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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Daniel Fernandes
@dfern.eth
Agree, I saw firsthand how Status.app's v1 product with public channels was completely ruined by spam. Made it a hard sell to recommend. The sign-up fee does prevent the kind of DDoS you might see if posting to a hub was free, but it doesn't stop the kind of ppl willing to pay for LLM botserver farms. The long term solution (without compromising on cypherpunk values and devolving back to Twillio phone KYC verif) is the social/reputation graph which takes years to build. Metcalf's law cuts both ways, each new valuable node increases the value of the network quadratically, and each user that churns due to spam/poor UX is a quadratic loss.
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Daniel Fernandes
@dfern.eth
*Metcalfe's Law, not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
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