Farcaster

- to establish itself, fc needs lots of users
- as a dau, you are unusual. lots of users are not like you
- merkle is optimizing to attract and retain lots of users who are not like you

once you internalize this, a lot of the conflict and confusion around merkle's strategy will resolve itself

A lot, but not all. 

As in: how do you expect to attract and retain the mob by giving them a lower quality experience on both fronts?

- Farcaster has focused on attracting <B tier influencers for what seems like forever. But people want to follow cool people, not less cool people rising to the local top through lack of competition. 

They also want to follow people in a niche, this is why Twitter throws you in a "theme ghetto" asap. Here the algo just assumes you want thirst traps and top accounts.

- the app still has horrendous bugs, loading times, responsiveness. We *know* this is a retention killer since before social media even existed!

The strategy makes sense as a first draft of something that was somehow abandoned in the middle.

Good news, there's pretty clearly competent people here and they can turn the ship if they want to. Question is do they want to.