Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Why is a TikTok-like algorithm for giving new users a boost hard? 1. Social network vs. social media — we started as a follow-based social *network*. The core audience on the network uses a follow graph to express interests. It's also a social network vs. social media (i.e. television with an algo on phone). TikTok was a broadcast / interest-based algo from the start. 2. Narrow focus with a novel primitive — TikTok was extremely successful with a single category — young people (mostly women) dancing / singing to music with high remix-ability — and it took them several years to expand to their next category (gaming-oriented content for younger men). This existed for multiple years before Meta made the big shift to video on Instagram in August 2020. 3. User acquisition — They spent billions of dollars per year on user acquisition (infamously re-acquiring the same users multiple times). So there was a massive audience (even if not retained) to distribute the videos to (with an at-scale AI algorithm from their parent company Bytedance). So if you boost without the audience, you don't get the same result. 4. Text limitations — videos have a longer shelf life vs. text tends to feel stale after a day. There's also a high degree of unsaid context and in-group value (a typical cast from @six or @gwart has 3 layers to the onion). It's also harder to make a widely interesting text post vs. a video (or image). 5. Text is linked to who you are — a video is more likely to stand on its own (assuming it's visually stimulating) whereas what makes text interesting (on a relative basis) depends on who is saying it. Imagine the average new user coming into the network saying "gm happy to be here" vs. someone with 500K+ followers on Twitter saying the same thing. The engagement is as much about the person as what's being said. (Ironically, this is why anons have a lot of success on text-based social networks -- a lot of work to breakthrough of course -- but once you do no one is judging your opinion based on your credentials but on the merits of how smart / funny you've been).
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Erik
@eriks
if fc looked like tiktok i wouldn't be spending much time here tbh, and if tiktok fc works and there is demand for it someone will build the separate client maybe i'm naive, but i do think fc is onto something w irl connection (making friends and having convo instead of broadcasting the next viral trend), i've made friends with 100s of ppl here and have met irl with 15 or so, in multiple places around the world. hard to say if this environment can scale in a big way yet, but w an economy being built here too i think it makes sense to try to make it as similar to irl as possible community focused instead of "going viral" focus - just like irl, status games still apply in local communities lol ultimately the incentives will determine if fc wins - ownership for users, distribution for creators and ppl building things, i think it's off to a great start if the long-term shift from offchain to onchain thesis is correct
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