Danica Swanson on Warpcast

Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

Not enough focus on incentivizing quality. When there are so many projects, tokens, systems and mechanisms that incentivize engagement - and only a few small projects that try to promote quality content - it's not surprising that we get so much engagement farming. You can't solve this with LLMs alone bc you're filtering too many user accounts that mostly use the platform normally but may also want to profit from the incentives (or maybe they're just caught in the LLM filter regardless). But if that's the approach there needs to be greater bottom-up user feedback on spammers. If the incentives were stronger to create quality content you'd have "quality content farming" - by both users and bots. No one would be complaining about either.

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Danica Swanson pfp

Appreciate your thoughtful takes, Mike. Re: not enough focus on incentivizing quality, here's another view of the problem. I've been casting since Jan 2023. My essays get good feedback from readers. I've curated content others appreciate. I've started + modded 2 channels. I've been boosted by WC. I've received 5 USDC top caster reward several times. I love this place. I know we need more interesting content. Happy to contribute what I can. Yet like most writers, I still can't make ends meet sustainably through my creative writing. Nor through channel mod work. Tips + minting are supplemental revenue at best, and unreliable. Thus far I've been subsidizing the time I spend on FC through other means. That won't be possible for me much longer, so with no clear path to a sustainable livelihood there may soon be a big drop in the time I'm able to spend on FC (and thus, the content I contribute) since I'll need to turn my focus to paid work elsewhere. How could FC retain contributors in similar positions?

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

Thanks for this response Danica! I'm totally with you on this.. It's likely nearly impossible to make a living here from quality content unless you already have a following, or mainly focus on growing your following to then be able to make a living from quality content. In other words, current incentives mostly revolve around engagement, but engagement is not a sustainable model for an open ecosystem. That's also partly why all the tokens are losing value quickly. The alternative is to create incentives around quality contributions to the network in all their forms - writing, art, apps, etc. - I believe this is doable and that's what I've been focused on for the past few months. In fact, I think this may be the only way for an open graph network to be sustainable in the long term. so tl;dr: we need to build more incentives, systems & tools that reward quality content over engagement. Also, Merkle team should be supporting this effort, in some capacity

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Danica Swanson pfp

Thanks for all that! If you're right that the key to a sustainable livelihood in the FC ecosystem is to focus on "growing my following" then I'll readily acknowledge that I'm doomed, because I'm terrible at that... lol. I agree that engagement isn't a sustainable model long term, and that systems and tools that reward quality content over engagement are needed. I respect the Merkle team greatly, and I'd love to see them reward quality content creation in more ways, but I'm not sure this aspect of the "need more interesting content" problem is a high priority for them. Even if it were, though, I doubt it's an easy problem space to navigate. In any case, I'm going to keep reading and learning about your work while I think through my next steps. What I've read so far is very much aligned with my own thinking.

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Mike | Abundance 🌟 pfp

Mike | Abundance 🌟

Merkle should be focused on that bc that's their clearest path to differentiate themselves from legacy social media and build a great alternative that people would love and benefit from. Its also probably a much better way to sustainably grow the platforms both in terms of users & financially. Either way that's what I'll keep building and advocating for. 💚🙏

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