Welcome to Interregnum Episode 2 of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show, a podcast for the Farcaster middle class.
Watch the episode on Zora, and Mint to collect.
Summary
In Episode 2 of the Interregnum, BeavChris and BArt-Head dive into an unfiltered conversation filled with humor and insight. They start by poking fun at the "millennial pause" before diving into the quirks of social media habits and the oddities of sushi etiquette observed during a hilarious dining experience. The duo share their thoughts on the evolution of Farcaster clients, highlighting the golden age of innovation with clients like Supercast, FarQuest Pro, and the exciting new Recaster.
They explore the potential of their lite client, designed to enhance user control and customization, from hiding PFPs to adjusting feed algorithms. The conversation takes a thoughtful turn as they discuss the ethical considerations of advertising in Web3, advocating for ads that respect user choice and deliver genuine value. They also invite the community to participate in their alpha test for micro-ads, emphasizing transparency and user feedback.
Join BeavChris and BArt-Head as they navigate the world of Farcaster, balancing innovation with community values, and always keeping it real and entertaining.
This episode was sponsored by NO ONE.
Sponsor this spot for 0.1 ETH (90 seconds for 0.05 ETH).
Transcript
BeavChris
Hello, we are live. I was trying not to do the millennial pause. I don't know whether you noticed that we do that.
BArt-Head
I absolutely do the millennial pause, but I don't notice it at all. Because I am pre millennial.
BeavChris
Oh, yeah. Are you? Wait, are you? No, you are millennial.
BArt-Head
I had a funny thing with BC because I posted a GIF of Freddie Mercury from Queen saying Can't Stop Me Now.
BeavChris
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh,
BArt-Head
it's amazing how you could tell these gifs made in the 70s and I was like, oh, yeah, like I am made in the 70s and have never been called a gif before.
BeavChris
You're so funny. Alright I'm going to let our GC know, and not the wrong GC that we are on live.
We should begin with our usual spiel. Shoutout to our permissionless partners, Unlonely, Base, Zora, Paragraph, Drakula, Seemore and our season one sponsors Farcastea, Proxy Studio, Borodutch, and Farchiver. It says here that we will release a mint and a transcript. BArt-Head thinks it's too good not to be onchain, but best way to experience the Interregnum is Unlonely chat.
Ah, this is from last week. So I think we've given up on the not releasing episodes, haven't we?
BArt-Head
Yeah I love listening to myself over and over and having it onchain. I think that's a really delightful thing for my own experience. And yeah, this is episode two.
BeavChris
Where most people like me, I actually, I hate editing our episodes because I'm like, Oh, I have to listen to myself again. Whereas you're like, ah, yes, I have said such great opinions.
BArt-Head
That is 100 percent sure
BeavChris
We're just all feeding your narcissism.
BArt-Head
Yes. Yeah. Why else would someone do a weekly stream except to see themselves? Come on! And hear themselves.
BeavChris
Yes. Yes. I wonder people like maybe this can be like a self confidence course sort of thing? Although I don't know. I think if you start off and then no one's watching then it's also like maybe not great for self confidence. I've thought this through, maybe this is a bad idea. But yeah, so what trouble have you gotten up to since we missed last week since I was sick and continue to be sick.
BArt-Head
Right, yeah, so this is Episode Two of the Interregnum. We're just gonna chill until we nail down our plans for Season Two. Right now we're leaning towards a more builder focused Season Two than our Season One, which was, I'd say what, 60 percent social commentary and 40% Farcaster society, right?
BeavChris
Mmhmm.
BArt-Head
We're, we haven't nailed it down. We are working on different ways as well on the backend to eat our own dog food, et cetera. So for the interregnum, we're just going to chill out. And we're also going on different trips and vacations and scheduling things. And in my notes, what trouble have I gotten into?
There's two things. I've been coding a lot and not casting as much and
BeavChris
You're not being a dev influencer. You're not fulfilling your influencer duties.
BArt-Head
That's right. Yeah. Like I'm talking to Chat GPT more about coding problems and not to real humans and bots on Farcaster. And so I feel I've, I pulled my punches a little bit.
I made a comment about seeing someone eat sushi with their hands, but not eating it in a proper respectful way, but in a really
BeavChris
Oh, with the fish side down?
BArt-Head
No, they're like, like, waving it around using their left hand, not their dominant hand and just taking little nibbles and talking and chatting as if it was a pencil or a piece of fruit.
And I thought, no you're supposed to put it in your mouth and eat the whole morsel of sushi at once. And my first thought was, oh, yt people, but then, it's not just yt people. It's general people who don't respect sushi as much.
