A divide I sense in the Bot Problem Discourse is whether you think it's possible to exclude antisocial actors from an open network. Call these positions "idealism" and "fatalism."

Idealists think we can intervene and limit the long term growth of spam with the right incentives, credentials, and some social (network) engineering. It makes a lot of sense if you think Farcaster is closer to a closed platform like Twitter.

Fatalists think the long term growth of spam is inevitable and in the long run this will always be the majority of activity on the network. So we need to get really good at filtering. It makes a lot of sense if you think Farcaster is closer to an open protocol like email.

Another dimension on top is optimism vs pessimism: whether you think the negative effects can be mitigated. I can't speak for everyone, but working close to the protocol has made me much more of a fatalist optimist.

I'm eth newbie..just learning
(working on @farcaster)

terminally.online

Do you think it would be better to let users customize the settings and decide what gets filtered from the protocol? Right now, it feels like the consensus is that the client should make those decisions, and if you don’t like it, you’re supposed to build your own. One of the main reasons I really liked Discove was because it gave users way more flexibility in filtering out content and remixing feeds/users