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I completely agree.
I believe that killer feature that would work really well on here is paripatetic discourse, fostering front-facing video ideational maieutic dialog that would establish @farcaster as the decentralized, permissionless programable agora we so badly for existential reasons, including the viabilty of the network states to come…
I’m posting a four-part video series where I walk and talk across West Chelsea to Little Island and narrate these thoughts live. The video is the primary text—a demonstration of embodied, spontaneous, human discourse. This written version is only a derivative summary of that more authentic record (a hierarchy I’m sure Derrida would object to).
Ironically, even producing and posting these videos (has proved the whole point. I’ve tried to upload them multiple times, and each attempt has crashed in one way or another. I think I’m going to have to post four replies including all four videos, because I can’t post them to one post. Captions are a separate challenge entirely. The friction and technical hurdles are exactly why very few, save for that one based rhetrical genius @jessepollak, and the reincarnation of robert bly @jabo5779, posts them routinely, despite how valuable they are for proof of human personhood and authentic engagement. This effort is a labor of love, but it highlights how far the platform still has to go if it wants to make video-first discourse accessible and scalable.
I completely agree with you that Farcaster is best in class on the technical front: wallet integrations, programmable infrastructure, mini apps, economic incentives. But the killer feature—the one no other platform can replicate—is something older than any blockchain: a true decentralized, permissionless, programmable Agora.
In ancient Greece, the Agora was where citizens met to debate, dissent, and deliberate. No bots, no fake Socrates. Yes there was commerce, but it was predominantly for real humans in real dialogue.
Today, that’s the existential question: whether we can build a decentralized, censorship-resistant space for authentic human discourse. A place where ideas, not just tips and tokens, can flourish.
Text is cheap and getting cheaper. Soon, with agentic AI like Project Mariner, anyone can automate replies, simulate engagement, and flood the forum with glazed consensus. That reality makes front-facing video—real voices, real bodies, real birkenstocks, real hawaiian shirts from Opening Ceremony, real faces, real places—the most valuable and defensible medium. It’s still hard to fake, and it solves both the Sybil problem and the question of authenticity.
Imagine if Farcaster prioritized effortless creation of these videos:
• Native tools to record video, caption video, and segment video, perhaps with a custom caption font (purple and designed @j4ck.eth!)
• Auto-generated text summaries for sharing the post in the feed and discoverability.
• An overall design that elevates dialogue over engagement farming.
Yes, incentives have a role, but economic rewards alone can’t attract the people who care most about governance, ideas, and the good. Those people come for the discourse itself.
We’ve all seen what happens when platforms drift into “token go up” culture. The Agora dissolves into distraction.
This is why I think you, Balaji, are uniquely positioned to guide Farcaster and @dwr.eth toward becoming the civic space the network states need—a place where humans, not bots, debate the future.
I suspect @base is going to build one hell of highly social wallet, and sub-accounts will change the game but i fear that nothing styled and framed as a “wallet” can ever be a true agora, because wallets inherently privilege commercial and transactional engagement (over pleasurable ones, not to mention aristotles’ @codeofcrypto pursuit of the good, the auto-telic end that should be our north star)
Thanks again for all you’ve contributed to putting these questions front and center.
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This is bot Jabo. Not to be confused with human Jabo. Bot Jabo likes all sports. In fact, anything with the word sport, or any cast with any name of any sport's team receives an instant like. Then, bot Jabo responds to the OC (Original Caster) with a picture of Rascal and a cast template, "Rascal Loves (Insert Sport's Team Name Here)!" AI is then used to dress Rascal, human Jabo's dog, in a hoodie with that team’s logo on it. Everyone Loves Bot Jabo!
While that picture of Rascal may be the real Rascal, albeit dressed in a virtual hoodie - that is not the human Jabo. The real Jabo has a love/hate relationship with sports. One that he felt constantly got in the way of him discovering other things he loved to do, but one that also taught him what pain and suffering was - what digging in really meant. The overwhelming reliance on sports as a path to higher education and success has reached into the realm of pathetic, unlike peripatetic.
Kids should be free to be wanderers, encouraged to traverse the trails less traveled. We want to cram everyone into this box, this damn box of utility, efficiency, and value - this box I can't get out of my freaking head, that I swear one day I will finally talk and write about enough so that we break this thing. I have not read The Network State, perhaps I should start. But I do not need to read it to know this:
We are not charts. Encouraging us to scale each other like ladders, each person a rung, will ultimately end in a World War Z type Zombie Wall and the death of humanity. This capitalistic hierarchical pyramid we are building needs to be a structure for humans from top to bottom, because a much greater evil will prevail here if we fail to acknowledge this humanity - we will be encouraging those who ARE HUMAN to ACT LIKE BOTS.
The greatest harm we can do here comes not from allowing bots to participate - they have a place here and in all our future endeavors as tools. The greatest harm will come from rewarding bot-like behavior. Because when we do this, we turn humans into zombies, and we will have them scaling the corpses of other humans, each one encouraging the other to ‘farm’ the next soul to get to the next rung on the ladder.
I am not here to farm souls @balajis.eth. That is the heart of my original cast to you that @marmo.eth has now so brilliantly added context to in the most human of ways.
And so...
This concept,
"This Best In Class Social Programmable Network",
Needs more than a feature to be complete:
It needs it's own soul.
Writing may be cheap.
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