Product

Alright I slept on it and it’s still eating at me. 

This is poison. 

Is it a step toward 10x’ing DAUs? Almost certainly. I don’t blame Merkle. 

But this is exactly the kind of mechanism that promotes Current Thingism and tanks the average shelf life of content on a platform. 

It incentivizes top level casts and replies in the moment’s hottest little bucket over sharing the original thoughts on niche topics that made this place so appealing in the first place.

And it was the complete absence of this kind of timeline cruft that made Farcaster feel so preternaturally high signal and productive of non-regretted interactions.

This is eulogy for an era that I will remember with great fondness, not a protest or feedback. Happily for all of us, this place is not designed by committee.

This is reality, where goods and services cost money. Merkle either slowly bleeds to death providing a magical tree fort for my favorite nerds or it lives long enough to see itself become something more like TikTok.

🫡

As a product developer, you must understand that products go through waves of evolution as they seek adoption.  The things that appealed to early adopters are often not the same that the early majority want.

Worse: after getting enough users, teams must optimize for customers (because they often aren’t the same), and after getting $$, they must optimize for investors (value extraction).  Cory Doctrow calls this process enshittification, and with the current web2 startup capital model, it’s difficult to avoid.

One of the reasons I’m in web3 is I believe that this death cycle could be avoided by using blockchain in a clever way.  It remains to be seen if it’s true.