True Man
@truemann
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walked & thought (iâm not recording myselfâŚ) but hereâs my head on killing the masters, and driving sustainable retention & âinteresting contentâ to the platform by fixing the leaderboard
reality is that nuking the OGs is not a binary toggleâitâs a systems-design question with second- and third-order effects; hereâs how i see the moving parts:
1/ status & incentives
early adopters earned outsized reach by just being here first. thatâs fine until the networkâs marginal user can no longer break through the legacy moat. if a day-one video post autowins 100 likes while an actually useful deep dive & product update gets 20, youâre watching path-dependence strangle discovery
in practice, it means:
- new builders ship less because nobody sees them
- ct lurkers visit, scroll, decide âsame clique, pass,â and bounce
- rewards funnels up to incumbents who push out tips, compounding the gap
â the core unease isnât envy; itâs a mispriced signal. the algo keeps saying âthis is the good stuff,â while the builders & natives screams otherwise
2/ the three cohorts
- tribe 1 ~ signal ogs: ex/builders, polymaths, tech weirdos. crypto-adjacent but maybe not crypto-maxi. they add context, nuance, real reach outside the bubble. lose them & you forfeit narrative diversity
- tribe 2 ~ squatter ogs: first-mover clout, little net-new value. their likes are reflexive, their posts rarely travel. theyâre not malicious, just noise-amplifiers
- tribe 3 ~ crypto devs / ct raiders: care about composability, capital, memetics. they build tooling, pump charts & bring liquidityâbut also volatility
â healthy farcaster = tribe 1 anchoring discourse & tribe 3 stoking velocity
â tribe 2 is ballast; useful only until it turns to drag (today)⌠time to kill
3/ re-weighting without collapse
full de-weighting of all OGs flips one monoculture for another⌠better:
- time-decay any early-fid bonus: followers earned 18 months ago lose some power each quarter. still rewards history, but the ladder pulls up slowly (probably inline)
â better: where do the net-new users on the platform go? $tipn/ $noice? video content? micro-blogging? the data tells the story
- multi-metric karma: marry onchain contribution (deploy a mini-app, tip from your own wallet, ship a hook) with social metrics (unique commenters, repost ratio, outbound clicks)
â forces tribe 3 to do things, rewards tribe 1 for context, and leaves tribe 2 exposed
- topic entropy boost: posts that pull fresh tags or cross-graph links get a temporary surfacing bump. incentives exploration over echo (probably inline)
- weight across the week: monday post at 11am is not weighted the same as thursday post at 7pm or saturday post at 2pm (iâve posted about this before). this is a countermeasure to protect the aggregate signal of group 1 against groups 2 & 3 (farm the leaderboard with food or thirst posts in last six hours, get nuked into oblivion; seriously, rate limit this garbage & mark em spam, itâs zero net-new value to the network)
â none of that kills masters overnight; it just makes the throne contestable again, or at least directional pushes us that way
4/ why ct still matters
every network graduates from intimacy to economy. weâre at the hinge: either become a crypto super-app (wallet layer, mini-apps, liquidity) or remain a nice niche forum. ct is the only funnel with enough bodies & capital to fund that leap. the irony: ct wonât stay unless discovery feels meritocratic. fixing the leaderboard is table stakes for courting them
â killing tribe 2 & losing 20% of tribe 1 might be the only way; either way, pivoting ahead of a bull market when builders here are finally drawing ct attention is BAD for builders & their projects
we integrated crypto but never tried to make it work, now weâre pivoting. if crypto doesnât work here, nothing likely does. itâs inherent & fundamental. i donât make the rules. no one is coming here for science or micro blogging (they will churn when the tribe 2 & tribe 1 leaderboard fabrication ceases & their engagement & rewards go to zero as we have seen before)
- tam + wallets on tap: fcâs core audience is maybe 2k daily users; ct has 100Ă that. you need their wallets to even sniff meaningful scaleâtips, mints, gas, all flow from that crowd
- money memes = growth loops: every jump in fc activityâ$degen, cashtags & charts, $noice, $bnkrâwas bolstered by ct migrations. the price or airdrop lit the beacon, the beacon pulled new users, new users â more builders â more apps. rinse, repeat. no ct, no meme ignition
- builder economics: mini-apps survive on throughput. if $10-50k/day of tips moves consistently, someone will ship the next $degen. if itâs $500/day, they ship nothing & leave. ctâs speculation engine bankrolls the option set
- escape-velocity & critical mass: wallet-native super-app = thousands of experiments, most failures. ct supplies the risk capital & dopamine to fund those failures. without it, fc tops out as a pleasant but tiny forum
5/ the video pivotâ˘
â mostly orthogonal, and sometimes harmful, imo
shorts diversify content but solve none of the above. they actually magnify clout concentration because video creation has higher friction; incumbents with built-in audiences capture outsized algorithmic placement. good for dopamine, bad for surface-area innovation. pursue it, sureâbut only after the incentive layer is patched. how does this play here?
