Cameron Armstrong on Farcaster

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@androidsixteen.eth

Ted: “ok you guys, let’s stop talking about Farcaster on Farcaster — new users think it’s weird” Everyone, last week: “bet” Everyone, this week: *posts leaderboard screenshot every 2 hours to engagement farm*

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Cameron Armstrong

the problem is every crypto twitter big dawg that gets nerdsniped by farcaster (even if just for a week or two) literally just wants to talk about the thing that nerdsniped them it’s their new toy and our new toy is their temporary fascination with our told toy no way to acquire new nerds without gettin nerdtalk

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@androidsixteen.eth

Great articulation I think onboarding the crypto nerd cohort with fancy money toys is at odds with acquiring GA users who don’t care about the nerdy stuff (hence Ted’s feedback) It’s like a conflicted GTM — do you want to niche down or scale?

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Cameron Armstrong

Yea I agree in the general case but in our specific farcaster case we have a long tail deconfliction problem Crypto long tail cares first about free internet money and then accidentally gets entertained/may stick around for the memes + vibes Normal long tail just wants memes and jokes and content Crypto long tail will listen to whatever boring shit the CT big dawgs will say bc they think it might reveal alpha or a shitcoin or w/e So all the normie signal is blurred by the arguably more incentivized CT long tail class I don’t think there is a clean GTM that lets you acquire both bc as you pointed out they are fundamentally at odds. Best idea I have is further siloing the feed and basically engineering a “crypto farcaster algo” and a “non crypto farcaster algo” to separate the cultures but I think that’s unfortunately worst of both worlds strategy My guess is merkle continued full bore money audience a la coinbase forced growth and gambling games or they shut down in <2 years Long term, i think we need to make mini apps that give a real reason for communities to hang out more. Combo that with revitalized channels thst looks closer to discord with some public feed connected components and we might have a chance at being a permanent place on the internet e

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@androidsixteen.eth

I think you’re right about the segregated feeds, and that seems to be what’s happening I just don’t think the degen growth strat leads to quality growth — people who come for money are mercenaries. You can extract swap fees from them, but you’re not going to build civil society And speaking as a non gambling mini app dev, I need more “normal” users to grow and for creators to have a big enough audience to monetize well. The gamblers don’t care about good content

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Cameron Armstrong

Yea I certainly have my tinfoil hat feelings of relegation to the off-meta feed haha I also agree, but with maybe a huge caveat I think the Merkle team has very strong opinions about the challenge of content generation and very little attachment to individual creators outside of avoiding the anger of longtime users Gun to my head I bet they believe: - Most people will always make bad content (or at least content that is “bad” outside their immediate social circle) - Creators as a class are fundamentally economically unsustainable at least at current % of population rates (thats why we get sub min wage weekly prizes not something more structured) - AI content esp infinitely generative custom content will supersede most if not all content creators in the next 5-10 years - The normies will follow the AI content - But since normies don’t use crypto apps yet, let’s prioritize CT big dawgs So normal users aren’t coming anytime soon

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Uncle HODL pfp

Pretty crazy to say normal users aren’t coming soon when Farcaster is atp one of the best first steps for a new normal user. There’s just a lack of content/reach to get them here (imo)

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Cameron Armstrong

I agree with you and I don’t 🤷‍♂️ Farcaster is for sure the easiest way for normie to interact w crypto, but crypto is nuclear waste to normies rn especially so to the traditionally “creative” class on the internet which is left leaning and hates Trump who has de facto branded crypto as Republican (for now) So how will we ever get content quality up to compete with any of the other similar offering across the internet that arent saddled with the extra baggage of being associated with toxic stuff?

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Uncle HODL pfp

Idk tbh but I think normies are purely reactive, so in the same sense that trump has reinforced the toxic label… I believe it really only takes one person to say it isn’t… or to explain how its a major opportunity. My wife and I have been making food content for a few years and it’s become insanely competitive & saturated… I showed her a dune dash with all channels active users and it’s easy to see how untapped this app is (so she’s taking it slightly more seriously)

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