Dan Romero on Warpcast

Dan Romero pfp

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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Jawa pfp

Spam is a platform problem not an end user problem. It makes perfect sense that devs are more tuned into it than users. Solutions should also take this into consideration…

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Dan Romero pfp

Also it is a user problem if it's not solved. Fastest way to get your power users to stop using the network is if they feel like things are too spammy.

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Jawa pfp

Losing power users is also a platform problem. I’m afraid I don’t have any suggestions other than viewing it from that perspective. We are consumers here for a dopamine hit. It’s your job to make sure that experience is overall enjoyable so that we come back.

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Dan Romero pfp

Agree. Which is err on being more aggressive with filtering for the known power users and dial it down vs. the oppposite.

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Jawa pfp

One way I’ve tackled problems like this in the past is this: treat content & users independently. Identify over time what legitimate user behavior looks like and build “reputation” for lack of a better word for those end users. Their content can be treated as: “presumed good” with some checks & balances (watch for obvious account takeovers etc.). Your new users then become your biggest challenge. A crawl, walk, run strategy has worked for me in e-commerce but I’m not sure how that translates to SM.

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Dan Romero pfp

That's basically what our model does. Tries to classify users as quickly as possible based on activity into various buckets. Very hard for new users without a lot of inbound engagement.

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Jawa pfp

What about looking on-chain to the associated wallet? Users transacting on multiple chains or with a long history with the wallet add a lot of credibility before the first cast. Or look at their lifetime gas fees on L1 😂. I really liked the idea of using Gitcoin history. I meant to preface this all with: I know nothing about running a SN! I’m always just throwing ideas out and never trying to tell you how to do your job.

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Dan Romero pfp

We've looked at that. Most "good" new users at this point don't have a lot of onchain activity. Also airdrop farmer bot nets have sophisticated onchain profiles.

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Jawa pfp

Last idea for now: the e-commerce world has hundreds of API as service options where you can evaluate a transaction or new user registration as coming from known IPs & even devices using device fingerprinting. I suspect someone has built something similar for wallets. But those tools are typically pretty cheap when used only @ signup and can filter out a % of the bad actors.

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