Welcome to Episode 5 of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show, a podcast for the Farcaster middle class.
Clips:
BeavChris was rugged by USC! https://drakula.app/post/79323969-81d0-46f4-ad02-fc4a4b6b44c0?invite=Nhbkqw
BArt-Head calls it the Korean massacre https://drakula.app/post/0349df61-21e3-486c-9fdb-aca418ae2556?invite=Nhbkqw
BeavChris almost reveals Asian racism against Europeans https://drakula.app/post/b1434251-052c-40e3-aceb-2b1f0d2a74c4?invite=Nhbkqw
BeavChris is interested in successful farmer pee https://drakula.app/post/25f58fb5-f564-43b1-9670-e275c0f61226?invite=Nhbkqw
BArt-Head hates cozy conversations https://drakula.app/post/5d7494b9-0179-45c4-925b-0bd0e9ee9635?invite=Nhbkqw
Watch the episode on Zora, and Mint to collect.
Summary
Join BeavChris and BArt-Head in today's episode of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show, a podcast for the Farcaster middle class.
BeavChris and BArt-Head return after a one week break with an engaging discussion on BArt-Head's European adventure; comparing notifications in Warpcast, Supercast, and Nook; promising Warpcasters on the verge of getting a power badge; building social networks for "elite" users first before expanding; debating the recent disqualification of >21K $DEGEN farmers - was it fair or selective justice?
Plus, a delightful and thoughtful sponsored segment, and excitement around upcoming FarCon events!
Borodutch Book Read Ad
Borodutch wrote a book, We Don't Live a Thousand Years, aka wdlaty, and we read an excerpt from the Productivity Chapter for 3 minutes. https://drakula.app/post/9f535b07-b964-4a7c-88a0-d9a8c61de702?invite=Nhbkqw
Nine rules of productivity
Write down tasks as they come up
The two-minute rule
Completed a task? Write it down
Keep tasks brief and specific
Tidy up what you've accumulated
Set a date or month for tasks
Planning
Eat the frog
Focus on one task
Purchase the book at book.borodutch.com. Tell 'em BeavChris and BArt-Head sent you.
Sponsor this spot for 0.1 ETH (90 seconds for 0.05 ETH).
Transcript
BeavChris
Hello, we are live, theoretically.
BArt-Head
GM, hello, BeavChris, how are you?
BeavChris
I am good, I do see that we're live. Yeah it's been a fun week. I feel like I was scrambling to put together a build for a one week sprint while you were gone, and it was really fun. How about you?
BArt-Head
Yes! I've been away for a week. It was, it's still spring break actually for part of this week.
And we went to Europe. I shared lots of photos. I met a fellow Farcaster unplanned, but we found out we were actually in the same city at the same time. And we met up for drinks. That was fun. And then I casted about being in Europe as an American.
BeavChris
Oh yeah, I love that series.
BArt-Head
Banned me.
What's that?
BeavChris
What? They banned you?
BArt-Head
Yeah! Tim said nope, I had to silence @artlu. Because he's annoying, and so I am no longer welcome in /europoor, which is okay, because I am not a Europoor.
BeavChris
Wait, what was, okay, what was offensive about what you cast, or did I miss some offensive casts?
BArt-Head
I think the tipping point was, I said, somebody is rolling over in his grave, maybe Keynes or some economist, because timdaub who created /europoooooor I don't know how to say it, Europoo-oo-oo-oor,
has a very fun channel, much more, I'm sorry, but it's much more fun than the /europe channel.
BeavChris
Oh, for sure.
BArt-Head
And Tim is a pretty masterful troll of Americans. And so I was responding to him half in good faith, half in fun about one of his comments about the US dollar being inflated and how that's actually really. In my mind, it's really poor use of economics and numbers. And he, I think got tired of me, continuing to point out that I think he's wrong. Which is fine. And then he said, Oh, and I had to mute @artlu from the channel. Because I continued to challenge him. And so I am no longer having fun in /europoooooor.
BeavChris
Aww, so that means you can't even reply, right?
BArt-Head
I don't know! I can reply, and other people can see me in different clients, because the mute functionality only applies to people reading in Warpcast.
BeavChris
Oh, that to me is the weirdest design! It's there is no door, you just think there's a door, but it's more like a little curtain situation.
BArt-Head
Yeah, that's the difference between a protocol and a client. So the client can enforce rules on top of the protocol. Warpcast is experimenting with different rules for channels to help them work better.
And eventually those rules will make it into the protocol. And I assume that certain layers of rules will be optional or choices to be respected in the client because the casts always exist at the protocol level. So the client can choose to hide the cast or not. And I assume most clients will follow the protocol and maybe there'll be a pro user opt out to be able to see the pure feed.
I also assume as soon as you flip the switch, you will just be overwhelmed with noise. And so people will rarely do that.
BeavChris
Right.
BArt-Head
That will effectively silence, or enable that gate and enforce the freedom of reach concept.
