Hello Warpcasters!

Every day I see so many new projects and I really want to write a piece about them but I have to prioritize the important ones.

I’ve spent the last 2 weeks monitoring the DEGEN allowance situation. Like all the newcomers, surely I want to know how my casts can be more deserving for tips and which user with high amount of DEGEN allowance likes what types of casts to be persuaded to tip. And with this new decay algorithm it was sensible for me to search their stats with @nikolaiii frame. I did the same for other users too and I’ve learnt a lot but do I have good news?! Let's find out.

If you go to: https://dune.com/queries/3745431, you’ll see a graph showing the DEGEN allocation exponential decay.

According to @jacek the DEGEN allocation decay was supposed to affect the season 5. But if you search your FID or any other user’s, you see that it happened way before and in the middle of season 4. I’m sure you remember the last two weeks of season 4 when you tried so hard to get your allowance up but whatever you did (quality casting more, having higher engagements, etc.), it went lower and lower.

This new algorithm was supposed to weed out farmers, scammers, spammers and anyone with malicious intent to abuse the FC’s openness to anyone with that 5$ sign-up fee (not sarcasm). The intention to stop fraud is admirable but I don’t thinks it works or this was the only intention (you too are feeling a conspiracy theory brewing?!). If you’ve read the https://docs.openrank.com/ it says:

“The rapid growth of onchain users and transactions has come with an increasing amount of fraud, rug pulls and spam. To continue attracting and retaining onchain users and high quality developers, there's an urgent need for trust and reputation solutions. It's a pain for users to discover, use, fund, read or buy something on-chain without worrying about getting spammed or scammed.”

Ok then, we get the need, but the whole solution being built on just the reputation of some select users?! Is this a joke? (I know that the reputation is not just about having more followers, and everything from a like to the number of users' on-chain transactions matter a lot!)

The more I read the details provided by OpenRank the more I was assured that this solution is not practical, and with a simple research you can see my point. I try to say this simply:

G1: About 2.5 million DEGEN allowance went to 173 users with a good rate for trust and reputation which was computed using graph algorithms like EigenTrust. These users allocations were between 10k and 19.9k DEGEN with approximately 80 DEGEN difference. This means that these users are legit and never scam and know better how to tip.

G2: About 2.5 million DEGEN allowance went to  570 users with the same computed reputation graph algorithms with allocations between 1k and 9.9k DEGEN with the same ≈ 80 DEGEN difference.

G3: About 300k DEGEN allowance went to roughly 560 users between 100 and 999 DEGEN the same way but with lower difference than 80, like 4 users have 100 DEGEN a day or more than 10 users had 850, 853, 857 and so on.

G4: About 40k DEGEN allowance went to roughly 730 users between 6 and 99 DEGEN the same way but with lower difference than 80, like 4 users have 50 DEGEN a day or more than 10 users had 13, 12, 11, 10, and so on.

G5: The rest of the DEGEN community who hold 10k DEGEN in their wallet (≈537k users) have only 5 DEGEN per day. With a simple multiplication it will be ≈2.685 million DEGEN allowance. Which interestingly won’t tell you that these people are bots or farmers or with bad reputation of not having the ability to tip fairly and correctly! Even if you are not very active in FC or you had an accident and couldn’t come to the show or probably died, this 5 DEGEN allowance a day is what you deserve!

Now let’s see how the big shots deal (or not) with their allowance. About half of those 173 users in G1 never tip their allowance or just tip to 1-3 casts. (What a shocker!)

Most of those 570 users in G2 tip most of their allowance to their friends with the amount of 1-2k per day which incidentally is exactly the behavior that a farmer would have! I’m cheering these guys because at least they’re distributing their allocations, not just waste it! And they are earning high amounts of DEGEN which I think it is fair and brilliant. They are powering their community and according to the reputation graphs they know what they are doing and we should learn from them (Am I right?!).

The next 560 users in G3 are doing the same as G1 users but more cautiously (afraid of losing even this amount of allowance).

The 730 users in G4 are mostly whiners! “Oh… why my allowance won’t go up L”. I’m going to give some tips for these users later on.

These two groups are struggling very hard and it’s not entirely their fault I must say. Most of them do the work but because of G1 and G2 they can’t get enough attention to build a good reputation. Just think about it: most people have jobs and are not developers or artists, they only can give a little to the community; and the time zones make everything harder. If a G1 casts in 2:00 in the afternoon and a G4 casts at the same time, which one do you suspect to get the likes and recasts and replies? Or how the supposed G1 user can see a very good cast of a G5 user in a good channel, while all the focus and attention is on the G3 user’s cast (like “paid? With a screenshot of Nikolai’s frame”)?!

All in all, I don’t think this reputation graphs are working, maybe on ‘trust’ it is ok, but in other areas is failing. I have questions that no one will answer because I’m in G4!

If you want to get more DEGEN tips you need to build a friendship with big accounts which is really hard. You need to get your followers number up but not in an obvious manner like F4F, etc. GET more tips from Power Badge owners, DO NOT WHINE! Make memes. Post in different channels. Don’t be greedy. Go hack the system if you are a dev because any developer can make changes to the protocol apparently! (THIS was a test for you, yeah, you! You evil-minded hacker! I was just joking!)

I must say that these new algorithms for every season are (if I’m being kind) a Trial and Error method, attempting to build a better place than Instagram, Facebook, etc. But what FC and DEGEN community needs most, is poll results from people, hiring more ordinary people from all over with different kind of opinions and intuitions to detect bad users, listening to those who care about less-noticed accounts, not banishing every unknown or new user to the dungeons of oblivion first then trying to build a base for reputation. In my opinion, founding members of any project on FC should give people a chance for trust first and don't just rely on machine learning and algorithms.

I’d love to help and monitor different accounts for this purpose but no one seems to be interested (yet).

Hope this helps you <3

Thanks for reading