horsefacts 🚂
@horsefacts.eth
A divide I sense in the Bot Problem Discourse is whether you think it's possible to exclude antisocial actors from an open network. Call these positions "idealism" and "fatalism." Idealists think we can intervene and limit the long term growth of spam with the right incentives, credentials, and some social (network) engineering. It makes a lot of sense if you think Farcaster is closer to a closed platform like Twitter. Fatalists think the long term growth of spam is inevitable and in the long run this will always be the majority of activity on the network. So we need to get really good at filtering. It makes a lot of sense if you think Farcaster is closer to an open protocol like email. Another dimension on top is optimism vs pessimism: whether you think the negative effects can be mitigated. I can't speak for everyone, but working close to the protocol has made me much more of a fatalist optimist.
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christopher
@christopher
Yes, email is plagued by spam because its core protocols were designed in a more innocent era. But we're building new protocols now with decades of lessons learned. We can bake in proof of work, reputation systems, stake-weighted voting, or other cryptoeconomic mechanisms that make spam dramatically more expensive without sacrificing openness. I think of it like city planning. While early cities grew organically and had to retrofit solutions to problems, modern urban development can iterate/design around known failure modes from the start and build progressively. You don't eliminate crime, but you can make it much harder through new environmental design. A pragmatic idealist would say: Sure, some spam will always exist. But by iterating the protocols, we can keep it to a manageable fraction rather than accepting it will be most of the activity.
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