Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
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
@jawa
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
@dwr.eth
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
@jawa
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
@dwr.eth
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
@jawa
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
@dwr.eth
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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