And the funny thing is in America, in New York City, almost all sushi is made by Chinese people and Hispanic people. It's very rare to find sushi chefs who, like the line sushi makers.
BeavChris
That's interesting. Yeah. Japanese, I feel like in in LA it was mostly Korean people who were running Japanese sushi places. And over here where I live, it's more, yeah, it's more like Cantonese. People masquerading as Japanese people,
BArt-Head
You hear them talking to each other in Chinese and you're like, oh.
BeavChris
And I'm like, "gimme a good deal, please" in Cantonese.
BArt-Head
They figured out how to increase the price for the same quality produce, call it sushi and... Yeah so American sushi also has gotten much bigger because what Chinese people do is they say, Oh, we can get more volume by making it by making 15 percent larger, or we can make it 30 percent larger and add layers and layers of stuff. We're just not Japanese. We can add like four different layers on top to the point where you can't put it all in your mouth at once. Unless you're already like
BeavChris
@cryptowenmoon says eating sushi like, if it was pizza, lol.
BArt-Head
Yeah, man! It was just really cringe. And to make it worse, it was these two middle aged people on a first date.
And the woman was sitting there with her legs like way open in a really strange way. She was
BeavChris
like in a, like a Sharon Stone kind of way? This is such a dated reference.
BArt-Head
Yeah. Like at the table with her, just her legs were like in a V or a Y shape. Like maybe the table was too small for her or there was like, it was a small New York restaurant.
And it was a first date, because the two did not know each other well. She was super dressed up. She had a necklace, she had a ring, she had a bracelet, she had an arm bracelet. And the man was in shorts, with his very hairy legs coming out, and his sandals with socks. And I thought
BeavChris
Are you sure this wasn't like a prostitution thing? escorting situation or something? [Ed. note: what kind of places does @christin think @artlu brings his family?]
BArt-Head
Neither of them looked that rich or attractive for it to be a pay for money thing. And like the manners of both of them were atrocious. The woman was eating sushi with her hand, like waving around while she was talking. And then the man, he was using one chopstick in his left hand to dab the wasabi and then to paint it on his sushi before putting the two chopsticks back together to eat it.
In one bite. He did it. He did it in one bite. He used his chopstick as a paintbrush.
BeavChris
I was imagining you like sitting in the corner. You were like taking notes. One of these people.
BArt-Head
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going on stream. I'm going to cast about you.
BeavChris
Exactly. Our chat says, so scandalous. Wait, like her legs were up? Question mark. Or maybe she just had a UTI. LOL.
BArt-Head
Yeah, I bet that was more the situation.
BeavChris
This is so deviated from our notes though, because we were supposed to talk about signing up for CastOut and not signing up for CastOut, and somehow we're just talking about these two strangers eating sushi.
BArt-Head
Yeah, so I, I could, I felt I couldn't cast about it, but I could share it with you all on stream, because it's just, I have some problematic feelings about what I just experienced.
BeavChris
Mm hmm. Well, um,
BArt-Head
So, if I wasn't building, I would just cast. But since I'm building and I want people to use my products.
BeavChris
This is the gems we're missing because you were busy heads down.
BArt-Head
Yes my sacrifices for everyone. Not sharing my thoughts with you.
BeavChris
Yeah. Okay, let's talk about CastOut later, because let's jump right into your builds so we can roast them. I guess I should probably, should I drop the link of the lite client into the chat?
BArt-Head
Sure.
BeavChris
So people know what the heck we're talking about. Okay.
BArt-Head
Yeah, welcome everybody to The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show lite client.
BeavChris
Yeah theoretically, I can pin it. Oh, I pinned it. Wow. Unlonely. Oops, I unpinned it. Unlonely's new function is a pin chat.
BArt-Head
Unlonely is shipping.
BeavChris
Yes. Yeah, tell us more. We're the first onchain show with its own Farcaster client. I'm trying to be very technical here, just in case there's someone else who's already doing this, but I figured I don't see any single other show that's doing that. Yeah. Yeah, tell us more.
BArt-Head
We are in the golden age of Farcaster clients.
I thought we had our golden age and it was gone forever, but I think we are, that was the classical era, HeroCast, OpenCast, Flink.
BeavChris
Oh, yeah!
BArt-Head
FarQuest Pro, but OpenCast is on the shelf until Stephan relaunches it. And Flink is, has turned into Nook. So I was really disappointed to see Flink go away.
I thought it was incredibly innovative and exciting. And Opencast to me was like one of the most values aligned builds to come out of the Farcaster ecosystem. And for it to not be able to continue, I thought was a, just a pretty deep blow. And it's not dead. It's going to come back at some point and I know Stephan is working on it.
