/Mint other people's stuff

I recently came up with a pretty cool idea to use frames' onchain transactions, or maybe a Farcaster bot, to mint other people's posts with just a "/mint" command.

You could grab the metadata from any onchain post, use the text as a description, use any multimedia elements as the thumbnail, and bingo. Immortalized and perma-quotable content that could fuel a content ecosystem as I described in BYOA.

And, just today, I found out it already exists:

Farcaster

Sean on Warpcast

/anthropology will be fun. We’ll do a lot, including crypto themed frames like this. A cast is an artifact of culture, use this frame to preserve it as an NFT. Enter any cast or feel lucky. Wait for image. It won’t be perfect but if you like it, mint it for a couple bucks. https://www.sean07.com/frames/5

Do you have any idea how huge this could be? It could be the fuel behind the most powerful reputation engine we've seen since Google.

It's no coincidence that an /anthropology member is running this experiment. If my instincts are right, this is just the setup for what I called a Captcha Moment that measures the overlap between a person's quotability and people's belief in their thoughts (measured in mints and collects)

Farcaster

Les Greys on Warpcast

Onchain creators, the historians of our future.

I've always thought the biggest hurdle to onchain adoption was putting the onus of minting on the creator's hands. If you ask me, it's way more of a telling signal when some third party chooses to sanctify something you posted onchain. Similar to how google's inlink rank worked originally, or the wayback machine keeps an archive of the early internet based on how many people store a given URL.

And comically, it also seems that's the way Farcaster seems to be thinking about it:

Farcaster

Varun Srinivasan on Warpcast

The active badge is going away. Spammy accounts are aggressively gaming the system to get the badge. Making the rules stricter just makes it harder for legitimate users. We’re past the point where a simple rule based system will work. We need something better.

When people can't do, they talk; and I'm sure this exact behavior is what's gonna end up driving this new trustworthiness/showcase mechanic the FC team is working on. It's definitely a step in the right direction, but as mentioned in the post itself, it can still be gamed when people find out how the gears work.

Google has been combatting this exact problem for more than 20 years. If your end goal is bringing trustworthy creators and content to the limelight, you'll always run into the same shortcoming of how gameable hype can be.

I'll be keeping a close eye on this new verification method. The ball's still out on how it'll play out, but if you want to gain a sense of how I think it'll evolve, give the pieces I quoted above a read.

For now, I think it's interesting to see these ideas being tested live in Farcaster's growing community ecosystem, all data points compartmentalized based on your likes and tastes. Whoever cracks the code to understand them could become the most successful creator/project in the web3 social space.