Best of telegra.ph on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
15 stories from telegra.ph have been shared on Kiwi News since 23 May 2023, with 55 upvotes and 14 comments in total. The latest was shared on 10 July 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Farcaster's Locust Plague
Tim Daub argues that Farcaster's surge in daily active users, driven by a wave of airdrop farmers he calls "the Locust Plague," is likely to fade and that the platform will need a period of consolidation before retail users arrive. He cites Dune Analytics charts, curated by Pixel, showing new onboarding peaking on February 5, and notes that high churn after a user's first few days or weeks could push daily active users back toward a mean. He says the hype came from new features and the DEGEN memecoin launch, and that Farcaster onboarded much of the Ethereum-aligned crypto space, with Dan promoting the app on Bankless as a Reddit alternative for people with deep interests.
- My short-term roadmap proposal for Kiwi News
Tim Daubenschütz proposes that Kiwi News finish several outstanding items before starting its new roadmap, which runs until the end of 2023. He argues the team should push harder on device delegation, which he calls its strongest retention and engagement device, and that it should close the mainnet NFT contract and offer new users minting on L2. He also argues that the team should drop the "Art as Kiwi News Pass" strategy and treat the NFT as a utility ticket. He says a price cut from 0.042 ETH to 0.0042 ETH brought five new mints in five hours.
- Is "being active on Farcaster" a viable user acquisition strategy?
Kiwi News developer timdaub argues that being active on Farcaster is not an effective user acquisition strategy, and that the team should carefully manage its time on Warpcast and X. Over the last 90 days in Google Analytics, Warpcast and X each brought only 2-4% of new users, about the same number from X as from Warpcast despite much less activity on X. The article suggests a possible echo chamber effect, with the degen tips airdrop as the exception that reached new users, though many who minted the NFT did not use the product. The article also says the Warpcast and X bots did not produce the expected engagement or retention gains.
- Let's continue building our village!
Tim Daubenschütz argues that Kiwi News should keep building a small, independent link aggregator rather than chase growth like Farcaster, which recently added channels and increased its daily active users. He says Kiwi News received about 2000 USD this month from donations and sales, keeps operational costs at a minimum, and has not raised venture capital. He describes its protocol DAU growth as stagnating at 10, and says the site will continue to struggle to make ends meet for a while. He proposes a "multinational, small business" model built on independence, serving paying customers, and credible neutrality.
- Meditations on the Kiwi News content moderation policy
Tim Daubenschütz writes that the Kiwi News content moderation policy, introduced on June 6, 2023 to curb off-topic submissions, has become too restrictive and now holds back content from being posted. He notes that Alex Palmer and others pointed out early on that the document featured too many "DON'Ts," which made users second-guess new links before posting. He credits the policy with streamlining title submissions in the "How to submit" section and with helping keep off-topic content off the front page. The article sets the stage for a change and asks readers about their experiences, whether the site could benefit from a broader range of news, and whether central moderation leads to good outcomes.
- Ethereum addresses are the next hot commodity
Ethereum addresses with vanity prefixes or many zeroes are becoming tradable, according to a post by freeatnet. A short prefix like 0xC0FF33 can be generated on an M1 MacBook in about a day, while longer ones such as 0xC0FF3DA4 proved too hard to find locally, since difficulty grows roughly exponentially with length. Outsourcing to an address miner would reveal the private key, so the post describes asking a miner to find an address through contract deployment and then handing control to the buyer via a mutable proxy contract. 1inch proposes a version where ownership of the proxy is represented by an NFT that can be sold on any NFT marketplace.
- Update: PWAs now have a pull-to-refresh flow
- You are wasting your time on Twitter and Farcaster
The author, an entrepreneur selling a consumer software product, argues that spending heavy time on Twitter and Farcaster is a trap, comparing it to the rationalizations smokers use for their habit. Founders often justify tweeting and casting as necessary for promotion, but the author says the sites' tight-knit communities make them seem like the whole internet, which is not true. The author says that for their past project, rugpullindex.com, they found more promising audiences by posting to niche forums and subreddits, and that their last cast was 22 days ago.
- Kiwi doesn't have an entertainment factor
Tim Daub, writing about Kiwi News, argues that the platform lacks an entertainment factor and that this matters for users who want a quick social media hit. After uninstalling Warpcast, he found himself opening X, Substack and YouTube instead, and he says Kiwi's high interaction thresholds, such as expecting users to read a full article before writing or upvoting, make it a poor fit for that need. He asks how to add features like comments or a memes sub-kiwi, and how to lower the engagement bar, without compromising the platform's value as a place to learn about crypto culture.
- Update: Improving Kiwi News on-boarding
Kiwi News updated its on-boarding so newly arriving users better understand the site, after user interviews found many visitors did not know what it was for and some did not know Hacker News. The changes add a "Learn more" button beside a prominent "Connect" button that now signals the site is a web3 product, and the button leads to an updated sales page at /welcome. The post says the goal is to grow the community and sell more NFTs, and it invites user feedback.
- EA Sports Ultimate Team; First Impressions after 1,900 hours in CFB25 CUT
RNG card-pack mechanics in EA Sports Ultimate Team exploit players financially and psychologically, and stricter rules are needed to protect children. The example given is a $108 purchase for an 8% chance at a specific card, which works out to an expected cost of about $1,350 (12.5 attempts). A UK study cited finds 40% of children use loot boxes, with 5% accounting for half of £700m in revenue (The Guardian, 2021). EA's customer service score is listed as 28.53/200 by CustomerServiceScoreboard.
- Comment count heuristic removed from feed algo
The site's team removed a feed ranking rule that had boosted stories with more comments, after it produced a weird ranking and degraded feed quality. Tim Daubenschütz wrote that the rule, introduced the previous day, counted each comment as half an upvote, but it did not decay older comments the way upvotes decayed, so comments kept their weight over time. The post says comments are expected to influence rankings again in the future, and that product updates will now be posted on the site rather than in the Telegram channel.
- I must build "what I want" and then "what other people want."
timdaub argues that founders must first build what they personally want, and only then build what others want, because building solely for others' demands drains motivation. He says YCombinator's "build what people want" motto doesn't account for personal motivation, and after years of working on other people's priorities he quit freelancing to focus on his own project. In that project, he writes that customers mostly state obvious, stated preferences, and that they often want a "faster horse carriage" when the team is building a car. He also describes Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, speaking at a16z's startup school, who considered quitting over employees' push to refocus the company on value-driven goals before deciding he must first like what he works on. Timdaub says he still wants users and sees "build what people want" as useful once the founder's own motivation is secured.
- Is crypto dead?
timdaub argues that crypto is not dead, though the space feels deserted and its community has changed since the Twitter-centered era. He says the replies to Ryan Sean Adams' "What is it actually?" thread left him bearish because he saw no genuinely innovative projects in them. He attributes concerns to DeFi's block-space demand, which he says prices out non-finance projects, and to US regulation, which he says has diverted companies like Coinbase from focus. He points to Farcaster, Bluesky and his own app, Kiwi News, as signs of hope, and concludes that the spirit of crypto persists even if Crypto Twitter may be gone for good.
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