How do we grow Farcaster? The current consensus is by creating more and better content. In this article, I would like to offer an alternative strategy: Make Farcaster the best place to hold conversations.
Why
We already agree that Farcaster is not be the best place to find the latest news (it's getting better, but we are in no way Twitter), but it's a great place to hold conversations.
Is it the culture? The friction imposed by the signup cost? The way clients work? The size of the network? I'm not sure, but it's a fact.
In any case, why not make it, Farcaster's unique selling point?
First of all, high quality conversations don't require a large network.
If you are interested in distrubution, you want to find the largest venue, ideally packed with people —when it comes to distribution and reach, size matters.
But if you want to have a good conversation, you pick a few, often a handful, of people —when it comes to engagement, quality matters more than size.
Second, the cost of using Farcaster (storage unit and signers costs) is better aligned with quality, than size —it's ok to add friction if you are more interested in audience quality than audience size.
Third, engagement and conversation drive daily, reoccurring usage. Every reply is a new invitation to respond or react, and the more time users spend on Farcaster, the higher the probability of sharing high-quality, original content.
How
If this is a strategy worth pursuing, we should review all features and touch points: Do they promote or facilitate conversations? Is there something we could add or change?
For example, can we improve how threads are presented in clients? Or maybe, is there an opportunity for a client that gives a better overview of long, nested threads and better tools to manage them?
How can we add more context to discussion threads? Would it add value if it was easy to see if the person who replied in a discussion about sports is a fan of team A or team B? Or in a political discussion if they are on the left or the right? Or in a crypto discussion if they are a BTC maxi, and ETH maxi, or chain agnostic? If yes, maybe we should introduce badges? Maybe badges that are channel-specific?
Or maybe we want better moderation tools per discussion. Would it make it a better place to hold discussions if I could moderate or token-gate or add some other type of control on who can respond? When they can respond, or how many times they can respond? Something else?
Should we look at FIP-2 again, through a different lens?
I'm sure that if we make conversation quality a top priority (even higher than better content), there will be many, and most probably, better ideas.
Final thoughts
Is focusing on engagement a better strategy than focusing on growth? I can't be sure, but it looks appealing to me.
While there may be a tension between network size and engagement quality, there is no tension between content quality and conversation quality. They are probably complementary.
Could it be a viable, long-term strategy? Again, I'm not sure. It definitely has its advantages at the stage we are right now, but maybe it will be less effective if the size of Farcaster grows 10x.
In any case, I think it's worth exploring the idea, even if it's only as a thought experiment.
