walked & thought (i’m not recording myself…) but here’s my head on killing the masters, and driving sustainable retention & “interesting content” to the platform by fixing the leaderboard 

reality is that nuking the OGs is not a binary toggle—it’s a systems-design question with second- and third-order effects; here’s how i see the moving parts:

1/ status & incentives

early adopters earned outsized reach by just being here first. that’s fine until the network’s marginal user can no longer break through the legacy moat. if a day-one video post autowins 100 likes while an actually useful deep dive & product update gets 20, you’re watching path-dependence strangle discovery

in practice, it means:

- new builders ship less because nobody sees them
- ct lurkers visit, scroll, decide “same clique, pass,” and bounce
- rewards funnels up to incumbents who push out tips, compounding the gap

→ the core unease isn’t envy; it’s a mispriced signal. the algo keeps saying “this is the good stuff,” while the builders & natives screams otherwise

2/ the three cohorts

- tribe 1 ~ signal ogs: ex/builders, polymaths, tech weirdos. crypto-adjacent but maybe not crypto-maxi. they add context, nuance, real reach outside the bubble. lose them & you forfeit narrative diversity

- tribe 2 ~ squatter ogs: first-mover clout, little net-new value. their likes are reflexive, their posts rarely travel. they’re not malicious, just noise-amplifiers

- tribe 3 ~ crypto devs / ct raiders: care about composability, capital, memetics. they build tooling, pump charts & bring liquidity—but also volatility

→ healthy farcaster = tribe 1 anchoring discourse & tribe 3 stoking velocity

→ tribe 2 is ballast; useful only until it turns to drag (today)… time to kill 

3/ re-weighting without collapse

full de-weighting of all OGs flips one monoculture for another… better:

- time-decay any early-fid bonus: followers earned 18 months ago lose some power each quarter. still rewards history, but the ladder pulls up slowly (probably inline)

→ better: where do the net-new users on the platform go? $tipn/ $noice? video content? micro-blogging? the data tells the story 

- multi-metric karma: marry onchain contribution (deploy a mini-app, tip from your own wallet, ship a hook) with social metrics (unique commenters, repost ratio, outbound clicks)

→ forces tribe 3 to do things, rewards tribe 1 for context, and leaves tribe 2 exposed

- topic entropy boost: posts that pull fresh tags or cross-graph links get a temporary surfacing bump. incentives exploration over echo (probably inline)

- weight across the week: monday post at 11am is not weighted the same as thursday post at 7pm or saturday post at 2pm (i’ve posted about this before). this is a countermeasure to protect the aggregate signal of group 1 against groups 2 & 3 (farm the leaderboard with food or thirst posts in last six hours, get nuked into oblivion; seriously, rate limit this garbage & mark em spam, it’s zero net-new value to the network)

→ none of that kills masters overnight; it just makes the throne contestable again, or at least directional pushes us that way 

4/ why ct still matters

every network graduates from intimacy to economy. we’re at the hinge: either become a crypto super-app (wallet layer, mini-apps, liquidity) or remain a nice niche forum. ct is the only funnel with enough bodies & capital to fund that leap. the irony: ct won’t stay unless discovery feels meritocratic. fixing the leaderboard is table stakes for courting them

→ killing tribe 2 & losing 20% of tribe 1 might be the only way; either way, pivoting ahead of a bull market when builders here are finally drawing ct attention is BAD for builders & their projects

we integrated crypto but never tried to make it work, now we’re pivoting. if crypto doesn’t work here, nothing likely does. it’s inherent & fundamental. i don’t make the rules. no one is coming here for science or micro blogging (they will churn when the tribe 2 & tribe 1 leaderboard fabrication ceases & their engagement & rewards go to zero as we have seen before)

- tam + wallets on tap: fc’s core audience is maybe 2k daily users; ct has 100× that. you need their wallets to even sniff meaningful scale—tips, mints, gas, all flow from that crowd

- money memes = growth loops: every jump in fc activity—$degen, cashtags & charts, $noice, $bnkr—was bolstered by ct migrations. the price or airdrop lit the beacon, the beacon pulled new users, new users → more builders → more apps. rinse, repeat. no ct, no meme ignition

