Over the past couple of weeks, the community on Farcaster has noticed a stark reversal in sentiment around memecoins despite their price action and novel tech implementations (my favorite is the moneygun, a way to spray people with your daily tipping allowance). It's mostly turned negative, and within the past few days, downright ugly as participants in memecoin paradigms challenge their leaders.
I believe the shift towards this now-wavering appeal stems from the changing of algorithmic weights to support the attention economy. Originally, Farcaster's newsfeed thrived on fairly close, familiar relationships within a skilled social network. When someone showed appreciation, the recipient genuinely felt it because these connections were authentic.
Naturally, this led to incorporating cryptocurrencies and smart contracts: following the early success of $POINTS, leveraging this blend of genuine relationships and monetization became lucrative. Tipping and rewarding others with memecoins means reducing the latency of recognizing someone for a good cast or worthwhile content, and maybe you get a reward yourself for the same.
The issue, I think, is that this economic behavior is entirely simulated. It's turned what was real into something programmatic. It has become vain, and more problematically for our community's success: impersonal.
A person's worth is not their monetary value nor their status within a leaderboard or on a pedestal; a person's worth is constant and it is incredibly high, full stop. If we reduce people to elements of monetization, we risk diminishing their self-esteem, and their ability to confidently contribute to the network in the future is harmed. We should practice great discipline in our appreciation of others.
And if we're looking more acutely for who is to blame for the lower engagement of memecoins, we can only blame ourselves and the advancement of the tech that enabled it. The internal functions of memecoin economics have been downgraded by the feed algorithms curated by Warpcast, and further undermined by the advent of cast actions.
In effect, it has made it incredibly difficult to concentrate the behavior of individuals in the way we captivated their attention and willingness to participate initially. I believe the combination of these factors reduces the speculative value of the tokens, and so my position is now much more bearish than it was a couple of months ago.
