🧙‍♂️ on Farcaster

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I've observed a loop where newcomers latch onto welcoming "big" accounts by participating in a growing discourse centered around said accounts like pseudo celebrities which reinforces their mundane posting and makes them more relatable but then newcomers mimic this and instead get punished for "not being interesting" even though they're doing all the right things and big accounts aren't doing anything bad and it's all weird and I forgot to use punctuation and follower counts are bad okay bye

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I feel like SNS and video services have sort of done a gradual whittling down of celebrity awe over the years by making these “stars” relatable through private life exposure, whether wilfully or not. I think when details about the life of said celebrities was left to imagination and rumour this sort of elevated the mystery and intrigue about them, with only real coverage about them emerging from their professional works or specialties that have them saod status. Now we have people on the platform who may be in this celebrity status doing mundane casts like “I eat ice cream for breakfast” and everyone’s like “banger”when it’s just kind of low effort mundane casts but get standing ovations from their inner circle. When people see this success, naturally they want to replicate it and reinforce the feed with mundane casts. Making everything relatable is in a way a watering down of sophistification of the feed.

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🎯 And for what it's worth I think mundane posts are okay from time to time! It's just a matter of balance. The huge follower counts for some accounts have made it very hard to balance things. Farcaster feed content is much closer to IG today than it was a year ago. Which can be off putting because the app is not optimized for image/video posting, and if people wanted IG it's already there.

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I think the team’s approach to leaning in to video format is understandable from a business perspective of wanting to maximise growth by tapping in to popular mediums… but also think that at the cost of wiping out the text loving culture, it’d be at a cost of the literature types who can write beautiful insights in short or long form,ultra imatrlyleafin if the video format gives way to too much brain rot media. I think mundane posts are good too, with good balance like you mention. Because not everyone can pump out extraordinary every breathing moment. I guess the real question is if we go video/graphic heavy, what is Farcaster aiming to be, without being a clone of IG or TikTok? And if it’s just about adding crypto to the mix, what’s stopping IG or TikTok from doing that, such as adding a crypto wallet or tipping function to their existing platform in the future. I mean, monetisation and live stream tipping already kind of exists anyhow. It’s hard to put in to words, but Farcaster has its own allure from being different in culture and feeling from mainstream apps, while having niche advantages like miniapps, building in public, builder culture and first hand interaction which other platforms find hard to do (they focus more on oneway signal broadcasting to th masses and less discorse/mingling without the quibbling) But Farcaster still faces the problem of needing to kind of become mainstream in the future to maintain relevance and show growth results to stakeholders etc. In some way or another something’s gotta give I guess.

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