0 reply
20 recasts
20 reactions
23 replies
18 recasts
149 reactions
I've been reflecting on market force and structure as it presents an alternative to more institutional governance. right now, it seems prudent to subdivide Store of Value into institutional control (like treasury companies) and agentic control (like tipping).
the symptoms of the "hard time" that I see people having with all online social is some overexposure by ulterior design. for example, people complain about labels (https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol/discussions/216), because they are app-level and not the same as user-based emoji reactions (https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol/discussions/89). both can be negative abuse vectors, both can be hidden by one app or the other, but one is more centralized, so that choice and its consequences are acceptable? just looking at X or Bluesky is frustrating, because one faction or another is brigading or being facilitated. why would leaning on the more controllable lever produce global results?
it's very difficult to be agentically liberal with the "free speech is not free distribution" when it's one-sided like that. on the other hand, most people reveal a preference for positive proximity. and furthermore, an overwhelming majority of users aren't desperate to assimilate, they're not lining up for institutional announcements.
most users want validation. they're busy people that settle for superficial succor, fuel for their beliefs over their concerns. they're sitting on resources for garage sales and gigs, rather than looking forward to ads and data-entry on their choice of videoscroller.
a while ago, I brought up the need for region-specific clients to buffer culture clash. if Base is sincere about onboarding millions of content creators, it doesn't make sense to funnel every class of agency to one chain of supermarkets for a vanity metric like gross engagement. that way, we see the mini-apps are kinda generic or derivative, and the "winners" are like ivy league entrants, insofar as there must be a much bigger runner-up institution, underneath.
what's the edge over big platforms with the leisure to split audience by algorithm? this is where NFTs as community badges really flourished, and a similar abstraction percolates across video platforms like tiktok/youtube, as self-referential language. *these stop thriving when the institution pushes lingua franca over vernacular*
back to the original point. are we just sitting back and applauding the same rogue's gallery for lifestyle, or asset accumulation? I think a particular crowd settles for that, not the general public. I think global "layer zero" of social media is chapter-based, and consumer-patrons may group around one house of creators, but are they indentured or tithing their life's value in that direction? I think it's an inferior exchange compared to some town with regulars of some local third place referencing the grapevine between all agents of nearby workplaces who know and subcontract each other. there can be modest growth with unimpressively positive cash growth, but that moves more genuine culture forward in aggregate.
maybe the concentration is the best attempt at institutional direction with asymmetric return, maybe SoV spikes for the few with the most skin in the game. but it's timing the market, not time in the market, and it's not retentive. at some point, even big platforms need to make history that's referenced, and one can argue that they fail to capture that kind of attention, as very few users will recall anything but the title of the lore.
I don't think the answer is to design retreats like paywalls, artificial companionship, or any other self-defeating feature. there must be many capita of values that should be schlepped to the local bazaar, not some direct mecca to global dominion. 0 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
