Varun Srinivasan on Warpcast

Varun Srinivasan pfp

Varun Srinivasan

Some thoughts on spam on Farcaster and how we tackle it. First question - What is spam? The naive answer is "automated activity" but this isn't right. Over 75% of spam we find comes from real humans who have phones, wallets and x accounts. The best definition is "inauthentic activity". It's that feeling you get when you realize that someone who is following, liking or replying to is doing it to benefit themselves and not because they're interested in you.

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Varun Srinivasan pfp

Varun Srinivasan

Spam is driven by people who want to get airdrops. How much can you earn if you set up a fake account on Twitter? Probably not a whole lot and not in directly measurable dollars. If you do the same on Farcaster, you might earn 10 or even a 100 dollars in airdrops. Spammers on Farcaster are very, very motivated. We see patterns like LLM spamming before they become commonplace on larger networks like X.

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Maretus pfp

Thanks for the comprehensive breakdown. Really interesting to learn about the different levels. Are level 0 people placed in ‘see more replies’ until you can get a sense of their account? Like a sandbox?

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eggman 🔵 pfp

level 3 trained on Bitboy and Ansem amirite 💀 Awesome rundown, loved reading it. Less love for the ML vs LLM arms race. Automated airdrop farmers are getting much more difficult to detect nowadays - they’re not stuck with tiny llama2 models anymore. It’s become very cheap to run a highly capable LLM. Someone argued with me once that if LLMs get so smart and so engaging that they beat out most humans for “content generation”, maybe we’d prefer social networks filled with LLM agents instead of humans. Deeply, deeply depressing thought.

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Nicholas Charriere pfp

Nicholas Charriere

Thanks for sharing, very interesting and clear

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Tayyab - d/acc pfp

Will you teach when you retire? I think you have a calling here.

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will pfp

imo “unwanted activity”

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iSpeakNerd 🧙‍♂️ pfp

iSpeakNerd 🧙‍♂️

@ispeaknerd.eth

Great thread, thanks for sharing! random forest is decision tree with learned weighting for different factors? inauthentic engagement is abusive of the commons, engaging with mal intent, imagine similar in relationships deceptively love bombing and emotional manip to get sex

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Mikado pfp

Q: There's a lot of rumors about not tagging people. People say don't tag more than 3,4 per cast. Would be nice to be clear about that. Fwiw I think akshaan has done a fantastic job. The good it does outweighs the mistakes it makes. I compare farquest notifications with Warpcast and think I'd have gone crazy if it weren't for Warpcast's protection.

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Haole pfp

Thank you for this! Very helpful!

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mvr 🐹 pfp

Nice insights, thanks for sharing! Are the levels introduced recently? If not I'm trying to understand how I got to level 3 without going through level 2 first, while I had the deprecated PB I lost everything from one day to the other. I don't think almost all people disliked me suddenly

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Gramajo pfp

Just wanted to say thank you for even sharing some bits. Completely understand can’t share too much or else ppl will build around them. Sounds like some fun problems to work through. Keep up the good work team!

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zenxosaⓂ️🎩 pfp

zenxosaⓂ️🎩

I agree with most of what you’ve said I also think that user feedback should be considered-if most non-spam users are saying the changes put in place to eliminate spam is alienating them(i’m referring to the channel changes),it’s important to listen

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Rafaello.base.eth pfp

Rafaello.base.eth

This was properly defined

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OTTI🎨🖌🎩 pfp

OTTI🎨🖌🎩

This is true but sometimes obstructs real people,how then can one know when someone is genuinely interested in you,I feel for the new users because most are trying to get their way around things by replying but they get tagged as spam, some people are not necessarily builders or artists they are just extroverts trying to know people and chat a lot.

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Shaya pfp

We see the efforts the team puts in to make this place better for all of us. Please don’t label me as spam.. it feels like my casts don’t have the reach they used to. Are users punished for not being obsessed with this app? I took a few days off and feels like that really hurt me here..

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Breck Yunits pfp

I think this analysis is flawed at the root.

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AusaR Ⓜ️ pfp

Thank you, mr. V. I personally feel like i've learned a lot from this cast. Now what remains to be done by the community is a "check spam level" action. 😅

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Dutchess.Base.eth👑💰🐉 pfp

Dutchess.Base.eth👑💰🐉

Being relatively new I didn't see much spam behavior outside of larger groups and responses on raffle type things which is kind of to be expected. It wasn't until the rash of recent updates that I started receiving very obvious spam/AI generated out of context comments on my casts. I suspect that it's not causing a flag on them because they are making the responses long and on the surface "quality" because of word count.

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DV (insert a lot of emojis) pfp

DV (insert a lot of emojis)

@degenveteran.eth

I like the definition of "inauthentic activity" over spam. The best way I've been able to identify this is going to their profile, look at their replies...often I'll see responses every minute or less.

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