Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Stream of consciousness on channels 1. The overwhelming top complaint about the new channels is “I lost access” / “I can’t cast in the channels I used to” 2. The root of this is channels ran for a year as public topics / hashtags and we nudged people to cast in channels for a minor distribution boost. 3. When we launched channels last year, one of the fears was people wouldn’t cast in channels, since Twitter has tried versions of this and people were too used to casting on main / in the home timeline. 4. Farcaster user behavior was more nascent / “plastic” / early adopters. So we ended up getting most people to cast in channels. 5. The other reality is most people want to maximize distribution. So telling them “channels = more distribution” is hard to unlearn, esp. if you’re more of a weekly active user.
13 replies
16 recasts
77 reactions
Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
6. We could have renamed channels to communities or groups. But then the issue is people would have said what happened to channels. 7. Most people can’t be bothered to read the manual / what’s changed. So part of my job is to repeat that 100-1000x across a variety of casts and replies. 8. Another issue is the original group of channels that got huge audiences as a result of the growth earlier this year. People see the big follower number and want access despite the new model not giving you a distribution boost / explicitly designed to not have canonical topics. 9. Removing the legacy channels wouldn’t be good since some owners did do a bunch of work in the model to grow them.
8 replies
2 recasts
42 reactions
links 🏴
@links
So does casting to channels give you a boost or not? The way @zinger explained his understanding was that when you cast to channels, channels followers + your followers might see the cast. Therefore always better to cast to channels. Is this how it worked before the changes? Is this how it works now? Just curious, 🙏
2 replies
0 recast
9 reactions
Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
No boost. Only additional benefit is appearing in the channel feed which few people tap through to. It’s about participating in a community now.
1 reply
0 recast
6 reactions
Pichi 🟪🍖🐹🎩 🍡🌸
@pichi
How do channels work in my home feed now? Will I see casts from people I don’t follow but who casted something popular in a channel I follow? I unfollowed 80% of the channels I was following. I’m trying to figure out how to optimize my home feed more and want to make sure I’m doing the right clean up.
1 reply
0 recast
5 reactions
