Ben - [C/x] on Warpcast

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dawufi pfp

Farcaster as an economy is reductive and a race to the bottom for coins and content. No one wants a feed of anons casting fake wins and loss porn. FC took off because it was counter positioned to traditional crypto narratives. The quality of developer and founder here was strong, memes were niche, and people found signal in a shit filled sea of noise. I love when people make money, but the economy is a feature. Not a narrative. If economy is your entire narrative the network will eventually be replaced by nothing but speculation and you don't need a social network to do that - and it's actually detrimental. Unless you consider dark pools cozy corners. I hope we're not headed to the death knell, I'm not going anywhere, just want share a word of warning against a danger to a network that has come to mean quite a bit to me. I realized I offer no solutions here, maybe I'll offer them in another cast. Just had to vent this one out for now. Appreciation for your grace.

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Ben - [C/x] pfp

I generally share similar concerns. I view it as a necessary growth phase though. The risk lies in not evolving beyond, and getting stuck in pump-and-dump purgatory. It’s like building a well functioning society: you need some amount of degen taking risk to experiment at the edge of the frontier, allocate capital and spur economic growth, but a strong economy is just one small element of a well functioning society (or network state). A strong economy is also the result of years of intentional trial and error through various phases of less strong economies (ie., speculative and filled with boom/bust cycles), and a strong economy can’t exist on its own in isolation - it must be accompanied by a strong civil society with unique shared values, history and cultural identity. So we must pass through the messy early stages of economic and social formation, while keeping our eyes on the North Star of what we’re working towards lest we get lost and turn into Vegas.

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I don't disagree, but I felt it would be a disservice to the network (and to myself) to not say something about it. If we move past this I'll be more bullish on FC than ever, if we don't, it was another experiment we all learned from. My greatest fear though is that we've seen this before, many times, on many networks, in many places that thought they could become "platforms". FC is on a dangerous path to becoming low status, I've already heard it in many private conversations, once that happens, there's no clawing your way back out.

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