First Draft Club

The Unwritten Rules of Farcaster: Cast A Lot*

When the Warpcast team says: Cast a lot* to be successful and be eligible for airdrops and rewards, that’s a huge oversimplification. 

There’s a BIG asterisk in there that’s invisible, but important understand. You need to cast things that are going to get engagement. Casting for castings sake isn’t going to work out in your favor. 

75-80% of casts on Farcaster get zero engagement. That means no likes, no comments, and no recasts. This is bad.

If your content is getting zero engagement, you need to change your casting habits. These are called orphaned casts and they are bad. The algorithm sees them as not good. When people ignore your content, it must be bad and the algorithm wont favor you in the future. 

You need to cast a lot to do well here but casting things that get engagement is more important. It’s better to not cast at all than to cast slop, aka something that gets no likes and no comments. 


Here’s a Dune dashboard that shows how many cast or orphaned daily. It’s fascinating.

Pi-chi.eth (she/her) Artist /animeoutcasts
Hosting: /sakura /kyoto /momiji  /anime-manga /farcasterunion

https://portrait.so/pichi

If your content is getting zero engagement, you need to change your casting habits. These are called orphaned casts and they are bad. The algorithm sees them as not good. When people ignore your content, it must be bad and the algorithm wont favor you in the future. 

You need to cast a lot to do well here but casting things that get engagement is more important. It’s better to not cast at all than to cast slop, aka something that gets no likes and no comments. 


Here’s a Dune dashboard that shows how many cast or orphaned daily. It’s fascinating. 
https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

While there are some channels on Farcaster  that have deep web3 culture and you can simply post gm and people might respond back, that is not the culture of most well scrolled channels here. Most people want to interact, have conversations, learn, explore, try new things, and build relationships.  If what you cast isn’t fitting into one of those categories, think hard about why you are casting it.  

Not everyone is a content creator and that’s OK, but to be successful here you need to be bringing something to the network that’s interesting, compelling, or gets people talking.  One way to do this as a non content creator, is to lean into being a curator.

We need curators. They find interesting content and amplify it. They add their own color or the reason they’re sharing or a strong opinion about the material in question. 


 If you don’t have anything that adds value/content to the network,  that doesn’t mean you can’t participate it means you need to think about how you participate, why you’re here and what your goals are.

If your goals are to be on the rewards leaderboard or to get airdrops in the future then you need to be working on your content or curation. Both can do well here. A mix of both is even better. 


Your content needs to be getting interaction from Level 2 casters (the good spam label). If you aren’t getting interaction from them, you need to change your tactics.

If you’re an artist or want to share art, it’s very important to add text to what you’re sharing and not just photos/images. They don’t  tend to do as well with the algorithm when posted alone. Sharing the backstory of your art or photograph and giving detailed information is really helpful and people enjoy reading the story behind the art, so it’s worth adding some context to do well.

Artist love when you share their work and frame developers love when you share their frames. We are thrilled when you do this, but the best way to do it with the algorithm is to try to add some context.

You’ve all seen frames that go viral and have the same text that was written by the developer over and over and over it gets really old really quickly. If you add your own spin on why you’re sharing it/enjoying the frame or why you bought the Art/Support the artist, that’s the kind of content that the algorithm is going to like and that’s what will get people to stop scrolling and start interacting with your content.  Even if they’ve seen the frame or the art before, if your text is new and different they might stop to read it.

Remember Farcaster is open. You can do whatever you want. There are no rules. It’s an open network…but there are a lot of invisible rules on Warpcast and if you want to do well on Warpcast, you need to learn how to navigate them. You need to play to the algorithm and you need to try new and different things and experiment. This place attracts innovators.  You can be an innovator or you can be a spectator, but you’re not gonna end up getting airdrops, getting reward, or being on the top of the leaderboard if you take the same approach you do on all other social media. It’s not going to work here, especially broadcast only mode. Give people something to engage with, engage with others freely, and Warpcast will love you back.

What works one week doesn’t necessarily work the next! Text content tends to get the most engagement. Farcaster  started as a text base network in the algorithm heavily favors text.