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Hey Joe,
I was initially responding to you on a keyboard, and then I decided to stay true to my initial Marshall McLuhan-like contention: there’s a different way we express ourselves in text and in speech. It’s almost a neo-Derridean point—that textocentrism prefigures a type of discourse. You know, “the medium is the message,” or “the form is the function,” and it ends up being caustic, acerbic, more biting, more critical.
So, in text, I was inclined to say critical things…like… challenging things. Discursively sharp things. To lean on the logos of the rhetorical triumvirate—ethos, pathos, logos—and say: well, logically that makes sense, but what non-social spaces or places have been successfully transformed into social spaces by features and functionality?
There is no app that’s like a “social doctor’s office,” where you’re paired with people who have the same condition so you can share tips, tricks, and support. People have tried variations of it, but it hasn’t worked—because a doctor’s office is an inherently private space.
Notebooks, kind of near and dear to the now, have been tried for ages—Evernote, from years back, for example. The idea was to make the notebook social. Yet notebooks are inherently private. It’s your own personal notebook. “Don’t read my notebook.” It’s like your diary. Even your commonplace book. So it’s a tremendous uphill battle.
Wallets suffer from two issues, if you think of them as an archetype. First: a wallet is not a place. It’s not somewhere you can go. You can’t say, “Meet me down by the wallet.” Unlike “meet me on campus”—which, by the way, could soon be the Vanderbilt New York campus just around the corner, so that’s a really appropriate plant. Or: “meet me in the virtual campus.” There’s no skeuomorphic analogy—what I call a metaform—like Facebook as college campus, or TikTok as dance studio. You can say, “Meet me there.” Or Instagram, which is like an art gallery—right here in Chelsea, where there are tons of galleries. It’s a setting where it’s social. You’re hanging out. You’re talking to people.
But you can’t say, “Meet me at the wallet.” People will look at you like you’ve lost your mind.
A lot of the functions you’re describing aren’t social in themselves. Attestation, verification, voting—these are private acts. Voting is a private function. You draw the curtain, step into the booth, and cast your vote. So it’s worth questioning whether these are even social functions at all. [Note that the tipping is not social. When's the last time you had your friends over to dinner and then you tipped them and said, "You did a great job tonight?" It's easy for crypto people to add money into transactions and say that money is fun. But there really is no analogy that connects that to the real world. It’s crucial to translate from URL to IRL, per @codeofcrypto]
I think @ted mentioned the other day that they’re excited about open graphs, mini apps, and ZK proofs. These are functional layers that may enable social behaviors, but they aren’t inherently social.And they’re not necessarily pain points users care about.
The positive news is this: there is a new social function—going to a public space. An Agora! That’s the archetype we have to be thinking about. A neo-decentralized Agora. [A fargora?] Think Hyde Park, Central Park—take your pick. The public streets. The city streets. The country lanes. A place where one can speak peripathetically—can enter into this mitotic dialogue with strangers at a distance. Farsighted strangers.
We need to lean into the FAR. Short-form content, especially text, creates short-term thinking—quick dopamine hits. So do points and rewards. But those aren’t as important as long-term serotonin waves.
The way to get there (to the Fargora!) is to enable functionality that makes front-facing video the default. Make it easier to natively film and caption these videos. Right now, if I want to caption this video—like @jesse.base.eth does on his walking talks, or @dwr.eth does—I have to put it through another app. Then I have come back and post it here. That’s difficult. Thats painful. [Just like it’s painful to pay for invites and storage @jabo5779, and it’s painful to figure out how to use and moderate channels @j4ck.eth @stephancill]. And once videos hit the five-minute mark, it becomes even more of a hassle.
If we enabled core native video features and functionality, we could create a custom caption style people would recognize immediately and say, “Oh, that’s a Farcast!”
Because, remeber, so many early platforms had distinctive signature formats and/or watermarks for their content. That is what virally drew in all the new users. Building a signature branded content frame is key. For @farcaster, the could and should be the purple captioned @walkntalk video…peppered with purple arch emoji.
(but happy to debate—ideally in front-facing video ;-)—with anyone who thinks better wallet functionality or higher rewards or open data and mini apps and zk will move the needle more than this one clear feature request.) 1 reply
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