Farcaster

A key user segment that Twitter has and Farcaster doesn’t is reporters. As long as the primary source of new information remains news outlets, Twitter will always have an advantage in overall relevance, because people want to consume live news as quickly as possible.

Note that I said reporters and not journalists. Even if it’s true that traditional media is dying because people are sick of agenda-driven journalism, there will always be strong demand for low latency factual reporting.

You might retort and say that facts will move onchain as @balajis.eth has suggested. Maybe! I’d love to see that. But it’s unclear to me how this would actually happen for high leverage events like politics, war, etc. The flow would be Reporter -> Twitter -> Oracle -> Farcaster, ie Farcaster would remain downstream of Twitter.

To fundamentally change this you need cryptographic attenuations from the principals of the news, and I don’t see that happening soon.

Network States

NETWORK STATE NEWS

I've thought about starting Network State News on Farcaster.

We'd start with $1000 in prizes each day for content broadly related to startup societies and network states. For example, "generate a 60 second vertical video review of the top 10 startup societies", where the grand prize winner gets $500 and five runner ups get $100 each. But we'd also issue prizes for open source code, for book reviews, for politics and history, and for breaking news.

It'd be social-native, because content would come fundamentally as public casts on an open social protocol rather than posts on a closed website. It'd be AI-native, because everyone would use AI tools like Claude, Midjourney, Runway, and Suno to compose every post. And of course it'd be crypto-native, because every post would be digitally signed, all payments would be in crypto, and everyone here would know how to cite blockchain evidence.

Most of all, it'd be an experiment in decentralized global citizen journalism. Should we do it?

Funny you say that. I've been thinking about building a completely new kind of news outlet here...

Crypto @ Coinbase, foreign policy, political theory. yugacohler.twitter

Follow /yugacohler

Funny you say that. I've been thinking about building a completely new kind of news outlet here...

https://warpcast.com/balajis.eth/0x04c7553e

I think it's partially right. 

A large chunk of the reporters have moved most of their posting to Threads and that hasn't really helped?

What Twitter has is the "arena" where a primary source video clip or meta conversation with screenshots of the actual reporting create a memetic battle for the day.

You can add the breaking news accounts here, but it's the meta that the news junkies crave.

e.g.

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

Yes, great point. It's a combination of the primary source + the immediately surrounding discourse.

Yes, tried replacing X with FC completely for about 3 months this year. Can’t do because lack of fast, reliable news. I’m not even talking world news. Just crypto news.

It’s time to get the crypto pubs and their reporters on here. They’re severely hurting for traffic so I see that as an opportunity to pitch them on adapting FC.

Why not journalists ? Will give a much higher credibility imho. Good content costs 

Actually building a on chain Digital Magazines Publishing House backed by a coin, Karavan ($KRVN). Launching end 2024 / 2025  2 mass market titles. 
A never seen before concept.

Twitter's advantage in live news is hard to beat.

yappin in /midwits & creating idle rpg /animarising

@itsbasil is fixing this. I’ve seen the plan and it’s real.

As seems like it might be relevant to include that we need some kind of new market demand or market support for people who are primary news reporters. Twitter or FC or Threads or whatever are just distribution channels. As distribution becomes more fragmented it's actually revealing the fact that newsrooms just don't have as many reporters as they use to. Coverage feels thin because it is thin, especially in coverage of critical areas like local government. Will be interesting to see if onchain dynamics can make it possible for independent reporters to find supportive audiences and or create federations to offer to coverage areas. Personally, I'm not bullish on AI replacing good reporters. There's a lot of connecting the dots and source cultivation that goes into getting timely, accurate, and confirmed info.

a more ideal setup would be:
Reporter --> Oracle --> Socials (X + Farcaster)

Twitter definitely has the audience right now, so it makes sense for reporters to start there but if Farcaster had a hand in building oracles and ways to attest truth directly onchain that were part of the protocol that would be a huge win