We are getting all of these really cool clients that are coming out. FarQuest Pro is evolving into quite an interesting interface. DegenCast from @liang is coming out very soon. Fiids has been in a beta for three months or so, and it's innovating. Of course, nook came out and is really pushing the boundaries of what a client can do, especially the onchain data.
And Recaster dropped either yesterday or the day before on an actual iOS Apple Store native app download, not test flight, but it is through the review process. You could download it on any non test flight phone. And it's called Recaster from @haole H A O L E. And it's a, it's very smooth. It's very fast.
There was a brief cast in their channel /recaster that they're using 85 percent Neynar, 10 percent AirStack, 5 percent Pinata, something like that. Some breakdown like that. So the backend is really similar to Supercast, but it's a totally different experience. It's a mobile first iOS only for now, but he's transporting to Android fairly soon. And it's
BeavChris
Oh, with so many great clients, I, so including Supercast as well, why are you making your own?
BArt-Head
So the nouns project where they're giving out a pretty big amount of money for real clients made me think, ah, like there's going to be lots of experiments and I'm itching to try different experiments, especially as the feeds are changing with the curation, with pins disappearing, with watches turning into bookmarks, power badge becoming such an important aspect, priority mode.
So I wanted to experiment, shine light on things, and cast actions can take you so far, but cast actions are things that you do explicitly to a single cast.
And I wanted to see the feed. And I also saw SCS, SCV becoming widely available, OpenRank becoming widely available, some of the degen.tips APIs becoming widely available.
And I thought, wow, it would be just interesting to try things out. So the lite client now has Sign In With Neynar. It started off as just the Pinata lite client where they had done the /diet-coke client and the photocaster client. But now it's a bit different. It's incorporated with Neynar.
BeavChris
Not to speak too much for both of us. My impression is that the point of this BCBH Show client is to almost put all the things we complain about and point out in the first season into practice by making a client that is a little bit more fair. Is that true? Or at least more flexible?
BArt-Head
There is a correlation absolutely. It's not causation. I think we did not start with a show and turn into the client. I think we've had these concerns before the show specifically about cool kids club and some unfair centralized decisions impacting the algo or impacting the experience in ways that are hidden. So one of the priorities of things I wanted to build was just a little check box to let you see the casts that are non power badge. And if you want to hide them, you just check the box and immediately poof, they're gone. You can be Dan, if you want, just that
BeavChris
That should be the tagline on this client. But I think that sells a lot better.
BArt-Head
See what it feels like to have all the power of a unicorn founder. You can ban all non PowerBadge users from your site.
So that's one thing, but as all of these different algos come out, one of my strong opinions, weakly held is that none of these algos on their own will solve the problem for everyone.
Another way of saying it, a better tagline is, There is no silver bullet. And so you need to try to combine things in different ways that leads to a lot of complexity, so it's up to people to find good defaults. But if you stick to one default, it gets gamed unless the people making the ungameable algorithms lean on secrecy and opaqueness.
If secrecy and opaqueness is your non gameability, to me that's against the promise of crypto. The promise of crypto is that you can't be evil, not you won't be evil. The second client is,
BeavChris
I feel like the pedestrian impression of crypto is the opposite. Is where you can be evil.
BArt-Head
You can be evil and have no consequences.
BeavChris
Yes. So
BArt-Head
Exactly.
That may be true in practice, to some extent and we are so early. Yes. That is a fair point. But to everybody who believes that, just know, BArt-Head believes that we can get to a world where crypto lives up to its promises. Definite optimism.
So the client is designed as a harness for a simple feed to layer many different things. And to play with the layering to find the good defaults and to understand them. It's like a, it's a tool, it's a harness for different social layers. And as I'm building it, I'm finding things like months ago, people had said, Oh, what if you could have a client with no PFPs, and no usernames either.
BeavChris
Oh yeah Manash and Brad, I think? Wild?
BArt-Head
Yeah, they were talking about it months ago. And somehow, I don't even know how it came across my feed, and I interacted with it, three month old post. And they said, yeah, like Zen, their idea was Zencaster.
BeavChris
Yes.
BArt-Head
Which is a really calm feed without moving PFPs.
I'm guilty and I think you're guilty of moving PFPs, but maybe it would be better if you don't know who is saying what. And so, I've always said, I want people to have control. And if that leads to a super crazy Control panel, so be it, you can hide the control panel when you don't want it.
But, I want people to have control. So that was a great idea and easy to implement. There's a little button. So not only you can be Dan, but you can be Zen, you can be Buddha. Just turn off all the distracting things. And one thing that I found was if you hide all the images, that changes your experience. Like you miss out on a lot of jokes because people will put a little joke in the meme.
