TL;DR: Extended Reaction will enable stronger value signals on Farcaster, which could promote high quality content (instead of farming), and create new primitives for communities and developers to leverage for growth.
What are Extended Reactions (ERs)? Think of Cast Actions that work more like ‘recasts’ and ‘likes.’ In other words, these are interface elements that users can choose to install, that are actionable, and display data in casts. The data can be external (onchain, private, etc.) or live natively on Farcaster. The Extended Reaction’s action itself can be based on a set of conditions.
Let’s say for example a DAO has a channel in Farcaster. The DAO can have an ER that is an up/down vote, where users’ votes are weighted based on DAO tokens held. Another channel can have an ER that is a 5-star review, where only Hypersub holders can review casts. Yet another ER can simply display whether the user is a likely spammer (as a percentage), based on how many people flag the user’s casts.
While some of this capability is already possible with Cast Actions or standalone apps, ERs can improve both the visibility and usability of tools and apps built on top of the protocol, and enhance value signals in FC.
Instead of developers having to build standalone apps and try to funnel and retain users, in many cases the functionality of these apps can be seamlessly integrated into ERs within a Farcaster client. Such an approach then results in improved user experience, and creates the potential for a much larger user base for the business.
ERs with native data would allow Farcaster clients to integrate bottom-up value signals to improve the quality of feeds, filter spam, and give channels greater control over their feed (if main feed can be sorted based on the data). And because native data is decentralized, businesses and communities can use ERs as new primitives to build on top of, where anyone can integrate those reactions into their FC clients, apps and tools.
Legacy Social Media
Farcaster inherited much of the user interface of legacy social media (LSM) platforms like X, yet we rarely stop to ask ourselves why the UI is the way it is, or how we can improve it to optimize signal on Farcaster.
So what’s the reason for LSM’s UI decisions? The short answer is that it serves their business model; you have a centralized system that makes money by maximizing ad revenue from user attention. Maximizing ad revenue means maximizing user attention. Maximizing user attention means serving the most engaging content to more users (and vice versa). How does the platform know what content is more engaging? By getting engagement signals from users through the UI.
LSM platforms didn’t care about value signals, they only cared about engagement signals. The more users engaged with certain kinds of content, the more the network could boost that content so that other users could engage with it also. This process allowed the platforms to keep the UI simple while maximizing ad revenue from user attention.
Users quickly learned that there are two main strategies to gain influence on a platform: either producing high-effort quality content (signal), or engaging in all sorts of low-effort engagement farming (noise). Since the ‘like’ button didn’t care if you’re creating signal or noise, the latter proliferated and user experience on the platforms suffered.
While LSM platforms were counting their money, users were engaged in a race to the bottom, with ever more toxic and socially destructive behavior – that, after all, was the surest way to gain influence on the platform. But that’s what happens when the interests of the platform are aligned with the interests of advertisers and not with its users.
The question then is why follow the same trajectory on Farcaster? Why limit ourselves to interface elements that only make sense in a centralized platform that relies on ad revenue? Instead of limiting ourselves to the ‘like’ and ‘recast’ reactions we should extend the kinds of reactions users can engage with.
With better value signals in the form of ERs the best strategy to grow (and earn) on Farcaster would be by creating high quality content (while engagement farming would become self-defeating). Quality content, improved user experience and better signal-to-noise – coupled with the ability of communities and businesses to better incentivize, capture and distribute value – can give Farcaster a serious competitive advantage over legacy social media platforms. And held turn Farcaster into a central hub for the Creator Economy