BeavChris
Have you ever read the Library of Babel by Borges? Do you know the short story?
BArt-Head
Is it in /Spanish?
BeavChris
Originally? Yes, but of course I read the translated version.
BArt-Head
Okay. Tell me about it.
The idea is that sometime in the future or something like there's a library where every single combination of letters have been written down and produced, and it's like a Library of Alexandria in theory, but in actuality, because every single letter juxtaposed with every single letter has been produced, it ends up being like 99.999% noise. And so then there are these like different groups of people, some people are like desperately flipping through every single page to find some signal of something that will help them out. There are people who are like just burning books that are irrelevant to them because they're just like, oh, this is noise. We got to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And essentially it drives the attitude of people towards Farcaster, the different camps , of the curator type.
BArt-Head
That's the first time I've heard this.
BeavChris
Hmm?
BArt-Head
That's the first time I've heard this applied to modern social media. That's fascinating.
What's your takeaway? Or sorry, what was Borges' takeaway in the book?
BeavChris
I feel like he left it really ambiguous. I don't remember the plot being like, and these people were the correct people all along or something like that. I think it was showing like the various desperate ways in which we try to like make sense of the world, is my takeaway.
But yeah, I need to reread it cause I want to make this like cast where I make the analogy. Different types of people have been like, have you read this wonderful short story I was forced to read in college?
BArt-Head
Forced to read. Yes.
BArt-Head
Yes. For some reason I don't know, did you go to a college that made you take like Common Core type classes, like liberal arts classes?
BeavChris
Absolutely.
BArt-Head
Yeah. So so at USC, I took this class about modernity. What I thought it was about modern stuff, turns out it was about the Age of Enlightenment and its various literature.
BArt-Head
You got rugged by USC liberal arts.
BeavChris
I did. I think it's good. I think I learned a lot even though I'm still, I was forced to read Frankenstein and learn about the women's suffrage movement. It was really good, actually. But the grading was really hard.
So that was my like, you know, as you know, the gaming the grades, that was not an easy class.
BArt-Head
And so what were the incentives? Were the incentives set up so that you should do the least amount of work to get by? Or were the incentives set up so that you should actually engage deeply with the text?.
BeavChris
Uh, for the class, it was a bunch of really disaffected bored TAs deciding your fate, so I don't even know what would have been the optimum strategy there.
BArt-Head
And so the students migrated very quickly to nihilism.
BeavChris
Pretty much, yes. Yeah, we had a very sad, cynical TA type, which I don't blame like, grad school, it would just beat the soul, the spirit out of anybody.
BArt-Head
So let's substitute TAs, like underpaid overworked TAs, for unpaid channel moderators. Let's substitute the grading incentive with $DEGEN tip allocation incentives.
BeavChris
Yeah.
BArt-Head
And let's substitute the label or promise that you would take a class on modernity, and then you show up with, and you're presented with old stuff, with the promise of Web 3.
Web 3 is going to be this new thing, but Oh look, let's lift the covers and see, Oh, it's actually Web 2. Things that are claimed to be decentralized or
BeavChris
Well, that's an obvious Scooby Doo meme there. Oh and, our audience joining us. So I think we should get back into our usual greetings and really start the show !
BArt-Head
Yeah, so welcome to The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show! Shout out to our permissionless partners Unlonely, Base on Zora where we have our onchain media mints, Paragraph where we post our blog posts, Drakula for short video clips, and Seemore.tv which wraps it all together for us.
This week, we're back after a one week break, and I wanted to give a quick shout out to all the people attending FarCon. You will get to meet our prior sponsor, Ina, in person, and maybe try some fine tea, hand delivered from Japan. Unfortunately, it appears you won't get to meet our anti ad sponsor last week, Proxy Studio.
He did say at one point, I think, he was going to FarCon, but he changed it to he's going to India, and he had some quite funny casts about it. I encourage you guys to go read that.
And this week, we are very excited, with maybe a shade of trepidation on BeavChris's part, that we have a very unique advertising experience for you from a very unique sponsor.
BeavChris
Yes, and Fufu took some good guesses about who the sponsor is, so you will get to see the reveal.
So, Art, what trouble have you gotten to this week?
BArt-Head
Yeah, let's go back. So I got banned, I don't know if I was banned or muted by the admin in Europoor. /europoooooor. And I was in Europe, I had a great time, we saw some incredible artwork.
We were in Denmark, which has a very interesting history on the border of Europe and barbarianism. You know, they were Vikings who raped and pillaged and terrorized their neighbors. And then they became Protestant and one of their kings decided he would try to become the leader of Christendom from the Protestant side.
And he tried very hard. He went to battle and got beat up very badly and was sent home. And he could not lead the Christian nations or the Protestant nations because he had failed so badly in battle. So badly, in fact, that the country was at great risk of being taken over by its more powerful neighbor, Sweden, and the Dutch and the English said, Okay, look, don't come fight anymore.
