Varun Srinivasan
@v
I spent a little time with casters at FC who complained about not getting enough distribution. I found three problems that affected most casters. If you want to increase your distribution, try fixing these first.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
1. Not enough followers One of the people I talked to had 10 followers and was surprised they had no engagement. You absolutely need to build a following. A good rule of thumb is that if you have 1k followers, then 100 may be online today, 50 may scroll enough to see your cast and 5 of them may like it. If you don't have 1k followers, work on fixing that. Just posting casts won't get you more followers. You also need to reply or interact with others so they notice you and click follow. It's important that these interactions are helpful to others. If you are simply trying to farm follows, people will notice and it will have the opposite effect.
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Semidoxxed
@semidoxxed.eth
Hey @v this is a timely post and thank you. As a new, casual user I've had the same type of thoughts myself... even wondering if I was being shadow-banned or something. Then I started wondering if me not getting much interaction was a purposeful feature of Farcaster to limit the dilution of coolness from Normies. At the same time, I'm also recognizing that Farcaster is still a fairly small community so having less engagement is to be expected. The thing is, I'm not trying to be an influencer, I'm not trying to be a KOL, and I'm not trying to be a leading-edge content creator. I don't need a thousand followers or want to strategize about ways to grow my following. I just want to be a normal online dude who gets to interact with a community and not feel like I'm on the outside. I think the onus of how users end up feeling when they're interacting with a platform should be kind of on the platform creators - not fully on the users, unless that's an explicit feature. Anyways, hope this is somewhat helpful.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
I think you are not getting much interaction because you're not doing the things I said in the post above. If you don't put in the effort to create things that are interesting to others, you won't get a lot of likes. It doesn't mean you're "outside the community". It just means that your posts or your profile aren't that interesting to people who don't know you. So you either need to post more content or spend more time making friends and being helpful to others. This is not a platform problem, this is the reality of how humans interact with each other.
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Semidoxxed
@semidoxxed.eth
Is it allowed in product to tell users to put in more effort? 😅 Honestly, I'm just saying this because it's interesting to watch Farcaster grow over time and I'm thinking about this more from a perspective of what would I do as a product owner if I had a user engagement problem rather than what should I do as the user. I'm not any more interesting on Facebook or LinkedIn but those platforms help with the cold start problem by connecting me with people I know, who are more likely to engage with me. Personal responsibility matters, but I do think Farcaster has an opportunity to introduce more ice breakers and ways of advancing users from low-motivation users to high-motivation users.
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
Yes, the problem is that all APIs to connect you with people you know have been shut off. So we aren't able to do that anymore. This is why Farcaster and open social is important. We have other features that we've built to help with discovery, but fundamentally they won't work unless you: 1. post often and regularly 2. interact with others in replies. 3. cast stuff that other people like.
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