The active badge is going away.

Spammy accounts are aggressively gaming the system to get the badge. 
Making the rules stricter just makes it harder for legitimate users.

We’re past the point where a simple rule based system will work. We need something better.

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

Introducing the Power Badge, a new ranking system from Warpcast.

It uses a PageRank-like approach to recursively find power users who are active and post content that the rest of the network finds interesting.

Unlike the active badge, it does not have a set of rules that you can follow to earn the badge.

At launch, the power badge will have many fewer false positives (spammy users with the badge) and a few more false negatives (good users without the badge).

It’s at a point where its already better than active badge for most purposes, and we will continue iterating and improving it every week.

How do I get the power badge?

Since it is network-based, there isn’t a guaranteed way to get it. The best approach is to:

1. Use the app weekly.
2. Cast things that other power users like, reply to or recast.
3. Avoid casting things that power users find spammy.

Will the algorithm be made public?

No, for two reasons:

1. It becomes easier to game, as we’ve seen with the active badge.
2. It is going to change often as we dial in the parameters.

We expect this first version to be directionally right but not perfect. It will take many iterations before we get this right.

We expect it to launch later this week. If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear it now and factor it into our design.

Power badges show up on user profile, just like the old active badges. 

They're intended to be a signal of quality to users browsing Warpcast, and to frame developers and other devs building in the ecosystem. 

Warpcast will make power badges available over an API.

So the PageRank is just a way to determine who gets the Power Badge or is it also utilized in feed algos?

how do you define "interesting", if its based on reactions then it will just help even more the engagement farmers.

Excellent initiative, I believe that Artificial Intelligence could be of great help in this task, more so than applying specific rules. I think there could even be criteria that contribute quality measures not necessarily related to volume (click-baiting).

Any thoughts towards down-ranking people who follow obviously spammy accounts, especially of the "follow for follow" variety?