The spam filtering dilemma

Sharing how we think about it so people can better understand:

1. Most people will only use social networks if they are fun

2. Casting something and getting dozens of spammy replies is not fun

3. If you get enough spammy replies, you'll just stop using the app

4. So, aggressively filtering for spam is necessary to keep your existing users happy

5. However, this means some good new users will hit spam filters. Understatement: this is a bad user experience for those people. It would be great to not have this happen.

6. But given the choice of who to make unhappy — an existing user who has invested a ton of time and energy into the network or a new user that is most likely to churn (top tier social networks lose 50% of users!), then you have to optimize for your existing users.

7. So does that mean you don’t care about new users? No! It’s existential to have new users be able to join Farcaster and find people to connect with — without being labeled as spam.

1/2

Here's another way to look at the spam filtering problem. Consider this hypothetical?

1. Let's say you have a new account on the network (Account A) at they reply 100 times to the same account (Account B) with no engagement back.

2. It doesn't actually matter if Account A is run by a human or a bot with AI. 

3. If you have 1000 accounts like Account B, Account A will just stop using the app. They'll move to another network or a messaging app.

4. Ideally, Account B would reply thoughtfully a few times and Account A engages with them, and then it increases over time as they build a relationship.

5. If you say "well 100 times is too much, but 50 times is fine", then you're admitting humans can be spammy and we're now arguing over the definition.

6. Side note: I don't think anyone is ready for a world where bots powered by AI are as interesting—or even more interesting—than humans.

This is interesting, cause on large accounts on X it can even be hard to get engagement when you’re just starting out even with thoughtful replies.  

I think one aspect is the signaling of qDAU engaging and liking replies from new users, which is inherently dependent to a degree on the og caster and their predisposition to engaging and replying.

I think it’s one of the reasons i enjoy the ama cast is that it signals to smaller accounts that the og caster is prepared to engage.

Re ai accounts The Dither team just launched an ai experimentation reply bot on twitter and I think just the label is real helpful when you see bot reactions in the wild.  All of the bot responses are marked -the first dithsciple