BeavChris
Yeah. That would have been useful when I was in Tahoe and I had one bar of 5g, I could have used a text only, like a client for sure.
BArt-Head
So text only, it's a totally different experience. People have built image only clients as well. So they'll only show image only casts. And, I think eventually it'll. I'll just add that as a simple switch, but there's also a really cool thing is hide the image only casts, which tend to be spam in certain contexts. So in some channels, the meta or the norm is to spam it with image only casts and make the poor moderator ban them. And that's something that you can hide as a user setting.
And by the way, it's very useful as a user setting. It's not useful as a client level setting because once you make it and the client becomes widely adopted, the spammer who wants to spam will adjust their tactics. They'll add like an empty space or they'll add like a
BeavChris
I'm starting to suspect that's what they're doing in the /spirituality channel because the filters suddenly stopped working and I'm like
BArt-Head
Right, there could be, you know, it could be a space next, a little thing, and. Also another thing is, you can be Automod. You can be @jtgi. You can study the rules in a little lite client without relying on a dev, who has a thousand requests coming at them, to understand, will this work well for my channel or not? Can I propose this? And the next thing I want to work on is mute words because it's been a request for a year and a half.
Hey, why can't we have mutes in Warpcast? And, uh, mute words are extremely useful, right? And you get to see how the mute words that you've chosen will work in different contexts.
So that's the general idea of the lite client.
BeavChris
The most to me relevant thing to what you're doing, For your day job is the integration of the Farcaster ad network, right?
Cause now I guess this is opposite of Zencaster, but there is the ability to pin an ad sponsored content.
BeavChris
Yes. So I want to thread the needle between Zen and money. So to me, one of my deep, strong opinions, strongly held, is that things can be free for the end user in a respectful and empowering way where they're not slaves to the advertisers, but they get to trade their attention for value.
And so the way I built the lite client is, there is a very clear button to hide the ad and you can just banish it at any time and you can pull it back at any time. The ad has to compete for your attention on its own merits based on how quality and how engaging and tailored it is not because of a decision that I've made as a client developer that I need to monetize my space.
I don't need to monetize the lite client and yet I want a proof that an ad that needs to compete will still remain there and be able to provide me some kind of income stream for my work. So there's two layers of competition. One is that my community or my supporters will say, look, I'll give you 30 seconds or I'll give you a click, if that click gives you half a cent, and it means you can continue to do things, like I'll do that for you.
And part of the community will say, no, I don't like ads. That's not what I'm in web three for, and both of those things I think are totally fine and I want to discover what's that mix and the other thing is the individual ads themselves, they have to compete.
So the thinking behind the ad network is that users and creators have veto power. So if I see an ad that I don't like, I can banish it. If I'm a creator, like if I own the client and I don't want any ads that are against my values, I can say, I'm not going to show these ads to my users, and I'm not going to get any money for those ads, but, I get to choose.
So any ads that you guys see on there, I've implicitly chosen to allow them. It's very different from a web two model where, like you get someone who says, look, I'm not technical. I'm not in advertising. I'm just trying to make content. So if you get hair loss ads or if you get erectile dysfunction ads, sorry, I got to pay the bills. That's an enshittification to be given lots of erectile dysfunction ads because those pay the most.
BeavChris
The alpha drop for those who are in the chat and possibly we'll share on our GC as well. We're inviting you to use the ads. Is that where, I'm reading the notes?
BArt-Head
Yeah. If you have a project that you want to promote to The BCBH Show community, so ,to each other, please think of: a text blurb that will fit in a frame, but one of three things, and maybe all three.
A text blurb that will fit in a frame. Number two, an image, which can include text in it, but a static image. And three, an animated GIF. You can choose to make it as animated and as distracting as you want, or as subtle as you want. One of those three things, text, static or an animated GIF, and we're going to open up the things that are shown the rotation of ads that are shown to users of the lite client, to our community.
And the deal is for our alpha, you're not going to pay any money. There's not going to be money involved for the first experiment, but you will get exposure. We as the owners of The BCBH Show have veto power. So if it's like a show that we don't like, and you want to advertise on our show, we can veto you, or we can choose to let it go out of confidence or trolling.
And if the users do not like it, it will get removed from their rotation. And for all participants in this experiment you will see the results of how good your ad has performed relative to the other ads. So your ad will be made very transparent, like every advertiser and probably every user will see all the ads through a dashboard, but then they will be fed the ads through usage of the lite client, and we'll let you know how many people vetoed your ad.
