In 2022, Twitter launched Circles, a feature where users could post directly to a curated list of their close friends and select followers. The circles feature created what in web3 terms might be called ‘token-gated feeds’ where communities could safely post to specific people, instead of wallowing inside the hellscape of the global home page. At some point in 2023, a user (Ian Miles Cheong or @stillgray) who inexplicably had Elon Musk’s ear, likely due to shared political leanings, complained publicly about how ‘no one used the circles feature’ and said that X should get rid of it. Shortly afterwards, Elon did just that and axed Circles.
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In my part of twitter, lots of people used Circles. It was great, especially in a post-Elon network where monetized views and aggressive changes to the algorithm had rendered the feed less useful for doing what I wanted to do on Twitter: follow people I like. It felt like a cruel joke that instead of listening to the circles users who enjoyed the feature, Elon apparently took advice of someone too cringe to get invited to any himself.
Goodbye circles, hello more posts by Historical Vids, let's enjoy another 10000 Replies from ChatGPT bots adding unrelated historical facts in the replies, fishing for that Elon click-money.
Around the same time Elon killed Circles, a founder told me that Farcaster had a much higher signal to noise ratio than Twitter. I had to take her word for it, I hadn't joined Farcaster because I didn't like that you had to get an invite code to join a decentralized social media protocol. After joining this month, I realized that whether her belief about FC’s ‘signal to noise’ ratio was true mattered less than the fact that she - like many early FC adopters - believed that it was.
Farcaster was founded in 2021 and existed as a gated community until October, 2023, when @dwr.eth posted on X that FC was open to the unwashed public. On January 7, 2024, Degen launched and at the end of the month, Farcaster announced the launch of Frames. The combination of these three factors: new users, new tokens, and new features, contributed to an explosion in activity. We’ve all seen the charts:
Farcaster Growth Analytics, @krishg
I wasn’t here to see it, but looking at the OGs, the accounts that were casting & building here before us speculators arrived, Farcaster survived the long cold winter of obscurity by developing what we could call a “Network Identity.” Like many crypto projects, Farcaster users have adopted a loose set of norms and a collective, tribal allegiance to one another and to certain values. It's always fascinating when users will feel the same responsibility for the mission of a project itself as an early employee who is compensated with company equity. But I also understand why, I feel the same pull to help Farcaster grow, to see this alternative social media network succeed. We see these norms policed and these FC values implemented across conversations around what makes for a qDAU, or for good protocol and channel norms. More than any single growth metric, these values and the tribal identity, /wearesoearly, help explain the relentless positivity and optimism that almost everyone (myself included) has for a social network that is still only home to around 3,000 truly active users .
Farcaster today exists in an interesting state of tension: those active users are loud and opinionated, and many identify with slightly vague FC norms (again, myself included). Farcaster is for builders, cast with substance, speculation is a bit icky, airdrop farming is toxic, the Warpcast feed is a wreck, if I see another DEGEN tip I may just become Amish. Just look at Dan’s feed and you’ll see what I mean. For every person who loves Farcaster, there is a person who loves Farcaster and worries that the ways that people are actually (finally) using Farcaster threaten the thing that they love.
One of the amazing things about FC is that Dan and the FC or WC teams are so accessible. We can provide them with direct product feedback that might get implemented in the next Warpcast app upgrade. It’s a living product, and we have some sort of influence on what types of life are incentivized here. The downside of this is that the people with the biggest influence - the large accounts who have been on FC for a long time - are influencing client design decisions that optimize for a culture that already exists, and that has existed here for a long time.
The new entrants, the airdrop farmers & bot-adjacent NPCs don’t have this kind of voice. Neither do people who have not joined. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t join Farcaster to become part of a tribe. I had a totally adequate signal-to-noise ratio on my other crypto social media accounts. I joined because it seemed like an opportunity to engage to build on a robust, decentralized social layer. I want the Network, not an identity.
Actual bots and lower-grade, net value-extracting users are found wherever people are using crypto and talking about it, and sometimes are indistinguishable from new users, trying to learn how to join the culture. It's obvious that we all should attempt to provide value at the very least in the form of opinionated, human, and unique casts and engagements. If all you are casting into the network is “!attack south” or “Please tip $DEGEN” I don’t care about following you, and neither should anyone else. And Farcaster users should enforce norms within communities, and feel pride in whatever group or tribe they identify with this platform. We all log on everyday for vastly different reasons, but identity, community, and technology are some of the best reasons for many of us.
I've been uncomfortable commenting on these themes publicly until I spoke to @kenny yesterday, an early Farcaster adopter who is definitely providing value to the network (check out /poidh) and is also skeptical about certain expressions of Farcaster identity and culture widely accepted as positive values to be embedded and reinforced on the client layer. And when I say client layer I mean the one everyone uses today, Warpcast. So I'll just say it: there is something a bit cringey seeing so much complaint about how new users are playing with the Farcaster games, how they are tipping or seeking tips. Yes, it’s boring, but you know what? Lots of people online are boring. Crypto Twitter logs in everyday because no matter how many paid ads for actual scams, or 1 follower degens asking for handouts and followbacks, it continues to be the social hub of crypto culture.
Ben is obviously team north. I'd also like to note that Ben is an excellent mod for /venturecapital, one of my favorite Farcaster channels. He's helping grow the network, and this isn't a criticism of him or even this cast, but an attempt to describe a general trend.
I find it a bit ironic that so many people are struggling to keep their feeds pristine, to fend off unacceptable uses of the platform to the extent that they will politely inform an entire channel dedicated to one of the few popular games on FC today, that they’ll publicly cast about needing to set a boundary: anyone playing your game is getting unfollowed, not just muted.
My biggest issue with the Farcaster feed is that only around 3000 people are consistently casting on to it every week. Give me more airdrop farmers, Give me your tired, your poor without any $DEGEN tips, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, anyone !attacking north or south. Give me a network, you can keep your tribe. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door for the speculators, the traders, the kids with .05 ETH and a dream. There’s a builder in there somewhere, or maybe just a subculture different from my own.
Dan and the Warpcast team should listen to anyone with >1000 followers less, and start listening to people who don’t have a FID a bit more. Networks don’t need an identity to thrive, or a single way of quantifying quality daily active use, they need lots and lots of people, engaging in many different, often annoying ways. Not quality engagement, but different communities with vastly different opinions on what makes for quality engagement. It’s time to grow up, Farcaster, and growth spurts can be painful sometimes.