You're a liability to us. But if you go back, we will protect you from the Swedes. And so he went back and he decided to turn all of that energy into building great works for the city of Copenhagen, which lasts to this day. This time was a time where they called it the absolute monarchy. There were no constitutional controls over him.
And so he could take the country, take wild risks with their resources in a bid for personal and national glory, and fail. And when he failed, this turned into a new kind of government where his powers were somewhat shared.
There was a really fascinating description there about the rise of the middle class in Denmark, which was very different and very aware of what was happening in France, where the middle class overthrew the monarchy and went into Reign of Terror, where the tyranny of the majority just went amok and all of Europe saw this.
BeavChris
Is this the Robespierre guillotine situation?
BArt-Head
Yes, chopping off heads.
BeavChris
Yeah, I learned that from a board game. That's where I learned my history.
BArt-Head
So at this time, America was overthrowing its king, France overthrew its king, all the rest of the kings in Europe said, oh, we had better buy off our middle class before they chop off our heads. And come to some negotiation and come to some agreement on how we can allow some, human abilities that are now being demanded that were not demanded before.
And also avoid some of the terrors of individuals grabbing power where they had no power before and using that power in very atrocious ways, which were clear to other people at the time, and for hundreds of years, you know, like, Orwell wrote as a reaction to that period, even as all these things evolved. But my point was
BeavChris
How could this learned person be like banned from a channel like a petulant child. I don't understand.
So...
BArt-Head
Yeah, I mean, I was also petulant.
BeavChris
Did you eat the Danish sashimi, the herring?
BArt-Head
Yes, I had pickled herring several times unbeknownst to me. And it was quite unique.
The food there is great. Copenhagen has several one and two star Michelin restaurants.
As well as apparently the second best pizza in the world.
BeavChris
Oh!
BArt-Head
As New Yorkers, we did not even consider that to be a possibility,
BeavChris
For sure.
And I feel like the Asian association of Denmark is
Do you know what I'm trying to say?
BArt-Head
No, what are you going to say?
BeavChris
I was going to say the blue tin of butter cookies!
BArt-Head
Do you know what's what's the name of that brand?
BeavChris
There's several brands. So depending on where you grew up I think the one I grew up with is maybe Nielsen? I'm trying to remember. I feel like Fufu, you would know better. What is the stereotypical tin of blue tin of cookies that you would open up and then there'll be like sewing kits,
That's what I assume.
BArt-Head
Yes, I do remember going to my grandparents, and thinking as a kid that there would be a tin of cookies, like delicious European cookies, and finding needles and thread.
BeavChris
Exactly. Oh my gosh. Fufu said that he literally has one of these tins right in front of him.
BArt-Head
What is it about Asians substituting cookies for needles and thread?
BeavChris
I don't know.
So I always thought like it's because it's you don't want to poke yourself, so a metal tin is the safest container to contain pokey things, but I'm not actually sure.
BArt-Head
Use metal to protect yourself from metal. That's very logical.
BeavChris
Yes. Yeah so I see in the notes that you also deleted Warpcast from your phone, but you did post some, right?
That's how you got banned.
BArt-Head
So I deleted Warpcast from my phone as an experiment. Because Nook got opened to the public as a progressive web app. So Nook is a new-ish alt client from the same guy who invented and built Flink. Which was a Very important.
BeavChris
Yeah. I love Flink. I didn't realize it was the same person. Oh!
BArt-Head
Yes. And it's like his chance to do it properly. Flink was an experiment? I think it started off not as a client and then he said, Oh, I can add little client like features and then it turned into a full fledged client.
And then he said, wait, let me do this properly as a mobile native web app, which is available on TestFlight. And I personally don't install anything on TestFlight.
That's because I have crypto on my phone and I don't want to just think about it. But he made the web app
BeavChris
Oh, there's a security risk with TestFlight? I did not know that.
BArt-Head
Yeah. TestFlight apps can do more things than apps that you download from the App Store.
BeavChris
Oh.
BArt-Head
They're not reviewed. And so you do it at your own risk. I don't think the Nook team has any bad intentions with putting it on TestFlight. I think this is a stepping stone to an actual final product.
And it's a way to let new experimentooors play with the app before it's fully baked. But yeah, I just, as a simple rule to allow myself to sleep at night, I don't do anything on TestFlight and they released it on the web to everybody on a PWA. So I'm trying it on my phone and I'm trying it on my desktop.
And I discovered that, wow, this experience is pretty close to replacing the Warpcast experience. I'll say minus one thing and plus including a couple of things that were surprising to me. So minus direct casts, that's still Warpcast only. It does have things that are currently centralized.
So it has channels, whatever channels you follow in Warpcast, you get now today in both Supercast and Nook because the channels are being progressively decentralized. And the information is being made available to devs.
BeavChris
And the way they handle notifications is quite clever, right?
As you noticed, there's a subtlety in the way that Nook handles notifications. Can you explain what you noticed?
