THE RESTORATION OF FRIEND SPEECH ($2048 PRIZE) Farcaster began as a community of friends — specifically Dan Romero’s friends-of-friends — and it thus implicitly had the social norm of friend speech. It was really Friendcaster. However, it couldn’t maintain that norm at scale, in part because it lacked an army of human moderators to enforce its pre-existing terms of service. And thus Farcaster was on track to fail. But with the ~95% support we’ve received in our recent decentralized digital democratic election, we now have a mandate for the restoration of Farcaster. With scalable AI moderation, we can finally create the first digital Singapore, where an in-person level of civility facilitates a high-trust community, and thus a high-value digital economy. And we couldn’t be more excited about what’s next. So: let’s discuss our recent election, the motivation for the restoration, and the economic importance of civility. At the end we’ll close with a new kind of Farcaster Prize: $2048 in content prizes, for creating vertical videos on Norbert Elias’ book on why civility was actually essential for large-scale cooperation rather than a mere nice-to-have. 1. THE ELECTION First, some numbers on our first decentralized democratic election. As you can see from fc.dylanbrodeur.org and verify onchain, we received 26,000+ onchain votes for our new social smart contract, representing ~95% of all accounts that voted, and including many of the original Farcaster users, including both previous CEOs (@dwr and @rish), but also Linda Xie, Jesse Pollak, Alok Vasudev, and many others. The silent supermajority is silent no longer; there’s now overwhelming, cryptographically provable support by named accounts for the restoration of friend speech to Farcaster. Importantly, prior to the election on October 17, we moderated out only 271 abusive accounts, or about 1% of the 26,000+ onchain votes. Of those 271 accounts, we received 85 appeals and have accepted ~67% of them. The remaining ~200 unapologetically abusive accounts repeatedly violated the pre-existing Farcaster terms of service, by doing things like issuing memecoins to celebrate the murder of an innocent father, wishing death on specific people, promoting every kind of racial, class, gender, national and religious hatred, harassing named others with random obscenities, and running an endless array of spammers and bots. Many of these abusive accounts were already widely blocked or muted. However, despite being less than 1% of the Farcaster electorate, the abusers formed a loud, mean, unrepresentative minority who intimidated friendly accounts into silence. The answer to such a thing is democracy: our ~95% of pro-social netizens now provably outnumbers that abusive ~1%. In addition to the ~1% that we moderated out, there’s also another ~4% who chose to opt out of the new Farcaster. While of course on one level we’d like everyone to want our newly abuse-and-harassment-free Farcaster reference client, on another level we’re glad to see this because (a) it proves there was a true democratic choice as a sufficient number actually did choose to opt out and (b) it helps advance Farcaster client decentralization. Fundamentally, the core difference of opinion is over whether anyone actually has a “right” to run up to strangers online and endlessly scream curses at their digital faces, and moreover whether others must not just endure but *fund* such abuse indefinitely. Such behavior had unfortunately become too common on Farcaster, which is why we held the plebiscite, but we just don’t agree that this claimed right to free screams exists within the reference client. It's good that those people who think differently chose other clients and opted out; that's the magic of Farcaster. For everyone else, for the ~95% of accounts that opted in, let’s give a bit more history on why we’re committed to restoring the original Farcaster norms of friend speech, and then scaling that norm to digital Singapore with AI. 2. THE RESTORATION What was the original purpose of Farcaster? It was meant to be a techno-optimistic exit from the anarcho-tyranny of pre-2022 social media, and a return to a community of friends. I know this because I discussed decentralized social networks in detail both online and in-person with Dan for many years before Farcaster was born, and was also one of Farcaster’s very first users and investors. In other words, I know what Farcaster was meant to be…as opposed to what much of Farcaster unfortunately became, namely an original community of friends that was increasingly surrounded by a non-community of airdrop farmers, automated fakes, and even aggressive foes. It’s worth understanding how this degeneration happened, so that we don’t repeat it. Fundamentally, the norms of early Farcaster were like the unwritten norms of small town America. Everyone knew each other and got along. Those positive-sum friends then created wealth; that wealth attracted a flood of zero-sum farmers and negative-sum foes, which then in turn drove many of the friends into silence. The lesson is that the norms of small town America, almost tautologically, don’t scale beyond a small town. What does scale to millions is Singapore. Singapore achieves something extremely similar to small town America, namely a high-trust society with spotless streets and minimal crime, where anyone can walk any time of day or night without fear. Amazingly, it combines that with the merits of big city America, namely international capitalism, openness to experience, and the inclusion of people from different races and religions. Singapore achieved this by first establishing social order, by creating a society where spitting on the ground, public obscenity, drug abuse, and the like were simply prohibited. It became a shining island of civility amidst a sea of anarchy and tyranny in its neighborhood. On a pound-for-pound basis, Singapore then became both the strongest state and the strongest market in Asia, making the country admirable to both center-left administrators and center-right entrepreneurs