- builder economics: mini-apps survive on throughput. if $10-50k/day of tips moves consistently, someone will ship the next $degen. if it’s $500/day, they ship nothing & leave. ct’s speculation engine bankrolls the option set

- escape-velocity & critical mass: wallet-native super-app = thousands of experiments, most failures. ct supplies the risk capital & dopamine to fund those failures. without it, fc tops out as a pleasant but tiny forum

5/ the video pivot™ 

→ mostly orthogonal, and sometimes harmful, imo

shorts diversify content but solve none of the above. they actually magnify clout concentration because video creation has higher friction; incumbents with built-in audiences capture outsized algorithmic placement. good for dopamine, bad for surface-area innovation. pursue it, sure—but only after the incentive layer is patched. how does this play here? 

→ 100% of tribe 2 & a good chunk of tribe 1 are the king makers here. they drive discovery for new incumbents with less established existing audience — this, at the expense of tribe 3 & a portion of crypto-focused tribe 1 — meaning tribe 2 is largely shit in & shit out & should NOT have anywhere near this amount of power in terms of driving leaderboard winners & content highlights (if tribe 2 drives the trending page, we are cooked, but why?) →

- intent mismatch: people historically open fc to talk markets, tokens, charts, governance, scaling, direction, building—words + wallet. 60-sec walk-and-talk vlogs & grwm shorts scratch a totally different itch. when they dominate the leaderboard, crypto folks bounce immediately: “wrong feed”

- winner-take-all dynamics: video reach scales with audience you already have. the early squatter ogs keep winning; new builders stay invisible. we try to drain the moat, and short creators backed by tribe 2 fill it right back up

- product focus tax: hosting, transcoding, moderation—video soaks up engineering cycles that could ship hooks, sdk docs, or wallet ux. opportunity cost is real

→ they can coexist, but siloed: if fc has to test video, give it a “clips” tab & its own karma bucket. keep the main feed merit-based onchain contribution + discourse. otherwise the brand message—“crypto builder hub”—gets fuzzy

6/ acceptable casualties imo

- we probably lose 10-20% of tribe 1 who equate any deeper crypto move with “wasteland”

- we probably see 60-70% of tribe 2 churn out once their engagement & rewards fall off, or more likely, they’re forced into creating more “interesting content”

7/ endgame

→ if new builders can’t acquire 500 organic followers in 90 days, the algo is clogged

simple. 

8/ bottom line

we don’t need to torch every OG; we need to make status renewable. decaying privilege, rewarding provable contribution, and diversifying surface area gets us there… 

peace follows not from silencing masters, but from making mastery a moving target 

9/ tldr 

- you need ct because it’s the only funnel with both bodies & capital

- video can coexist, but only siloed; in the main feed it reinforces squatter moats & blurs the crypto thesis

- double down on low-friction onchain toys, leaderboard re-weighting, and reward-back loops to maximize the odds of another $degen-style shockwave

- protect tribe 1, trim tribe 2, and give tribe 3 room to build—the network compounds when status is earned, not timestamped

in short:

→ “interesting content” is contextual: a chart breakdown of liquidity funnels is interesting to ct; a day-in-the-life vlog rarely is. flood the top slots with the wrong genre & you repel the very cohort that can bankroll growth 

→ allow tribe 2 to remain in power & the reward loops degrades over time, ending with content that’s not interesting to any single niche. tribe 2 produces uninteresting content & then pushes more of it to the top through first-movers. this alienates builders at its most fundamental level. moreover, all of these new kings will churn as novelty fades & rewards collapse, leaving us stuck with a pot of slop that builders don’t care about. so builder churn. rewards dry up. new creators churn. then its gg. 

→ interesting shorts on any niche can be found on almost any social media platform today. interesting crypto content can be found on maybe 2 platforms in total & the first is dying. now is our time to capitalize, not alienate.

Great take from @itsbasil per usual

Well worth the read and lots of great insights here

I generally agree with majority of this and I think the emergence of a true alternative client like TBA will likely help most of these issues

Stay Curious // iixii // Head of Crypto at https://www.lazertechnologies.com/  // Prev: CoinDesk, Roc Nation // based @basedevo