BArt-Head
Nook, actually, so I've only been playing with it for a few days and I'll throw it back to you. But what I noticed is the notifications on Nook are different from the notifications on Supercast and the notifications on Warpcast.
All three have, each, their own unique I'd call it first principles approaches to building a notifications feed. And Kartik, who's the, one of the main builders of Nook has, in my mind, some really good ideas about how to make social experiences. And so they built their notifications feed for their own purposes, to be maybe aware of different problems of scale.
BeavChris
There was something where, like they, the notification surfaces interesting notifications a lot better, right? Was it a follow?
BArt-Head
They were built before there was the concept of the power badge. And so he had to invent a method to highlight useful notifications without relying on a power badge concept.
And somehow, they've apparently, they've seemingly accomplished it. For me.
It may be different for people with fewer followers, fewer follows, more followers, more follows, less spam, more spam, like it may be different for everyone.
So I just appreciate seeing a first principles approach to highlighting things, which lets me see that what we do have in Warpcast is not the only way to do it, and there are things that these clients will actually learn from each other and play off of each other with or without explicit stealing. But of course, it's a great marketplace of ideas and a place for, different approaches. Tested.
Lemme ask you, what do you find with the notifications?
BeavChris
I feel like, so I like cycle through. Sometimes I'm like, okay I'm done with my Warpcast home feed for the day, so I'm gonna switch to like Supercast or Nook to see what I missed. And I do see different types of casts and different types of notifications I wouldn't have seen otherwise.
And for me, I'm always looking out for the person who is new on Farcaster who is just on the threshold of the power badge. Because I think these are people who are sincerely trying to put out interesting content and it's really hard to see them these days. Even though I did toggle my Warpcast to everyone. So something to really keep in mind.
And in fact, it was such a quick good deed that I observed since it's related.
There have been some friends on on Farcaster, for example @letsglitchit, who is a fantastic glitch artist, has been openly soliciting people who are, like, looking for a power badge and trying to engage with these people so that they can then, make it and be actually visible.
And as this week I was trying to help my artist friend out. I'm just like, Oh my God. Like it's so hard if you're starting off from without a power badge, because literally people won't even see what you're casting now.
So I think like in terms of my own behavior, I'm trying to find people who are on the threshold who I find interesting because that would be like a sincere like approach to like trying to help them out with engagement.
For example, @alinaferry is someone that I noticed has been really trying to get a Power Badge and she's really sassy. So the way she mentioned it was super sassy. But it's great. Like now I mentioned her and then a few of like our mutual friends, followed and engage with her content.
And this week she did get a power badge, I noticed. So of course I'm not saying it's me. I'm sure it's a combination of everything that she's doing. But I think we can all take a stab at helping someone who you interact with, who's on the edge of getting a power badge, that would really help grow the ecosystem.
BArt-Head
I think it's definitely you, because we can go onchain. I followed Alina when she was less than 100 followers. My follow did nothing.
BeavChris
Oh, yeah, but again she's been hustling and then actually, in fact, she's going to be hosting the onchain media creator event at GM Farcaster.
So she is going places. Yeah, and then she's part of the traditional media cabal, the system. She actually works in the entertainment industry. So I feel like getting her perspective on what we're doing is super interesting.
BArt-Head
Yeah, that's, it's really good to engage. I remember back when the active user criteria was that you had to have 100 followers.
BeavChris
Mmmhmm.
BArt-Head
It was very fun thing to look for people with between 60 and 99 followers and try to boost them and get them over. There were a bunch of Farcaster OGs who went above and beyond to try to help people. When it went to 400, we got a little bit tired of it, but I think people still continued to try.
BeavChris
Exactly.
BArt-Head
The power badge concept replaces that with a different mechanism. And it is nice to see that the power badge cohort is expanding, becoming more diverse because it is organic that people with power badges are choosing to engage with people that are not holding power badges.
BeavChris
Right.
BArt-Head
A type of organic growth.
BeavChris
Oh, I was trying to convince Art to use his coding skills to make me a frame or a bot that would like surface like who's the next person I engage with the most who doesn't have a power badge. So then you can show everybody like you only have to help one person and that one person is whoever, and it's going to be genuine. So we'll see what I can grind him down with my pro social coding ideas. But
BArt-Head
can I give you three quick takes on this?
BeavChris
Fine. It sounds like more work for me, so I already don't like it.
BArt-Head
No, number one, does this mechanism of existing users inviting or empowering new people to join them.
Does this make the cool kids club stronger or weaker?
BeavChris
I would think it makes the cool kids club more diverse, which is a good thing, right? Shouldn't we pull people into, I know it sucks that it's a cool kids club. This whole concept sucks. But then it's if not being in a club means people don't even see your cast, I would like to pull everybody in.
