Completely agree with Polynia, but, honest to god, that battle is basically lost on a cultural level. Dan is an ex Coinbase and that Degen attitude shines out of him, and it has shined when there was an opportunity to siphon off money and us it for his company. This is a senior CEX exec, not a crypto missionary. Wake up sheeple. Then to @horsefact‘s comment: IMO it doesn‘t matter whether WC/FC embraces social features over financial ones. It‘s already outside of that team‘s control! Yacek just YOLO launched Degen and others followed suit, so to put all of the responsibility on the Warpcast team is misleading! They don‘t have control and they don‘t want it either. My problem with the crypto space is that the scamming and free-riding Degens are now operating in plain sight. We have made launching casinos so mainstream that some people even consider it reputationally/morally unproblematic for their personal brand. WC is cooked because the people I was fleeing from when FTX collapsed are now operating on WC and in plain sight. Fuck them! I started Kiwi News on a mission to reform this space because I had grown tired of this overfinancialization, and because in my view, people were missing the forest for the trees. All these excessive speculators came AFTER DeFi. But before DeFi there were hundreds of interesting use cases this technology was useful for! All of these are now drowned out by the noise from these plague launching scams to enrich themselves in the short term. Fuck Warpcast, fuck the crypto space! If this is the terminal market, fuck it, it‘s not worth building. But as long as we have still faith that the actual usefulness of crypto can outperform the casinos, I‘m happy to shout at people online for not understanding.
hear, hear 👏🏼
since there's such dissonance, and due to permissionlessness, there is such a pluralism, then current social media has clearly suffered representational collapse (and frighteningly, apps like TikTok & Telegram are the furthest away) but first, as an aside, how am I doing? I'm a self-professed degenerate and I spam warpcast as much as anyone else. if I'm causing offense & fatigue, I apologize for that. as far as solutions, I'm pretty confident that what's needed are expositional features. everyone contains multitudes, but there is clearly non-negligible, even prohibitive, cost of expression. pretty much every user deletes their drafted expression, even though that expended energy can be adapted to further writing. frankly, I'm just wondering how to manage this on a personal level, so I have to wonder if others run into the same thing. downstream, there's linkedin/threadboi, pseudonymous, and anonymous social media, so the salient question is: where do these fit in the least complex way? btw, Duolingo founder is known for gig economy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6FORpg0KVo). education is probably one of the highest aspirations that social networks are capable of. I think there's something actionable in getting users to act where they typically churn, task by task, and to make this immersively rewarding, by arbing the preference between those three categories. is lurker X going to start posting prolifically if there's an anon slop bucket? is shitposter X going to switch to longform because they're viewing interest Y? what's the path between quests in a gamified social app & profile flair? quite honestly, I cringe at derailed communication. it's the most fundamental way in which we thrive. but we need to introspectively weigh the opinion that current moderation & client opinionation is too little, too late. we're in a dark forest without sufficient cognitive security, and "not-a-bot" specifications do not have enough depth. attention is solidly on personhood & proof-of-humanity, not grouphood and multiplayer publishing. there are too many collisions because the market is not sufficiently routed. P.S. if the crypto space really is this, more URL2IRL invites the possibility of co-adjusted participants getting to criticality; as long as the computer science advances & we focus on coordination, groups outside of the dark forest will further discover more content from old content & day-to-day mundanity.
I am cool with Dan of leverage the DEGEN growth to get that 150 mil to build social value first Farcaster. That my theory and I am sticking to it XD.
Will re-pose the question I asked in the replies: there are basically no financialized features built into Warpcast or the protocol, just open primitives and emergent behavior. So what concrete things do you want the Warpcast team or protocol to do differently? What does it actually mean to have this "aggressive focus?"
