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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shoni.eth
@shoni.eth
i think you place a lot more importance on distribution than us cuz you said it a lot. yeah i post to channels for a little boost sometimes but its mostly more a categorical thing, /lazy is things i come back to, /books was cool books and people that like them but now if i want to find books i have to use /books but since the mod doesn’t like me i have to cast into /book that’s true for a lot of channels including farcaster. i dont think its a big deal but was only a subtractive experience for me most of my behavior change now is using the channel as a hashtag which is a little pointless and mostly out of annoyance or less distribution in alt channels
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