in the Anglophone world, and a model for Asia’s most important leaders over five decades, from Deng Xiaoping to Narendra Modi. Indeed, if you try putting a valuation on Singapore itself, estimated as either (a) the number of people times the net worth per person, or (b) the number of square feet times the average price per square foot, you get a number around $5-10 trillion. It is thus itself one of the most important startups in the world, the original startup city. And because it greatly influenced the development of both modern China and India, the #1 and #3 economies in the world, it’s also one of the most influential startups in world history. Again, all that began by establishing civility. The Singaporean norms against public swearing and spitting meant that its citizens could trust each other to behave themselves on small things, which meant they could potentially trust each other on big things, which is how they began to cooperate at scale, and how Singapore started to win business from the global market. Civility towards strangers of different races, classes, and religions was one of the core values that underpinned Singapore’s valuations. That’s why the vision of Network School Farcaster is to first create a digital Singapore, with in-person norms of civility similar to Lee Kuan Yew’s city state. We’ll then print out that friendly community at meetups, popups, and permanents around the world, like Farcon and Network School. And once that works, we’ll turn Farcaster into a platform for civilized people who want to find, found, or fund their own startup societies or network states. Along the way, we’ll add many features to Farcaster as it currently stands, but always with an eye towards incentivizing positive-sum behavior. All right! Election recap over. Details of the next $2048 Farcaster prize are in the reply below; we're asking you to create a video around Norbert Elias' pioneering work on Medieval Europe, to explain why inter-personal civility is a prerequisite for large-scale cooperation.
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$2048 FOR FARCASTER CLIENTS Anyone can build a Farcaster client and run a read node to get data from the protocol. There are developer tutorials on the web[1,2,3,4], but your mission in this prize, should you choose to accept it, is to improve them by collecting all relevant info and making it incredibly easy. Specifically, we want you to get it down to three commands, as described in your quickstart and then detailed in your tutorial: (0) Provision necessary compute via script (1) Set up a Snapchain read node (2) Create a client that reads from that node The read node should run on its own, with no API keys from anyone. You just furnish the compute. Note that a read node syncs the network but does not accept writes, so your client should read from your own node and submit casts to a validator endpoint; the tutorial should explain how that works. The client should be able to import an existing seed phrase for an account that already has storage, use that seed phrase to issue the client its own app key (one small Optimism transaction), and then post with that key: read the feed, post casts, follow and react, and include/exclude casts from any other client. In addition to the quickstart at the top of the page, the tutorial should be mobile- and desktop-friendly, and should explain key protocol concepts as it goes (e.g. FIDs, custody addresses, app keys, Snapchain messages, read nodes vs validators, storage rent). Anything that someone running a client and read node would need to know. You can use AI, but your output must *not* be AI slop, as ultimately determined in our sole discretion. To qualify for a prize, you need to have at least one other human user successfully go through your tutorial and create a read node and client. They then need to post on Farcaster publicly vouching for the quality of your work. You can go the extra mile of course, like adding Chinese translation, adding a 59s vertical video, and so on. But getting more humans to vouch for your tutorial will be the most powerful signal. To enter, submit a reply to this post with three URLs: (1) your microsite with the quickstart + tutorial, (2) the associated GitHub repository with all MIT-licensed open source code, and (3) the link to your voucher's public endorsement on Farcaster. Prize: $2,048 first place, $512 second place, $128 each for honorable mentions, subject to whether there are enough good submissions. Paid in USDC to your public Farcaster wallet address by default. Deadline: your reply with three URLs must be submitted within seven days exactly from this post's timestamp. That’s it! Go learn the Farcaster protocol yourself, help others learn how to boot up their own clients, earn crypto for doing it, and increase practical freedom of association.
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THE FARCASTER PRIZE With 10,000+ votes counted, we're at 94.4% support for the new Network School Farcaster. Dylan put together a great visualization of this first decentralized digital democratic election. In his post below, you can see the provable, onchain, cryptographically verifiable votes streaming in for the new social smart contract. As a thank you, Dylan is the first recipient of a Farcaster Prize for positive-sum behavior on the platform. We've awarded $1024 to dylanb.eth via Base at the public address he listed[1,2]. Importantly, we're going to make systematic use of prizes to fund public digital infrastructure on Farcaster. This will be how we bootstrap a true cryptoeconomy. Because once we can get useful digital work done here for the core platform, we can bring many digital employers to Farcaster. And we have plenty of capital allocated for the bootstrapping phase. So: go read the developer docs (docs.farcaster.xyz/developers), and you can be the next Dylan. More to follow soon, and congratulations to dylanb.eth! [1,2]: See reply for proof-of-payment to dylanb.eth's public Base address.
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