BArt-Head
Second quick take is. I have been, all this data is public, but it is not easy to find. There's no Dune query for who has the power badge, as far as I know. And please people share and correct me if I'm wrong. So far, it, so the lists get updated every week and every week I go and I grab the list, I push it to a GitHub repository and I create a pull request to the Neynar GitHub repository so that the community can have a history of how the power badge population is evolving every week.
BeavChris
You've been doing this?
BArt-Head
Yeah, and I would invite anybody else who's interested to also contribute to the repository so that if I forget or get tired of doing it, the information is not lost forever.
And if anyone knows of more systematic ways that this is happening please let's share and discuss.
BeavChris
Sohey said that there's an Airstack query that's possible.
BArt-Head
Yeah, so I'll look into that and see if that's also available for the history.
And then my third take on this, I would suggest everybody who's confused about the source of the power badge thinking to listen to the Moment of Zen podcast with Curtis Yarvin, his second appearance with DWR, Erik Torenberg and Antonio, but it's about the construction of decentralized social networks and the very outright blatant view, is that a social network will work if it has the right kind of people in it. And you need to build it from the top down of a pyramid, not from the bottoms up.
According to Curtis, and this is me interpreting what he said, with a whole bunch of jokes in a podcast format, but, the way Facebook did it by targeting Harvard students first,
and then going to Ivy League students
BeavChris
Oooh. I never thought about it that way!
BArt-Head
Is the correct way to produce a social network of value. That you want people, you want the elite in there. And he says this very baldly and openly. In the sense of talking about, hey, this is the way the world is, without value judgment that you might hear in the word elite, but you need the elite and you need to keep the non-elite out until you build the pyramid from the top down.
BeavChris
So I feel like if I can say this in a less douchey way, but actually in principle is the same. Like the way I would say it would be like, we should select for a culture of wholesome, pro-social behaviors. Establish, cement that culture a little bit, and then broadcast it out.
But in actuality, what I say and what he says is actually the same thing in some ways.
BArt-Head
Right! Yeah, Curtis Yarvin is very useful because he says things in a very bold, let's call it douchey. He says it in a douchey way, just so that when you hear it from his mouth, you realize what you might be saying, or you realize what DWR might be saying, but he does not give himself the freedom to say out loud.
That, Farcaster...
BeavChris
So clever. He's just like, they're just so, such a good politician. You don't have to say it. You just need to bring on a guest who will say it for you.
BArt-Head
Right. Curtis is like, some people hate him because he's
BeavChris
I mean, essentially that's what I do with our show. I just make you say the thing that I don't want to say. [Editors note: whut]
BArt-Head
I guess the main point is that the way Warpcast is building is to try to capture a certain set of elite, and to build community from there. And I will point out there are some, maybe 5 to 10 percent of the community, which thinks, and I include myself in there, that thinks we are elite enough, and to get to the bottom of the pyramid, I don't want to get there the way that Facebook got there. I want to skip some steps and immediately start to engage with people who are not elite. And there's other people in the community that feel the benefits of being early, which are quite synonymous with being elite or privileged. And
BeavChris
Yeah, that always makes me feel super awkward
BArt-Head
and enjoy that feeling of smallness, coziness, closeness.
So like in the same way that there's a douchey way to say it, and there's a non douchey way to say it. I personally think if we want cozy conversations, that's kind of saying we don't want those idiots over there.
BeavChris
And I think right now, your hot topic of this week is related to this concept, right?
There are these Koreans who are, in your words, not my words, massacred. And I think it is related to this idea of like, quality.
My understanding, okay, so before you go on your spiel, as an average person scrolling their feed, my understanding is that, oh, this is kind of good, right?
Like, the $DEGEN team are scanning through and checking if people are farming for $degen and maybe not producing something of quality that we can all share in the process. And according to the graphs by this other person whose name I forgot [Editor's note: it's @geoffgolberg], there was a certain Korean population who are doing so and they are the ones who've been now axed somehow in the system. And so to me, I'm like, okay it sucks for them, but this should theoretically make it better for the rest of us who are trying to do something towards earning these little points.
So what's the thing I missed? What's the angle I missed?
BArt-Head
No, That's basically right. It has always been part of the degen tip allocation that farmers get disqualified.
And this has happened in the past. I don't know, cause I haven't paid that much attention. I don't know that there have been 21,000 tip receivers disqualified in one fell swoop.
That's why I call it a massacre.
And I will continue to call it the Korean massacre, even though the team have said we did not target Koreans, we targeted their behavior. Not their ethnicity or their
BeavChris
Right. And I'm like, okay, so my twisted thought was, I'm sure there are farmers of different locales and maybe the Koreans were just the best at it as they are with Starcraft and things like that.
So they just Zerg Rushed the entire process so they got targeted because they were too good!
BArt-Head
That's right. I think that's exactly what happened. I think they got targeted. I think people noticed that a lot of successful airdrop recipients
BeavChris
Mmmhmm.
BArt-Head
Were people that do not feel like part of the community. And the natural response is let's get them the fuck out.
We can, and we have done this before, so we will do it again.