As I have already said, this is a question of leadership and a vibe that Dan has to set, but he has not been setting it because he's endorsing this type of behavior over, for example, a more modest attitude towards financialization. > there are basically no financialized features built into Warpcast or the protocol, just open primitives and emergent behavior. I strongly disagree here. In an alternative universe, Warpcast could have also worked on an open-source social wallet that would have given anyone the opportunity to build a social app like it has. But instead, it has focused on maximizing the value of its equity, which some of its members have sold on the secondary market for a lot of dollars, from what I have heard. Frames is made so that web3 actions go through Warpcast and that Warpcast controls them entirely, whereas the regular web3 works on the neutrality of the world wide web, people's servers. These are not "open primitives" and the wind is generally blowing in a different direction. Pair that with the recent "vibe" hate for PWA from Dan directly and also, thereby, endorsing Scoop, essentially nothing more than a iOS shitcoin trading app that steals people's personal brand and makes it tradable, and you perfectly know what's up and what "aggressive focus on social values" means.
Hey @horsefacts.eth, I think it's about setting the tone and app (Warpcast) tweaks that follow through. If you think of Warpcast as media (social, but still media), then Dan is the editor. He used to set the Farcaster tone by handpicking the first 10,000+ users, building a dunk-free culture, betting on features such as channels, and sharing "This is a low-effort reply" posts. And IMO now is the time for him to take a stance. I think the reason he didn't do it is because the incentives here are mixed: on one hand, he wants the network to grow, and people trying to generate $ have indeed been growing the network (as seen by DAU numbers). On the other hand, if the network turns into a memecoin spamming den, then Farcaster's value (both from the monetary and utility POV) will go down. So imagine that Polynya was the CEO of Merkle, and they saw people launching memecoins and tipping $DEGEN, $HAM, and others in the feed. What would they do?
> He used to set the Farcaster tone by handpicking the first 10,000+ users, building a dunk-free culture On god, this hasn‘t worked out in my view. When I criticize Dan or others in leadership at WC, I grow the resentment of everyone involved in this leadership class. Then suddenly some anon will behave badly towards me a day later or some „friend“ will have a snarky comment that probably originates from me having criticized WC leadership. IMO this is cancer because it is only „dunk-free“ culture on a very superficial and American level. When Salvino says that PWAs are shit, he anonymizes the dunk as if he means „noone specifically,“ so he‘s not held accountable because noone was meant specifically. But this is as much unconstructive dunking behavior as is the classic „being hard on a person.“ It just masks as more culturally compatible to American critique culture than actually personally offending someone. IMO the Twitter medium doesn‘t lend itself to village culture. I‘m a nobody on Twitter and so I can say anything I want. In its context, it‘s anyways not relevant, unless I‘m the main character. But on WC, because we‘re in the village and since there‘s perfect information symmetry, everything I say will be held against me. It‘s so exhausting. The only way to fix this is by massively growing to Twitter‘s size. But all this talk about the URL to IRL vision doesn‘t work for me at all. It‘s normal to have conflicts with people if you‘re an honest and earnest person. My goal here is to build the crypto space into something good. I’m not here to make friends as an end. That’s for private life. But then meeting up with these people IRL is just not comfortable. Vibes aren‘t immaculate, it‘s not working for me. And frankly crypto is too important of a technological narrative to compromise wrt certain behavior „to make IRL friends.“
> Frames is made so that web3 actions go through Warpcast and that Warpcast controls them entirely, whereas the regular web3 works on the neutrality of the world wide web, people's servers. These are not "open primitives" and the wind is generally blowing in a different direction. I don't get this. Frames *are* other people's servers. The Farcaster frames spec is open enough that even competing platforms have now adopted it. You don't need Warpcast at all to use a frame. In fact, the existence of the content you dislike so much is evidence that the primitives are open and permissionless! A hundred different "check my $BOZO allowance" frames are not my vision of frames serving their highest possible purpose, but that's tough shit because anyone can create one without asking for permission.
I actually don‘t have a problem with the Frames standard. I agree that Frames are an open primitive, but I perceive Frames as inherently part of Warpcast, which is closed source and for which MM has raised a bunch of capital and where Dan makes IMO bad rules etc.