I'm excited to announce Farther V2. This is a big change in how tipping works. Its an attempt to alleviate two problems:

1. User churn
   Many potentially valuable users who try Farcaster end up leaving when they don't get enough engagement. There is a great discussion about this problem between ted & nonlinear on an episode of their podcast, many such cases (last 10 minutes here).

2. Tips feeling spammy
   There are many tipping tokens that are all relatively undifferentiated, making many tips seem more akin to spam. See this poll from @dwr.eth

   

This all boiled down to a question...

What if tips could increase engagement for underrated users while simultaneously make the tips more meaningful?

The answer I've arrived at is to reward tippers based on how well they're targeting users who have the biggest increase to their engagement over time.

It works as follows:

1. Every time a tip is given, the recipient's OpenRank global engagement score is stored.

2. Every six hours, the app checks how much the engagement score has changed since the time of the tip, and multiplies the change by the amount of the tip. This is the tip score.

3. For tips during the season, tip scores of each tipper are summed. This is the Tipper Score.

4. At the end of the season, every tipper with a positive Tipper Score receives a pro rata share of a rewards pool based on their score relative to the sum of all positive tipper scores.

This essentially makes tipping into a competitive game and pseudo prediction market for increasing qDAU. My hope is that it will make tips more meaningful and less spammy, as each will be like an investment in the future growth of the recipient.

Additional details:

• A balance of 100k is still the requirement to receive a tip allowance.

• Tips to other tippers are not included

• Every tipper will receive the same daily allowance. The aim of this is to make it meritocratic and direct focus to the tipper score & rewards.

• No restrictions on tip amounts aside from the daily allowance. No minimum tip size.

• Tip recipients must have at least 100 followers. This is necessary to mitigate people from farming allowances with dummy accounts.

• The monthly rewards pool will start at 3 million $farther.

• Total daily allowance will start by targeting $2000 worth of $farther, determined by the token’s price at the time of the daily allowance reset. The target amount may be adjusted in the future. Allowances for most current tippers will decrease, but the benefit is this will enable more tokens for rewards and increase the system's longevity.

OpenRank data has already been syncing for the past week and the website has been updated to display everyones current tipper score. Scores will reset back to zero on August 1st when the new season begins. I welcome everyone to send me your questions & feedback in the meantime. ✨

Acknowledgements: Huge thank you to @wahoo.eth and @russian_acai for their valuable feedback on the design, as well as everyone who reviewed the app idea that Farther V2 started as.