I've been thinking a lot about Farcaster's growth. 

Disclaimer: I'm still working through it, and my thoughts will change, but here is my attempt to frame our current situation and some potential paths forward. 

Allow me to introduce The Network Axis.

Building /bright-moments - minting onchain art IRL | /purple #15 | FID 129 #magikarp

So, what makes social networks unique? 

My answer: the social graph and growth. 

A fast-growing content source without a highly-connected social graph is a popular blog or newsletter. 

A social graph with good content but no growth is a forum. Fine for niche audiences, but not mass market.

For Farcaster to succeed as a protocol for building sufficiently decentralized social networks, we need a framework to think about growth. 

Today's growth is a function of yesterday's content. 

Social networks can coast for a while on their reputation, but need to continually nurture sources of high quality content.

"Good content" is slippery to define. 

To try and put it succinctly: "good" content has some amount of novel insight that is valuable to a large audience. 

This doesn't mean good content needs to be serious; memes are sneakily one of the best sources of consistently good content.

"But if users make content, shouldn't more users be better?"

In theory, yes. In practice: it's complicated. 

Remember The Network Axis? 

That bottom right quadrant is where we don't want to be.

Growing too quickly can lead to other problems: low signal-to-noise and lack of common culture. 

Signal-to-noise is another way to describe "average" content quality. If users need to wade through an ocean of crap, they'll leave. 

The internet is littered with amazing blog posts that no one has ever read.

The other problem, lack of common culture, is nuanced.

Good social networks create their own culture that they export to the rest of the internet. 

This is fragile. 

If you short-circuit this process, the network won't develop it's own taste. As a result, it will just import content from other places.

Successful social networks are able to maintain distinctive high-quality content as they scale.

This requires a semi-permeable barrier; ideas need to enter and exit at a rate that allows a unique culture to form among a growing user base.

Producing good content requires effort, & users need to feel like their investment is paying off.

If existing users benefit from the growth of the network, they are more likely to stick around and pass on cultural norms.

If they don't benefit from growth (eg. buried posts, stagnant follower counts) it's a bad recipe.

Here is a rough tactical summary:
- nurture a unique culture capable of producing distinctive content via signup friction and boosting promising content
- funnel new users towards top content creators
- err towards moderate-high growth with lower avg. content quality to avoid failure to launch scenario

Any digital network can be evaluated along these two axes. 

Blogs like Marginal Revolution or SSC are not social networks per se, but they compete with social networks for user's time and attention. 

In fact, Twitter was characterized for most of its life as a "microblogging service", not a social network.

My favorite part about this mental model is that it's an implicit criticism of generic cross posting which I think more people should be thinking about

Great thread! 🫡

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