The spam filtering dilemma

Sharing how we think about it so people can better understand:

1. Most people will only use social networks if they are fun

2. Casting something and getting dozens of spammy replies is not fun

3. If you get enough spammy replies, you'll just stop using the app

4. So, aggressively filtering for spam is necessary to keep your existing users happy

5. However, this means some good new users will hit spam filters. Understatement: this is a bad user experience for those people. It would be great to not have this happen.

6. But given the choice of who to make unhappy — an existing user who has invested a ton of time and energy into the network or a new user that is most likely to churn (top tier social networks lose 50% of users!), then you have to optimize for your existing users.

7. So does that mean you don’t care about new users? No! It’s existential to have new users be able to join Farcaster and find people to connect with — without being labeled as spam.

1/2

I hope Merkle team can make the spammer list public so other clients can choose to adopt or not.

Clients built on decentralized social networks should implement stronger anti-spam mechanisms since people can switch to another client or build their own.

PS: I've manually marked over 1000+ LLM spam bot accounts in Recaster. Once they're flagged, no one can see their casts anymore.

Important step towards transparency and user protection