Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
One thing I was wrong about over the last few years: sign up costs would dramatically reduce spam. Turns out spam is a top 3 problem (aside from retention and infrastructure scaling) to solve for when building a permissionless decentralized social networking protocol. Spammers are willing to pay for sign ups at prices that normal users aren't. Spam is also relative: what's spammy for one person is not for another. Corollary: when you talk to developers building on Farcaster, spam is a top of mind issue whereas users giving product feedback but not actively building in the ecosystem tend to think this isn't that big an issue / not that hard a problem to solve. Also a good proxy for the quality of first principles thinking when suggesting "why don't you just do this?" if you haven't considered how would spammers abuse this and what's the solution.
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Ben 🟪
@benersing
I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself. No, it hasn’t resulted in 0 “spam,” but I have to imagine it’s reduced farming by increasing the bar for the initial capital outlay required to farm. Counterfactuals are hard to prove. My suspicion is it would have been much worse with no registration fee. The new channel approach is a smart next experiment. It creates an additional “spam” filter, allowing users at the community level rather than the platform level to self-define “spam” and set an optimal entry fee to deter what they view as “spam.” IMHO, next step would be to equip communities to further sub-divide thereby adding more nuance to their own definitions of “spam.” I’m curious to see how it unfolds.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
I'm not being hard on myself, just reflecting on something I've updated my pov on
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