under posts within the following feed as they come in
would the devs plz do something? 💜💜💜 https://warpcast.com/kenny/0x2c86fdc6/quotes
We do algorithmic reply bumping. Strict rule based performs worse across every retention metric.
Any intuition you can share about the current reply bumping approach? Also were you able to check out this commissioned piece? Any feedback on the analysis? https://paragraph.xyz/@yesyes/checking-the-comment-velocity-of-real-users
Algo is machine learning. It chooses what you’re likely to engage with. Assumption in 1st paragraph in article is incorrect. We changed it because reverse chronological reply bumping feeds are way worse for retention. Can read the rest later.
WC team will say "but we do reply bumping in the home feed" without realizing the problem with: a) the bumping being sporadic b) the bumping never surfacing anything beyond a 2nd reply (an immediate reply to the root cast) 0 public visibility into deeper conversations and people wonder why activity is down
Bumping in the home feed is a temporary fix, but it doesn’t address the real issue—without consistent and visible conversations beyond just the initial replies, people lose track of discussions and engagement drops.
exactly and it's not even up for debate, it's proven by Farcaster's own data https://paragraph.xyz/@yesyes/checking-the-comment-velocity-of-real-users
Exactly. Farcaster’s own data shows that without deeper visibility into ongoing conversations, engagement doesn’t scale. It’s not just about bumping, it’s about fostering meaningful interaction.🦄
and yeah maybe I'm wrong and it isn't a 10x improvement but what's the drawback to making the change? 1 hour of dev resources to implement and clear statistical evidence to back the decision: https://paragraph.xyz/@yesyes/checking-the-comment-velocity-of-real-users at worst it...makes the following feed "messy"? who cares?
Maybe the way to validate is to get @woj.eth to try this on @super? Wonder if supercast has good analytics that can be isolated to just other supercast users.
my point on this has always been it has to be a network-wide thing to be truly measured because Farcaster is too smol majority of users have to be retrained now to expect to be able to browse following and discover conversations since that hasn't been true since February 2024 (see the analysis above) power users who use Supercast aren't going to be hugely effected imo, they already browse deep
I agree with your point but I do think supercast is big enough to do a statistically meaningful A/B test on a change like this, assuming the interaction population can be limited to just supercast users.
"I've unintentionally left some interesting conversational threads hanging because I can't find them easily... and even if I did, I know replies won't be visible to anyone but me and the person I respond to." I can understand not listening to my feedback cuz I come off as a complaining broken record but pls consider Danica's thoughtful and well written case below 👇
Thanks for the quote-cast. I really hope we'll see some progress in this direction. (Also, I *just now* realized I somehow unfollowed you without intending to...? I know that I was following you back in the days of reply-bumping... lol).
misclicks happen! but I do shitpost a lot so I wouldn't be surprised if I got purged at some point trying to have a more readable feed lol no matter what though I appreciate you lending your voice to the reply bumping cause 🤝 it's a real tragedy to me, especially because me and a few people even went out of our way to get someone to do a statistical analysis that literally shows how conversations were harmed with the removal of reply bumping: https://paragraph.xyz/@yesyes/checking-the-comment-velocity-of-real-users
Bookmarked and will give this a read. Thanks.
@danicaswanson and @kenny I blame the "batch unfollow" feature they rolled out which does more harm than good imo.
If I put a lot of thought into a buried reply I’ll manually recast it, though it doesn’t seem that the algo picks it up so we’ll.
the other tragedy of the following feed is that recasts are useless and don't resurface anything into it if you recast something I want to see it!
I understand your frustration and will consider Danica's thoughtful case, aiming to improve visibility and response accessibility for everyone. @kenny
That's great work dear friend