Farcaster

Why don't you clean up "the bots"?

Useful to be precise here: "bots" is a catch all term that people use to describe low effort, uninteresting or otherwise off-topic content.

However, a "bot" is traditionally thought of as a programmatic account, i.e. controlled by a script or software. e.g. bot net

When people on Farcaster refer to "bots" they are more often referring to actual people using a mobile device (with the aid of translation tools and ChatGPT) who post uninteresting content (from their pov).

They are casting and replying in hopes of appearing to be a "real account" because they have learned that turns into a future economic reward in crypto. Recent tipping meta has increased the expected value of these accounts.

It's possible to algorithmically label these accounts, but then you create a "shadowban" meta. So you massively increase the number of support messages and complaints. This was the state of the world before priority mode.

For real bots and "uninteresting" accounts, the goal is to reduce users' exposure to these accounts while highlighting genuinely interesting ones.

One approach is using social reputation systems like social capital scores/ranks or openrank, though this can make it difficult for new users to be discovered. A common solution is to rely on recommendation algorithms that give all content initial exposure and judge its quality based on user preferences, customizing content delivery accordingly. Adding a downvote button, similar to Reddit, could help identify low-quality accounts. These user interactions, combined with manual tagging, could serve as training data for LLMs to determine low-quality content.

Different methods have their merits and drawbacks, making it hard to choose the best one. Warpcast alone might struggle with this, so third-party clients could experiment with different approaches. Effective methods could then be widely adopted, benefiting the entire Farcaster ecosystem.

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It depends on whether the project team prefers data or reality.