BeavChris
Mmhmm.
BArt-Head
And everybody who's still here are the people that we accept.
BeavChris
Mmhmm.
BArt-Head
So the argument is they did something wrong. They knew the rules. These are the consequences. There's nothing racial about it. That's the argument.
And I would say all of those things appear to be true to me.
I think the majority of them were farming. I think it's pretty obvious that most of the people disqualified, most of the accounts disqualified, I should say, were farming. I think it's obvious that it was well known that people would get disqualified. And I think it's pretty obvious that nobody, sorry, my impression is that nobody said, let's get those Koreans.
However, the whole process is non-transparent in the same way that the shadowbans or spam blocking in Warpcast is non-transparent.
They say, we cannot tell you what the rules are, the exact rules, because they will be gamed. And there are many opportunities to be selective. And selective justice to me
BeavChris
But you don't have proof though!
It's like just to say all this, it's almost like you need the data to show that there was another group of people who had the same behavior as the Koreans who were not massacred.
BArt-Head
Yep. And so, many of the Koreans, they said, what about these guys?
BeavChris
Oh, that's so funny.
BArt-Head
What about these Chinese people?
BeavChris
Oh!
BArt-Head
What about, and also, what about these Americans?
BeavChris
Yeah, okay. So there are these other groups.
BArt-Head
What about the, some of the Koreans have said, hey, what about these people? Why were we disqualified, but they were not.
BeavChris
Mmmm. But did you do it though? Like, Is it actually comparative?
BArt-Head
It's early days. And I will mention that @sayangel who is the developer behind /bot-or-not has been doing some public research and sharing some results using the bot-or-not mechanism, which is a really intelligent way to leverage his product.
BeavChris
Oh, for sure.
BArt-Head
To say, Hey, out of the people who are disqualified, they've been checked. Like, other people have checked them, out of curiosity. Like we, by the way, so the idea is, if you're a participant in the ecosystem, you don't know what the rules are, but you would like to know what the rules are so you don't get squashed. You don't get smashed. And bot-or-not is fairly impartial because it's done by an AI.
And so, the people at the top of the leaderboard get checked quite a lot.
BeavChris
Mmmhmmm.
BArt-Head
But you might suspect, oh, this guy looks a bit suspicious. I wonder if the bot would confirm, the bot-or-not action would confirm my suspicion.
So there's some really interesting data and there's, it's not impartial because the people at the top of the leaderboard get checked more often than the people, like people at the bottom who are like not successful. No one really cares.
BeavChris
It's like doping, right? Like you don't go check the pee of the loser. Like you only check the pee of the winners because it's time consuming and costs money.
BArt-Head
Actually, I hadn't thought about this, but I think that's a really great example about doping, because let's say the International Federation decides that Russia can no longer participate in the Olympics.
Then the individual athletes are tarred with their reputation, and they must compete as members of the Russian Federation.
BeavChris
This is only true if you are a Korean person who is not farming, who is caught in the fray, but is that true? I thought they were manually checking everybody, making sure that people are actually
BArt-Head
No, they are, there's 21,000, so they're, they have admitted, oh, maybe we got some wrong, please fill out this Google form, and we will review it again.
There is a mechanism which I have called a presumption of guilt, with an opaque appeal to the emperor backdrop.
BeavChris
So how would you design it better?
BArt-Head
Yeah, I proposed something.
BeavChris
Radio silence.
BArt-Head
What's that?
BeavChris
Crickets.
BArt-Head
I propose something which is imperfect, but if you say, Every month, the top N recipients get their allocations disqualified. So let's say every month, the top five recipients, we just, the community says, sorry, you were too good at this game. We're not going to let you win, but the next one, we will let them in.
What that says is it's a disincentive to win. It's the tall poppy syndrome. Where as soon as a flower grows too high, you chop it down. And that's still, it's still possible to game because you can have 10 groups coordinate and say, Hey, let's like, let's all try, but if any one of us gets cut, the other ones will share the pot accordingly.
BeavChris
I feel like you're just sharing a way to game the system and it's not an improved system. .
BArt-Head
So then what do you do? You say, if I say the top, let's cut the top 50
BeavChris
mm-Hmm.
BArt-Head
You kind of depend that 50 groups will not be able to maintain a secret agreement, that the upside to defecting is higher. It's impossible to enforce that agreement.
BeavChris
Oh, I see. It's like you're creating a prisoner's dilemma like mechanism to prevent coordination.
BArt-Head
And if you make the N too large, then you start to capture many people who you actually want to reward with this mechanism.
BeavChris
Okay, fine. I can't believe you actually came up with something good. I was going to be like, the bit was going to be, you don't come up with anything.
BArt-Head
Yeah, I propose a counter also that, Let's say the best farmer out there is a game called Perl. And you can see this. They are really good at collecting $DEGEN. The Degen team thinks Perl should, is a net add to the ecosystem.
