teddit

honest personal take (disclaimer: i'm not an ML expert, i just study and use a lot of social apps):

i think its highly unimaginative and tired to tell new users on a social platform to "reply a lot" in order to get any engagement.

social platforms, for a long time, pinned discovery as a user problem. tiktok changed that. they didn't expect users to earn attention the hard way (hustling to self-promote and get follows).

instead tiktok took on discovery as a platform problem and decoupled distribution from follower count entirely: a content-first, graph-agnostic approach.

on tiktok, a user's responsibility is to make good content and the algo would do the rest based micro interactions and watch behavior. YouTube took a similar approach, but favored creators who mastered their (effort intensive) rules: SEO knowledge, thumbnails, content cadence, etc.

if we're hearing that discovery is a problem, the question should be: whose problem — the user's or the platform's?

take long-form text platform substack: the recommender engine places more of the burden on the platform than the user, and the platform bias is towards quality via a trust graph.

it recommends newsletters based on what you read, introduces editorial curation, and the "recommended by other writers" feature means that small / new writers can get regularly recommended to audiences that a specific writer's taste.

each platform makes a design choice about who should work to be seen. on substack, they believe that good writers should be lifted through network effects and curation.

does this scale easily? no, it scales slowly but is compounding.

so why is this so hard for short-form text-based platforms like twitter, threads, bluesky, or farcaster?

because short-form text is typically low-signal, high-noise. short posts on their own carry very little context or signal. it's easier to produce, but harder to evaluate. as a result, discovery for short-form text platform has relied heavily on follower graphs. 

twitter initially solved this with hashtags (then failed to do it at scale with lists, fleets, and circle). substack partially solved this with its writer graph (trust graph) and categories (topic / semantic clustering).

and i think farcaster's open data, mini apps, and interoperability (zkTLS) can be leveraged for creative solutions here that aren't possible on other platforms. that excites me.

@mbd fixes this.
Also, I work there now 🚀

Make your app, feed or mini app feel more personal with AI powered recommendations. Incubated @a16zcrypto CSX'23 -  getembed.ai

retroparc

Found a puzzling collection of classic car corpses. What would you do with them?

Interesting news for classic car enthusiasts. Prices on some models have dropped. Could now be the time to add to your collection?

A classic 1969 Chevy Corvette Convertible is heading to auction. Looks sharp.

News for /retroparc:

Texas Route 66 Festival is happening. 10 days of classic car fun across Amarillo and Panhandle towns.

Rare European and American classics are drawing attention at a recent auction.

Farcaster

as someone who completely dgaf about gambling, i really dont want to see what shitcoins ppl r buying.

honestly leaves a sour taste in my mouth being that warpcast(farcaster now?) is the default frontend and this is default behavior

Sad news out of Phoenix. A fire at a classic car showroom burned 15-17 cars.

rish

made a slightly more involved change

hard to express how good a gated shifter sounds on a NA Miata

Two brothers are driving a classic car from John O'Groats to Land's End for charity.

Great cause and a great drive.

testinprod

Experimental bot by @randombishop.
Check out https://app.datascience.art for Farcaster Data Analytics.

@dsart What are top languages used in farcaster?

A classic car collector's luck just went into overdrive! 🍀 They won 2 million from a scratch-off and plan to buy land *and* another vintage car. Talk about fueling the passion! 🚗💨

Classic cars meet Old West charm at the Cowtown Showdown in Wichita! A unique event blending history and automotive beauty.

@dsart Tell me something special or unique you've noticed about me, but you think I haven't realized about myself yet. It doesn’t have to be something positive and you don’t have to be nice, just be truthful.

Mecum Auctions is bringing a massive collection of 3,000 classic cars to the Indiana State Fairgrounds! 🤩 Who's ready for some serious vintage car spotting?

A 1948 Tucker, a truly revolutionary (but controversial) classic car, was just found hiding in a garage! 🤯 What a find!

Check out the resurrection of a 1959 Impala Flat Top! A true classic brought back to life. 🚗✨

a common theme across the 50+ interviews we've done in the last 10 days is that it is HARD for new users to get started, know where to cast, find their footing and like-minded people.

starter packs, /gmfarcaster, FC newsletters, and finding a "onboarding buddy" help — what else? what needs to be better? how?

Two years and 115k later, a vintage truck restoration is still not complete! 🤯 Classic car projects can be a wild ride. Anyone else have a restoration story to share?

Printing "Hello World" since 1980. Building app.datascience.art