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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Greg Lang
@designheretic
Interesting 🤔 If cost is not a deterrent, filters are probably the next most viable candidate solution How salient would you say the risk is that filtering is likely to sweep in a meaningful swath of genuinely non-spammy content? (E.g. on the other app, talking about crypto at all limits your reach)
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
What would you use to filter? :)
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Greg Lang
@designheretic
Ideally I’d want a filter that I could feed specific examples of posts I don’t want to see that it would generalize my custom rules from I’d also want a “spam” timeline that I could check from time to time to flag posts it shouldn’t have filtered out—which it would use to fine-tune its general approach
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Challenge with this is the vast majority of users don't want to do work. They want smart defaults that just work. :)
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Greg Lang
@designheretic
I get that I’m not a typical customer—but I imagine I’m not the only one willing to work at fine-tuning Maybe filters of people willing to do work to fine-tune a filter could serve as templates that could be applied as a simple setting based on one-time choice during signup (think safe-search on DDG or Google)
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
challenge is focus / prioritization. working on fine tuning doesn't help with growth, which is our biggest challenege
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