Some thoughts on spam on Farcaster and how we tackle it. 

First question - What is spam?  

The naive answer is "automated activity" but this isn't right. Over 75% of spam we find comes from real humans who have phones, wallets and x accounts. 

The best definition is "inauthentic activity". It's that feeling you get when you realize that someone who is following, liking or replying to is doing it to benefit themselves and not because they're interested in you.

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

level 3 trained on Bitboy and Ansem amirite 💀

Awesome rundown, loved reading it.

Less love for the ML vs LLM arms race. Automated airdrop farmers are getting much more difficult to detect nowadays - they’re not stuck with tiny llama2 models anymore. It’s become very cheap to run a highly capable LLM.

Someone argued with me once that if LLMs get so smart and so engaging that they beat out most humans for “content generation”, maybe we’d prefer social networks filled with LLM agents instead of humans.

Deeply, deeply depressing thought.

e/acc || Building @ /nova || Catgirl maxi @ /imgnai || Dogecoin core dev 2013/14

I mean if the robot is more interesting and genuine than the human, is it really spam?

I’ve genuinely been trying to come to grips with that one.

It’s sort of the endgame for spammers I guess. Become so subtle that you integrate entirely. 

Likely already happening to some extent tbh