Network States

Farcaster

A key user segment that Twitter has and Farcaster doesn’t is reporters. As long as the primary source of new information remains news outlets, Twitter will always have an advantage in overall relevance, because people want to consume live news as quickly as possible.

Note that I said reporters and not journalists. Even if it’s true that traditional media is dying because people are sick of agenda-driven journalism, there will always be strong demand for low latency factual reporting.

You might retort and say that facts will move onchain as @balajis.eth has suggested. Maybe! I’d love to see that. But it’s unclear to me how this would actually happen for high leverage events like politics, war, etc. The flow would be Reporter -> Twitter -> Oracle -> Farcaster, ie Farcaster would remain downstream of Twitter.

To fundamentally change this you need cryptographic attenuations from the principals of the news, and I don’t see that happening soon.

NETWORK STATE NEWS

I've thought about starting Network State News on Farcaster.

We'd start with $1000 in prizes each day for content broadly related to startup societies and network states. For example, "generate a 60 second vertical video review of the top 10 startup societies", where the grand prize winner gets $500 and five runner ups get $100 each. But we'd also issue prizes for open source code, for book reviews, for politics and history, and for breaking news.

It'd be social-native, because content would come fundamentally as public casts on an open social protocol rather than posts on a closed website. It'd be AI-native, because everyone would use AI tools like Claude, Midjourney, Runway, and Suno to compose every post. And of course it'd be crypto-native, because every post would be digitally signed, all payments would be in crypto, and everyone here would know how to cite blockchain evidence.

Most of all, it'd be an experiment in decentralized global citizen journalism. Should we do it?