The spam filtering dilemma

Sharing how we think about it so people can better understand:

1. Most people will only use social networks if they are fun

2. Casting something and getting dozens of spammy replies is not fun

3. If you get enough spammy replies, you'll just stop using the app

4. So, aggressively filtering for spam is necessary to keep your existing users happy

5. However, this means some good new users will hit spam filters. Understatement: this is a bad user experience for those people. It would be great to not have this happen.

6. But given the choice of who to make unhappy — an existing user who has invested a ton of time and energy into the network or a new user that is most likely to churn (top tier social networks lose 50% of users!), then you have to optimize for your existing users.

7. So does that mean you don’t care about new users? No! It’s existential to have new users be able to join Farcaster and find people to connect with — without being labeled as spam.

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"I'm not a spammy, I'm a real person not a bot." or "Just use proof of humanity to solve spam."

1. Spam is relative: you might not find something spammy but another person might find it spammy.

2. If you are casting in your home feed or to people who chose to follow you, then it's by definition not spammy

3. If you are casting *at* someone else, then their opinion does matter. It's no different than walking up to someone on the street and trying to strike up a conversation with them.

4. Fundamentally, spam is unwanted inbound that tries to get someone's attention (literally what spam email is).

5. Humans can be spammy and bots can be not spammy.

6. What proof of humanity does is limits how fast new accounts can get created, i.e. if you want to create 1000 accounts, you now have to get 1000 proof of humanity credentials. That's friction.

7. However, if you have proof of humanity, you can still be spammy (and still hook your account up to ChatGPT, etc.).



8. It's essential to consider intent and impact on the recipient when defining spam