Stephan on Warpcast

Stephan pfp

My 2c: the incentives inherent to the farcaster ecosystem are not sufficiently aligned to prevent this from happening again Denying this means believing in “don’t be evil” as opposed to “can’t be evil”

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Stephan pfp

Farcaster’s bet is that client diversity solves the misalignment between users and clients, but turns out open data is not enough to get people to build truly competitive clients that result in the desirable outcomes for users you’d expect from a free market Maybe that changes if Farcaster has millions of users. Even with multiple high quality clients the incentives are not there for them to cooperate instead of capturing the market and being extractive

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Samuel ツ pfp

@samuellhuber.eth

what matters here is a protocol with the needed batteries. there will always be clients that differentiate on features else it would be just one by definition. - casts are protocol - DC's to follow - Channels are unproven at best, so no need for protocol the rest is up for grabs for anyone to build and take. Messaging is the retention killer once in protocol unlocking true competition on the client level. Any alt client at feature parity can then drive their own innovation

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Stephan pfp

You’re saying that it’s not even possible to build a competitive client today and I totally agree However I’m referring to incentives that exist today. A client gaining a majority market share due to a novel feature has very little incentive to put that into the protocol - that is totally dependent on the benevolence of its creators. Merkle is the only entity that has some incentive to behave in this way

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Samuel ツ pfp

@samuellhuber.eth

yep that's what I am saying while I am working on super. today the only client gaining a majority share is warpcast because if anyone else figured out 100k+ DAU they have no incentive to use the protocol as you said

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Stephan pfp

The problem extends beyond clients as well. Apps that use the farcaster social graph for bootstrapping their own networks have no incentive to write back to the farcaster network and that’s a problem too imo

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vrypan |--o--| pfp

What you guys are discussing is competition. A vampire attack is something different. It's about integrating with an other network or platform and siphoning value out of it :-) Like Instagram did when they bootstrapped their social graph using the Twitter API, for example. Or Instagram (again) by allowing users to automatically cross-post to Facebook. Or Facebook allowing users to invite their MySpace friends.

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Stephan pfp

The vampire attack in the tweet I quoted originally is besides the point. The reason I quoted it is because i don’t think farcaster solves the underlying issues that cause bad platform behaviour yet so I don’t think it’s worth vampire attacking anything

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vrypan |--o--| pfp

If someone thought it was worth it, how would they do it?

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