Virtually all of the people on Farcaster with large audiences:

1. Don't have large audiences elsewhere (Farcaster is their first time with a large audience)

2. Didn't know me or Varun and didn't know each other. The "Farcaster OG scene" is net new creation of Farcaster.

3. Were early and stuck around when everyone made fun of Farcaster (and people still do)

4. Continued to cast interesting stuff, casted in channels when we suggested people cast in channels

5. Warpcast onboarding asks all users for their interests

6. Based on the interests, we pair the account with an initial set of follows

7. There are 200+ accounts on the list, weighted toward accounts that get the most engagement / drive retention, but a large group of people benefit

8. On our list to improve, but the reality is outside of "I should be on the list!" haven't seen any concrete proposals to improve

I quit a large audience on Twitter and joined Farcaster a year ago as a direct replacement. I didn't know Varun or Dan, and indeed, anyone else active on Farcaster at the time. While "the list" made sense early on, it should be opt-in recommendations now - the engagement inequality is very real. 

This is made worse by the hyperfinancialization, where a handful of those people are incentivized to be very active, while a vast majority of the rest are bots. (IMO, as a casual observer nowadays) Farcaster right now should be aggressively focused on social values over financial values (and yes, this is a very direct contradiction and trade-off) - in design, engineering, and most importantly marketing. Unless the terminal addressable market target is degens, which is fair enough.

My only concern with the autofollow (which I understand why the team is doing it) is that almost the top accounts will benefit from it. This is a behavior quite widespread within our ecosystem (just look at raindrops from degen or similar).

Without looking into the data, based only on the descriptions from the cast, it looks like that there will be a list of 100 people that will get always the most follows, increasing the numbers a lot, while other accounts will have to fight to reach those numbers. But this is just an hypothesis and it needs to be tested (I might try to setup a Dune dashboard to show the ratios of followed accounts with bins for big numbers).

I just wrote this cast regarding this issue which is pretty similar to what you are saying here.

I just wrote this cast regarding this issue which is pretty similar to what you are saying here.

https://warpcast.com/teleyinex.eth/0x167fc241