Ok - as promised, here goes. 

This is a small list of tokens that I find the most compelling at the moment. Before you get your feelings hurt if your bags aren't on this list please remember, this is:

a) not financial advice
b) my opinion and not yours

First though, who the hell am I anyway and why should you care about my opinion?

I'm an artist and software developer and I've been active in web 3 since March of 2021.

After building up a bit of a following on Twitter, I watched the platform get nuked and realized that I would have to rebuild elsewhere, where I'd be less exposed to poor decision-making and power in the hands of a megalomaniac.

This was when I learned about both Lens Protocol and Farcaster, and so I joined both and enjoy both. I have been active here since there were only a few hundred daily active users.

I've watched as various hype waves have come and gone, people complaining about this vs that - (often about what is "fair vs unfair") though usually it boils down to their desire to:

a) earn value, and
b) put in as little effort as possible to earn that value

And by the way, I think this is completely fine. 

In fact, I think it's awesome and exactly *why* decentralized social media is going to be a very serious threat to centralized web 2 social media.

The issue we have seen time and again though is that antisocial behaviors that are detrimental to the long-term viability emerge to game these reward systems and can lead to ruining communities. So what to do about it?

(Ok time to finally start to chat about the aforementioned tokens)

Specifically: $moxie, $build, $enjoy and $degen. 

Also, this is my current line of thinking, and my opinion can and should change over time. Don't be interested in these just because I am.

I'm going to start with $moxie. 

I feel like $moxie is what Farcaster was missing but this was not obvious to me at all until yesterday 😂

Before moxie, we were all trying to fit other social tokens like a square peg through a round hole to reward content on Farcaster. 

It was kind of working, but kind of not.

The genius of moxie is that it *just works* in the background rewarding users who are creating great, engaging content in the network (which is what we really need by the way), and should help work to elevate this content from the spammy/farming/botting low-effort stuff that isn't going to help with wider adoption.

In just two days of using Farcaster like I always have, I've now accumulated around $70 worth of moxie.

This is pretty nuts and currently is under-appreciated. 

If you find and connect with people here who resonate with what you are sharing, you end up earning something from it. 

That fits pretty perfectly into this:

This is pretty nuts and currently is under-appreciated. 

If you find and connect with people here who resonate with what you are sharing, you end up earning something from it. 

That fits pretty perfectly into this:

https://warpcast.com/aaronrferguson.eth/0xb5a80751

I would not be surprised if moxie is the flywheel that drives wider Farcaster adoption.

And a great secondary benefit of $moxie being this wider umbrella for rewarding quality content on Farcaster is that it frees specialist tokens from having to pretend to be generalist tokens.

This allows you to use your $degen tipping allocation to tip (reward) the type of content you want to see with heavier weighting than just engaging and earning them $moxie would do. 

Use $degen to help grow what you want there to be more of. Or not, it's up to you and that's kind of the point imo :)

Want to help artists/creators/curators more than just engaging with them for them to get $moxie or $degen tips?

This is where $enjoy is filling a really important need on Zora. You can tip part or all of your weekly allocation when you mint - some goes to the first tipper (the curator), and the rest to the creator.

Tipping $enjoy can take some of the sting away for creators who are releasing work on Zora as "free mints", and is an excellent way of helping them earn something extra. 

Artists have a hell of a time making a living in the best of times, and believe me that giving away art for free is a very hard pill to swallow.

And finally (I'm probably going to catch some flak for this), I feel this frees $build to be more of a specialist income source for builders (ie: devs), though obviously this is open to interpretation. Nominating people who are building communities around channel feels like less of a fit now that $moxie is a thing.

From experience, devs are often spending a lot more time writing code and not as often focused on building a social media presence so I think $moxie now allows $build to be better suited through it's weekly nominations to help support people who are focused on building behind-the-scenes.

So that's my reasoning why $moxie, $degen, $enjoy and $build are currently interesting to me. 

I think they have potential to be used effectively in combination to help steer us towards the types of quality content and apps that we want.

Thanks for following along :)

During the closed Farcaster beta, I invited just under 100 people to join the platform. I've been casting pretty much daily here since before there were channels, frames, tokens, etc. The platform appealed to me immediately, before all this extra utility was added.

I joined Lens as well but don't really understand what makes it different. I cross-post to it sometimes, but haven't spent time on there.