And if you were one of 10 ads that were in the rotation, did you end up being shown 80 percent of the time because the other nine were crappy or did you get shown 5 percent of the time because you misjudged the audience? Like that's useful stuff to learn.
BeavChris
So in the testing of the ad network, you were trolling me specifically because you could actually set certain images to be shown per FID, right? And you were showing me Soup Nazi.
BArt-Head
Oh, was I trolling you?
BeavChris
I don't even know. I don't know. But it was a good demonstration of ad targeting down to a single user level.
BArt-Head
Tell me what happened.
BeavChris
So it was a, it was like a frame that was in a normal Warpcast client, and you were like, go click and check it out. So then I did, and then it was something like, yeah, like a Soup Nazi thing or something like that. And I actually, I was not sure, was that shown to everyone or just me?
BArt-Head
That was just shown to you.
And actually, I'm sorry, we're almost out of time, but in a frame, you have the ability to pass along your FID. Every time you interact with it and it's signed so nobody can spoof you. It's signed with all the cryptography that protects Warpcast and in fact, protects your Ethereum addresses. So it's highly secure. It secures trillions of dollars of value via Ethereum and millions of dollars via Warpcast.
When I see that Christin's FID is asking for an advertisement, I can send Christin specifically an advertisement or a group of FIDs, like the people who have a minted, for example, or people with wallets greater than X amount of value, et cetera, et cetera. So you can target. And that's part of the promise of Warpcast and frames that you can reveal personal information in a way that you control that adds value.
So if you don't want to reveal your FID to somebody, do not click on their frame. Every time you click on a frame or an action, you are telling that developer, Hey, my wallet is clicking on this.
But I hope that was a useful invitation or CTA for our community. If you have a project you want to shill and you're willing to do that in a transparent way, please talk to me in GC and in return, you get some privileged access to our audience, as well as you will get some feedback as part of this experiment of the quality of your ads.
BeavChris
Yeah, and something I was telling Art about is can we call it something else other than ads? Because people usually have this turn off reaction. They're like, we ran away to Web 3 not to be shown ads again. It's something closer to sponsored content or native targeted content or something like that is what the whole ethos of this is about. And I feel like it's like how, for me Instagram actually is probably the best at guessing what I like in terms of ads.
Because I'm always like shown these products and I'm like, Ooh, I do want to buy this. So I think ads are useful if they are done really well and really annoying if they are like poorly targeted. So it was like finding that sweet spot.
BArt-Head
Yeah. So , I distinguish ads and sponsored content.
I'm tackling ads first, like explicit ads, which people are familiar with, and I definitely want to integrate sponsored content. Which I think of as maybe slightly longer form, with different kinds of disclosures, with different kinds of CTAs, different kinds of things. But yeah, sponsored content is a different thing.
And I want to target, let's call it ad in frame or micro ad delivery via cast action first, which is separate from an influencer network. And those things are big business, like that definitely exists. There are people that will get paid to shill to their KOL groups. And yeah, those are opportunities to do right.
BeavChris
All right. Okay. So we're on the half hour, we're keeping our show short today. So yes, once again, if you have a micro ad idea, go reach out to Art and we can set you up in the new lite client. Oh, here 87A, sorry, I don't know your Farcaster username. We can't be building Web3 only for certain people. There are innovative ideas to use to make use ads to be more effective. We totally agree. So we're reinventing or inventing a new world of wonderful controlled ads by both the user and the client.
BArt-Head
Yeah, that's a wonderful sentiment. I agree. We can't be Web 3 only and Web 3 will be the world.
BeavChris
Yikes. How scary. All right. So thank you all so much for joining us in the chat today. We hope you have a wonderful rest of the week. And Art, are we back on next week?
BArt-Head
Yes, scheduling note, I'm traveling next week. So we won't be streaming next week. We will be online and I'm not sure your schedule, Christin, but we'll announce things in the channel, in the group chat.
BeavChris
Yeah.
BArt-Head
On the Unlonely channel as well about our next things. There is a luma, which I think eventually we're, are we migrating to @events?
BeavChris
Yeah, I think that's the hope. So @matthew from events.xyz is in our GC right now. He's trying to understand like, what the heck am I doing to announce the show and to help us with discovery and reminders, etc, in a more native way. That's hopefully more enjoyable for you and enjoyable for us. And yes, if you want to join our group,
BArt-Head
yeah, keep your eyes out.
BeavChris
Okay. All right. I gotta go. My voice is going. That's the real reason. So!
BArt-Head
Thank you all for listening. We'll see you onchain.
BeavChris
Take care. Bye.