So disqualifying them would be, like, pretty bad, right? So my proposal is that the Degen team can explicitly Give them a grant.
So I could say retroactively, hey, if you were one of the top N and you got disqualified, we'll give you a grant to make that up out of
BeavChris
Mm-Hmm.
BArt-Head
a different pot that we have.
BeavChris
Okay.
BArt-Head
So we don't have to have the perfect mechanism, we can fix flaws in the mechanism with other
BeavChris
I see. So it's like patching instead of kicking people out.
BArt-Head
And there's also like in mechanism design, it's often a problem to have a very sharp discontinuity. So what if you are N equals 10 and you have one outcome, which is very different from N equals 11, that tends to be bad because then that portion starts to attract really heavy attention and convoluted actions.
And so you can smooth it out in various ways. You can apply different functions, et cetera.
BeavChris
All right. I think it's time for our ad read.
BArt-Head
All right!
This week, one of our supporters paid us for a three minute ad read, and we reached out to them to ask what what they would like to read.
And they said we have a book, and we would like you to read my book for three minutes. So courtesy of Borodutch, who is @farcasteradmin.eth, he has a book, which is available at book.borodutch.com. The title of the book is, We Don't Live a Thousand Years. And there's a chapter called the Productivity Chapter, and BeavChris and BArt-Head will read to you about Productivity, We Don't Live a Thousand Years from Borodutch, who is also known as @FarcasterAdmin.eth.
Who knows more about me? Okay, starting at 11:46.
Who knows more about me than my wife? There was a time when I constantly forgot what I agreed upon with my wife And she would get upset about it. It's understandable. She informed me two weeks in advance that we were going to the theater or having guests over, and I scheduled a meeting at that time.
At some point, I realized I urgently needed a task planner to write everything down. I tried various services, but not a single one satisfied me. They all seemed overly complicated. It's clear why this happens. A developer studies time management topics and new insights come to them. They think, Oh, cool.
This needs to be included in the planner too. They believe they are increasing the planner's usefulness but in reality, it becomes so complex that its effectiveness drops because users spend more time organizing tasks than completing them.
BeavChris
Alright my wife is also happy with the change. She says I have become a better husband.
BArt-Head
Oh sorry, BeavChris, I skipped some sections. You need to...
BeavChris
Do I need to click the link to read the rest?
BArt-Head
Actually, read that bit. It's actually the best piece of this chapter, I think.
BeavChris
Okay. All right. Sorry. Sorry about that.
So my wife is also happy with the change. She says I have become a better husband since I started using my productivity system.
The nine rules of productivity.
So now we gotta find it on his website. So like his book is really neat because you can find like a preview of it completely on his website. And he built this entire tool for e-publishing books and making it into NFT. If anything, if you don't like his book, I think you should check out his book.
BArt-Head
I think he's the developer that he just was talking about, rhetorically.
BeavChris
Yes, correct. Okay, so let me read the nine rules.
Okay, so after reading numerous books on productivity, I extracted the most compelling ideas and put them to the test. The result was a concise list of nine rules that proved to be highly effective.
By following these simple rules, I experienced a significant increase in work capacity and in energy levels. This success is in accordance with the Pareto Principle, which states that 20 percent of efforts bring about 80 percent of the benefits.
So I think I'm going to actually read the headlines of the rules rather than each one.
BArt-Head
Useful.
BeavChris
The two minute rule, if it takes more than two minutes, do it right away. Complete a task, write it down. So that's interesting because I tend to not do that actually. Keep tasks brief and specific. Another thing I don't do, I tend to make them really long and complicated.
Tidy up what you've accumulated. The task is to be done once a month or even a year. And what you want to do is to declutter what you've accumulated over time, and your life is significantly improved due to the orderliness. Set a date or a month for tasks. Each task should have a date or at least a month of when you plan to approach it.
Planning, every morning make a daily plan, every Monday make a weekly plan, etc.
Eat the frog. You should do what you dread the most first. And then focus on one task. He says that his plan is called Todorant. It's a very simple service that shows only one task at a time.
Exactly. So in the chat, thanks Fufu for dropping the link and also Boro is Marie Kondo.
Yes, this is the exact confusion I have over Borodutch and my like morbid fascination. Because if you read the entire book, it is actually a very sincere self help book. With a lot of the tips that are pushed by a lot of guru types, right? So I asked him, what is the troll here? What is there is it gonna be like, gotcha at the end or something?
Cause I'm actually spending time to read the book. But he says that no, it is meta trolling. My favorite type of trolling. Because he says that I've written down all the good advice and yet would people follow them? No.
So highly recommend checking the book out. I think it's a really good condensed summary of the top 10 productivity books, self help books out there.
And he talks about cognitive biases as well.
BArt-Head
Yeah, the title of the book is We Don't Live a Thousand Years. You can find it at book.borodutch.com. The excerpt that we read here is not, as far as I know, you cannot find it through the website, but we will share the link. It is free and open, but there's a special link and so we'll share it.
