Farcaster

Dan Romero (@dwr.eth) did an AMA on Monday. 

Here are the key takeaways 🧵

Investing in Decentralized Social at Collider Ventures. Hosting @thepodcaster. 

On why Farcaster doesn’t support videos: “One bad apple can create a lot of work for us”.

Merkle is a US based company and needs to comply with US law. While text-based content is granted significant leeway by “Section 230”, videos and images have stricter regulations. One single violation could lead to federal charges. This means that the team would have to enfore a a difficult to enforce compliance policy which would lead to a huge overhead with quite little benefit for the network.

On Muting/Blocking: “There’s an argument for wanting everyone to engage with everything, which is egalitarian and democratic. But if negative interactions are allowed, it leads to people not wanting to post publicly"

At the very beginning, Farcaster only had mutes through which users could simply avoid seeing what another person casted. Now, Farcaster also supports blocks, allowing you to block people from engaging with your content (such as replying to your cast). However, this doesn’t limit the user's ability to see the casts. Some users like to always take the opposite side and troll, making the experience unpleasant for everyone. By trolling, you can gain followers, so it’s quite rational to engage in this way. However, this makes the overall experience unpleasant and could lead the original caster to not want to cast anymore. By blocking users, the original caster can avoid this.

On What’s the Next Frames Moment for Farcaster: 
“Most things people are asking don't massively change growth. Farcaster is a consumer app, not an enterprise SaaS. Existing users tell you their pain points, but they are already using your product."

Dan essentially says he has no idea. Frames allowed developers to get distribution, and the Merkle team ran a bunch of experiments, none of which hit as hard as Frames. Most things you launch fail, and most good things don’t result in massive growth, even if people get excited. You need to ask yourself: what’s the most likely reason this will fail? Does it work as expected? Most things users ask for don’t massively change growth. This is a consumer app, not an enterprise SaaS. Existing users share their pain points, but they’re already using your product.

On Merkle Funding Builders: "I think most of the people who actually want to build a Farcaster client are doing it for fame and fortune. As a result, you're far better off just allowing people to have contact with the market. If that works, they're going to be able to raise money from investors without any problem.”

Funding teams upfront creates adverse selection. Social products are extremely difficult to build, and there’s a brutal market competing with major social apps. There’s the issue of stated versus revealed preferences—consumers tell you all the features they want, but when they get home, they use the major social apps. You're trying to wedge yourself in for just a few minutes of users' time. The idea that funding will solve this is unrealistic. If you give money to build a client, but it doesn’t have users, it’s worthless. The expectation is that the product is free and competing against monopolies.

We’ve done some retroactive grants, and the funding afterward had an adverse effect—people stopped working on the project. Like editing Wikipedia, you do it because you’re passionate, and that’s what’s solid for building an open-source client. People building clients are often doing it for fame and fortune, and they will be able to raise money from investors if they’re successful.

On Marketing: “The challenge is that organic, interesting content is hard.” 

Merkle has been been trying different marketing approaches. For example, they did X cross-posting, but this strategy is more useful when you have a larger number of daily active users (DAUs) and want to inject good quality content. What will drive the network? Interesting, organic content. The challenge is that creating organic, interesting content is hard—it’s not just about a short sentence post. Naval, for example, is very famous on Twitter, and when he tweets two sentences, it's a compression of his entire experience. A two-sentence cast, however, is less useful. The most valuable content comes when someone takes the time to write about something new that has happened. When people show up, they come for multiple reasons, but if you want to attract great users, they want to read smart, insightful takes. When you don’t reach that level of textual output, the network struggles.

On Channels: “No channel on Farcaster has become the best place for a specific topic, whether that’s Ethereum development or gardening.

They’ve got hands; they kicked my ass. Behavior that didn’t pick up much on Twitter (through communities/circles), but has been very successful on Farcaster. However, no channel on Farcaster has become the best place for discussions on any specific topic (like Ethereum or gardening), which would attract a huge number of new users. Channels are really useful for existing users but don’t bring in new users. There’s been no growth as a consequence of decentralizing channels, and that’s dangerous—it becomes ossified into the protocol. We don’t want to keep channels moving in the same direction or just make channel pages. The real question is: how can you create a primitive that generates extremely high-quality content and drives people to sign up, no matter the topic—whether it’s F1 or anything else?

Having Smart People on Farcaster: "Users will come to Farcaster if they know that’s where the smartest people on a certain topic are hanging out."

The 1,000 most interesting accounts are text-based. They are driven by status—what you say is weighted by who you are. If the quality of the ideas isn’t world-class, it’s hard to attract text-based users. We need to make sure that some part of the network feels like the smartest people in the area are hanging out.

Where we are now is trying to figure out the fundamental issue—there’s not enough quality content. With it, people will stick around; without it, we’re searching for the next big thing. It’s difficult to replicate something like Frames again. You don’t want to do just what people ask for; instead, focus on something they aren’t asking for but that satisfies their needs. That’s consumer product development in a nutshell. Big companies like Meta didn’t have this issue—growth was a given. Their features are about increasing usage among existing captive users, not finding a way to 100x their growth.