Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Stream of consciousness on channels 1. The overwhelming top complaint about the new channels is “I lost access” / “I can’t cast in the channels I used to” 2. The root of this is channels ran for a year as public topics / hashtags and we nudged people to cast in channels for a minor distribution boost. 3. When we launched channels last year, one of the fears was people wouldn’t cast in channels, since Twitter has tried versions of this and people were too used to casting on main / in the home timeline. 4. Farcaster user behavior was more nascent / “plastic” / early adopters. So we ended up getting most people to cast in channels. 5. The other reality is most people want to maximize distribution. So telling them “channels = more distribution” is hard to unlearn, esp. if you’re more of a weekly active user.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
6. We could have renamed channels to communities or groups. But then the issue is people would have said what happened to channels. 7. Most people can’t be bothered to read the manual / what’s changed. So part of my job is to repeat that 100-1000x across a variety of casts and replies. 8. Another issue is the original group of channels that got huge audiences as a result of the growth earlier this year. People see the big follower number and want access despite the new model not giving you a distribution boost / explicitly designed to not have canonical topics. 9. Removing the legacy channels wouldn’t be good since some owners did do a bunch of work in the model to grow them.
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Kieran Daniels 🎩
@kdaniels.eth
The problem is people. Once you give most people the power over people online, then they will always use it. I’m still positive that through experimenting a balance will be found, but handing over channels like /music to people who want it to be a private club / eco chamber, ruined the magic of farcaster for a lot of people. It only took a week for the cliques to form and channels that were essentially public goods with 40k users now only have a few hundred “cool kids” who can post. I know that this allows the chance for other smaller channels to form but it just put a dark shadow over something that was objectively free and not censored before a couple weeks ago.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Have to stop considering them public goods. Most of those followers are inactive and the hashtag model does not work. We tried it for a year. Have to shake it up.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
What’s stopping you from casting about music in a different channel or on your home timeline?
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shoni.eth
@shoni.eth
@ghostlinkz.eth would probably add you?
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