Thank you very much, farcasteradmin.eth. His username is farcasteradmin.eth. That means he purchased this name through ENS. I should add as a disclaimer for our viewers who may be new to this ecosystem, there are actual Farcaster admins. Official members of the team. And then there is Borodutch who purchased his username, farcasteradmin.eth.
He has also given a lot of free and open source software to the community. Many of those pieces, which I use myself for farchiver.xyz.
And I will vouch for the quality and safety of that free and open source software, but as always do your own research. The code is all out there.
BeavChris
Yes. And yes, for those who are new to the ecosystem Borodutch is a person who, he's a line stepper.
BArt-Head
Let's remember he paid us, BeavChris!
BeavChris
Because I want to mention that as an admiration, because I feel like he's the one who is constantly challenging what is socially acceptable or not.
And I want to say that he's actually on the non destructive side of the line, actually. But I find him to be an extremely fascinating sociological observation. And I plan to get my book signed, at FarCon.
BArt-Head
Yeah, I will agree. There's a, there's like the matrix of chaotic good, chaotic neutral, chaotic evil, and I have seen that he tends to be non destructive and to respect self sovereignty way more than other people who might claim to, but their actions might look a little bit different.
BeavChris
Exactly. Do we want to talk a little bit about FarCon to wrap things up?
BArt-Head
Yes, this is one of the most exciting times. You will hear so many people talking about FarCon. I will be there in spirit as a poop on a stick.
BeavChris
Oh, so Art is not coming. Like, why? I still don't know. But we are going to give a raffle opportunity in collaboration with FCNY.
So if you talk to me. Actually, BArt-Head, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm a little confused about the instructions from Karo. I think if you talk to me on Thursday while I am wearing this wonderful wig, I will give you a password that will then allow you to enter into the frame, and that makes you eligible for the raffle.
And what is the prize again?
BArt-Head
The prize is 0.069 ETH.
BeavChris
Yes, all right yes. So there is actually a cash prize that we are giving out. So yeah, I look forward to seeing you there. And also I'll be at the GM Farcaster event as well on the Friday. And there's gonna be an onchain media creator hangout meetup situation. Looking forward to seeing many of you there as well.
Again, oh yeah, and then also because Art is not going, I'll print out his face and then put it on a popsicle stick and then I'm gonna be that weirdo because someone is not being there. And also you are asked, will you go to London? Are you going to the Far(away)Con? The wonderful satellite event.
BArt-Head
Is Far(away)Con at the same time as FarCon?
BeavChris
I believe so. I think that's the intention.
BArt-Head
Okay yeah, so I'm not attending any, but I will be there in spirit. Please take your selfies with my face on a stick.
BeavChris
Okay. Great. And also, I really want to acknowledge
BArt-Head
You may see something dropped in your wallet for those selfies.
BeavChris
Oh, really? Okay. You're doing that. The other thing is I want to really want to acknowledge the original FarCon. When I joined, I think that's when it was like just taking place or it just ended or something. And it was organized by Cameron and Grin. So I really want to call out that like they were the OGs and that they put on an event back when the ecosystem was much smaller.
And it's great to see that it's really grown. And I think it's one of those standing on the shoulders of giants situation.
BArt-Head
Let me also give a shout out to how decentralized it is. It's not supported by Warpcast. It emerged from the community. It has snowballed. It has grown. It's really incredible. It has been yeah, it's not sanctioned by Warpcast or Merkle, even though they are definitely approving and supportive of it. They, I think they might dance? DWR and Varun. We'll see.
BeavChris
We will see.
BArt-Head
A quick question, BeavChris, who's the better dancer? DWR or Varun?
BeavChris
I don't know. I feel like I have absolutely no information on their dancing abilities.
I'm going to throw this to the chat. So yeah, Fufu says that DWR is a better dancer. Oh, Sohey thinks Varun. I think this is a very split topic. It's a scissor topic for some reason.
BArt-Head
Yeah, I have my views. And I guess we can share them on Warpcast, on Farcaster.
BeavChris
All right, stop getting banned in various channels.
At this point, I don't even know, like, where we would advertise our show. Stop pushing the boundaries so much.
BArt-Head
Yeah I'm not doing the banning. That's a really strange thing about permissionless, decentralized social.
BeavChris
Oh, wow. But yeah, thanks so much for joining us. I think we covered a whole bunch of topics today.
Any last words, Art, before I say bye to you for a whole week?
BArt-Head
Yeah, thank you all for listening. Thank you for the chat. We appreciate you all. The best way to support us is onchain by minting our episodes, by watching our Drakula clips. Purchasing our Drakula creator tokens, tipping us $DEGEN, tipping us $ENJOY.
We are entirely onchain and Farcaster native. Welcome to everyone who's watching. Thank you for your time. We appreciate it greatly.
BeavChris
Thank you. All right. See some of you soon in person.
BArt-Head
Bye bye.
BeavChris
Bye.