â 100% of tribe 2 & a good chunk of tribe 1 are the king makers here. they drive discovery for new incumbents with less established existing audience â this, at the expense of tribe 3 & a portion of crypto-focused tribe 1 â meaning tribe 2 is largely shit in & shit out & should NOT have anywhere near this amount of power in terms of driving leaderboard winners & content highlights (if tribe 2 drives the trending page, we are cooked, but why?) â
- intent mismatch: people historically open fc to talk markets, tokens, charts, governance, scaling, direction, buildingâwords + wallet. 60-sec walk-and-talk vlogs & grwm shorts scratch a totally different itch. when they dominate the leaderboard, crypto folks bounce immediately: âwrong feedâ
- winner-take-all dynamics: video reach scales with audience you already have. the early squatter ogs keep winning; new builders stay invisible. we try to drain the moat, and short creators backed by tribe 2 fill it right back up
- product focus tax: hosting, transcoding, moderationâvideo soaks up engineering cycles that could ship hooks, sdk docs, or wallet ux. opportunity cost is real
â they can coexist, but siloed: if fc has to test video, give it a âclipsâ tab & its own karma bucket. keep the main feed merit-based onchain contribution + discourse. otherwise the brand messageââcrypto builder hubââgets fuzzy
6/ acceptable casualties imo
- we probably lose 10-20% of tribe 1 who equate any deeper crypto move with âwastelandâ
- we probably see 60-70% of tribe 2 churn out once their engagement & rewards fall off, or more likely, theyâre forced into creating more âinteresting contentâ
7/ endgame
â if new builders canât acquire 500 organic followers in 90 days, the algo is clogged
simple.
8/ bottom line
we donât need to torch every OG; we need to make status renewable. decaying privilege, rewarding provable contribution, and diversifying surface area gets us thereâŚ
peace follows not from silencing masters, but from making mastery a moving target
9/ tldr
- you need ct because itâs the only funnel with both bodies & capital
- video can coexist, but only siloed; in the main feed it reinforces squatter moats & blurs the crypto thesis
- double down on low-friction onchain toys, leaderboard re-weighting, and reward-back loops to maximize the odds of another $degen-style shockwave
- protect tribe 1, trim tribe 2, and give tribe 3 room to buildâthe network compounds when status is earned, not timestamped
in short:
â âinteresting contentâ is contextual: a chart breakdown of liquidity funnels is interesting to ct; a day-in-the-life vlog rarely is. flood the top slots with the wrong genre & you repel the very cohort that can bankroll growth
â allow tribe 2 to remain in power & the reward loops degrades over time, ending with content thatâs not interesting to any single niche. tribe 2 produces uninteresting content & then pushes more of it to the top through first-movers. this alienates builders at its most fundamental level. moreover, all of these new kings will churn as novelty fades & rewards collapse, leaving us stuck with a pot of slop that builders donât care about. so builder churn. rewards dry up. new creators churn. then its gg.
â interesting shorts on any niche can be found on almost any social media platform today. interesting crypto content can be found on maybe 2 platforms in total & the first is dying. now is our time to capitalize, not alienate. 27 replies
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On Friday, Polymarket showed a 75% chance the US would go to war with Iran. By Saturday, the site was down for me. Around midnight Polish time, ETH dropped to $2.2k, and just two hours later, headlines confirmed the US had entered the war. Markets really do see the future sometimes.
The worldâs full of unseen turmoil. Cryptoâs no different though. Since leading Degen, Iâve learned this space isnât all memes and good vibes. Behind the scenes, itâs cutthroat. Ideas get stolen, people stall competitors, smear reputations, pay bribes (Iâve seen it), and gatekeep access.
Everyone talks about building value, but itâs rarely that clean. One projectâs loss is anotherâs win.
Degen survives because Iâm willing to deal with that mess. And if cryptoâs this dirty, imagine politics. 24 replies
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