Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Stream of consciousness on channels 1. The overwhelming top complaint about the new channels is “I lost access” / “I can’t cast in the channels I used to” 2. The root of this is channels ran for a year as public topics / hashtags and we nudged people to cast in channels for a minor distribution boost. 3. When we launched channels last year, one of the fears was people wouldn’t cast in channels, since Twitter has tried versions of this and people were too used to casting on main / in the home timeline. 4. Farcaster user behavior was more nascent / “plastic” / early adopters. So we ended up getting most people to cast in channels. 5. The other reality is most people want to maximize distribution. So telling them “channels = more distribution” is hard to unlearn, esp. if you’re more of a weekly active user.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
6. We could have renamed channels to communities or groups. But then the issue is people would have said what happened to channels. 7. Most people can’t be bothered to read the manual / what’s changed. So part of my job is to repeat that 100-1000x across a variety of casts and replies. 8. Another issue is the original group of channels that got huge audiences as a result of the growth earlier this year. People see the big follower number and want access despite the new model not giving you a distribution boost / explicitly designed to not have canonical topics. 9. Removing the legacy channels wouldn’t be good since some owners did do a bunch of work in the model to grow them.
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shazow
@shazow.eth
Suggestion to try when doing a release like this next time: Offer a timeline for the "experiment" or "evaluation", any timeline. Example: We're changing how channels work, this is a community experiment that we'll evaluate in 60 days, primarily looking at X, Y, Z metrics and secondary effects. Here are the changes: ... Note you don't need to shut down after N days, it just sets expectations of how things are evaluated and when we can expect some more reflection on whether the changes were good or bad. Realistically you can keep iterating, but I think people will be much more open minded about changing their behavior if framed like this. Open ended changes feel scary and arbitrary (despite you doing tons of work gathering feedback and ideas ahead of time), this gives a bit of rails for people to hold onto.
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
I think the challenge with that approach is it commits to returning to the status quo. Whereas reality is we need to keep making big bets to figure out something that will drive growth.
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