hottakes

Tokens have done more harm than good to Farcaster

Full Stack Dev | Head of Developer Relations at /pinata | Technical Writer | Tinkering with everything | stevedylan.dev/links

What would you say are the negative side effects of tokens?

Some large subreddits had tipping bots for ages and turned out okay - maybe due to more aggressive moderation?

Maybe also because it was less widespread because you didn’t just get free money to give away

cypherpunk wannabe, engineer working on @frames /open-frames /opencast
https://stephancill.co.za create stories at https://stories.steer.fun

As far as tipping goes, spam is the big one imo. If I'm an "original content" or "high quality" caster and I scroll through a channel that has loads of spam content, why would I bother staying? Or if I do post something and get a bunch of weird replies, same issue. Farcaster is especially more vulnerable imo because of the programatic ability to airdrop with verified addresses. Its a blessing and a curse. Other platforms have more traditional means of handling spam where as Farcaster has to build an entire saas to make that happen and hope it stays afloat to provide a filtered feed. 

On a larger blockchain scale, tokens/airdrop culture have caused loads of poor quality hubs to clutter the network. Farcaster didn't even promise an incentive for running hubs and tried to discourage, but the culture was stronger. I could go on, but as a whole I'm disappointed to see amazing tech like blockchain get thrown out by the mass populous because of tokens