Community Onchain Virtual Summit Day 2: Building communities with Farcaster channels and OpenRank
Aired Date
February 22, 2025
Hosts
Series
Special Event
Episode
Community Onchain Virtual Summit Day 2
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/f9rkSCSTMZookay here we go
and gm farcaster and twitter and all the ships at sea we are live for day two of our on chains our building crypto social with cura and open ranks talking about channels and this is our fourth panel and very excited to have dan romero here to talk with us about channels and the vision of channels for farcaster so welcome g m d w r how are you today
good thanks for having me
we're so excited to have you here and just if you are watching on twitter give us a little retweet and also if you are watching on youtube and you're on warpcast you'll find this pinned in the gm farcaster channel give it a little recast and we're glad to have you here so sahil i don't know if you want to get us started with the first question that you had put together so the open rank team's been putting these panels together and has some questions so sanyil i'm gonna turn it to you and let you kick us off here
yeah thanks so much for having us again naresh and thanks for joining dan so we've been i think in the since yesterday we've been really exploring the idea of building communities on podcast or with channels and i think channels
we started as an experiment reached a level of a great being a great building lego for communities on farcaster there's about fourteen fifteen thousand and more channels now and i was looking at the dune dashboard which tracks just cost activity across channels and there's i think say about 500 to thousand channels which have great unique number of casters and volume of cast every week so they're still being used you know by specific communities it could be topical communities it could be token communities i think one of the things we're thinking is what is the next probably new horizon for channels if we had no constraints let's assume we have all the tools for making channels great how could we think about you know channels being used to build communities on farcaster so so that's the first question to kick it off dan any any any any free thoughts on that
yeah so i think that the original goal with channels and it and it continues to be is to broaden the kind of set of topics talked about on farcaster i think one critique of farcaster when we launched channels which are now almost two years old was that it was very crypto centric or there the the topic of conversation was monolithic like whatever was on the timeline it it felt like a big group chat and i think with channels it it it offered the ability for people to find kind of niches and other topics cozier corners on the network while still participating kind of the broader you know whatever meta discourse that naturally happens on a timeline like you know forecaster or or in this case forecast
i think what's been challenging with channels is they work really well for people who are already excited about farcaster and have kind of made the the kinda like full all in commitment to kinda making it work they get over the hump of posting into the void
and that has worked for people again who who were like already pilled on forecaster i think it's been a much more mixed bag for new users for for a couple of reasons so first is i think people are like okay what is this thing i'm used to twitter i don't tag things hashtags are cringe is it a subreddit okay why can't i post in this thing like so so there's actually a lot of i think just like low hanging fruit from a ux standpoint that could be improved but i think fundamentally what's been the most challenging with channels is to run a good channel is a is a lot of work right like basically you are an entrepreneur if you are running a channel that has any meaningful community and that that's the same to say for if you're running a community on telegram or discord like communities are kinda not just like you set it people join it and then it just magically happens on autopilot they have to be curated gardening is probably like the best like mental analogy is like you just don't plant a bunch of seeds in a garden and hope you have you know kind of like this big harvest nine months later six months later there's a lot of stuff to do you have to weed you have to prevent pests you know kinda have to nurture the plants with with you know water and sunlight and fertilizer like all all the stuff right
you have
to you have to check your farville quests and see what's what extra points you're gonna get for that day right
right and and gardeners are the most patient people on earth yeah
right and and it's it's frustrating and sometimes stuff happens out of your control you have weather and like all you know all all this kind of stuff i think in you know 2025 is a little bit of like a delayed gratification is is like maybe an underrated virtue and so i think that naturally people are like oh i i'm really excited about starting a channel i'm really interested in ai you start it and then it's like well no one else is posting in my channel like well the way to get that to go is like that requires a lot of like hustle and manual work of like basically reaching out hand to hand combat type stuff
all that said i think what the potential for channels is that if if kind of at its end state is is actually a tool to build a community in a way that you actually have a sovereign relationship for that community and and i think there have been plenty of examples of this where you know discord you can go build the discord put the blood sweat and tears into doing that and then have that yanked because it's okay we no longer wanna support crypto communities or we find your type of content violates our policies and and you don't have to be doing anything illegal it just could be that's where discord shifts or discord says hey we're we're moving in a completely different direction sorry you can't even export you can't even communicate with your existing users to say you've moved somewhere else and so i think a lot of people who've been around the block realize that like if you don't have a direct relationship with your audience or you don't have a direct relationship with your user base in terms of developer or as a as a you know kind of channel owner mod if you don't have a direct relationship with your community that can be rubbed and so i think that that is that's the aspirational thing for channels and i think that there are a bunch of tools that could be built that to kind of like make that work better but yeah i i i think like channels aspirationally basically mean you don't need to use discord because discord works well for a small group but doesn't really scale and i think forums are a little bit more old school but are really not kind of like mobile friendly and i think reddit is probably the the closest thing to what a channel would be that sort of works on mobile but i think if you actually look at most usage of reddit reddit is actually kind of like a it's like a wiki knowledge based thing that magically gets a bunch of user generated content a lot of people get there via google not because they are very active on a given subject
i totally do yeah that's usually why i aim to play
different model right because in in the case of at least forecaster channels today and and kind of the aspirational goal it's more about a community less about like we are collectively generating a bunch of content that's gonna search do really well in search engines or lms that's not to say that you can't use the primitive for that but i do think it it it's worth like starting from a place of like farcaster is a social network and it is a kind of like mobile centric text based social network with shorter posts so naturally the channels are gonna kind of conform to the shape of the network
have there been any efforts to sort of just thinking about the reddit and google connection to s e with seo etcetera for content that's on barcaster to help with any kind of surfacing
scale like i i i think that there's probably some some opportunities for us to improve that but i think the the problem that always comes back for forecaster and and the thing that we're really focused on is we just need more scale right like channels work yeah better if there are 1,000 thousand x more people using forecaster right
yeah
but
i think today you know you do have some very savvy people building channels and and they've built you know maridis with success is always a good example of one i mean peachy has a few channels that she's she's you know kinda building
those channels are still fundamentally capped though by the number of people coming into farcaster and and so if you're starting a new channel today there's plenty of people in farcaster go grow like go get your first hundred people or thousand people that are really excited so i think that there's actually a lot of opportunity for new channels but in terms of the macro i think the biggest thing we can be doing is is massively growing the number of people using the protocol
i would agree with that yeah
i'm curious about one one element i think you i i really like the the sovereign community's framing and i think one of the things dan that you mentioned is okay community owners or community members have sovereignty over the tech stack which means that they they can't be shut down they're on an open social network which has an also sovereign identity layer it also has cryptorails attached to it and now i think there's this interesting thing of controlling the economic layer too like subreddits don't make any money right discord channels if they wanna launch it open there's no and i think with farfaster getting a little bit more on this crypto so crypto first social kind of landscape there's also a different way to look at channels not just as content forums but as these independent communities which also control their content which also control that they have all the tools and they can also just like webcast is sending rewards to people you what the channels can yeah channels could do that channels could show and so is it is that something that you know more and more community builders can explore they can't do this anywhere else right with which where you have a wallet you have a channel you can actually go and incentivize and start exploring some of these economic layers as well how how do you think about that
yeah i i think that that's that's a near term opportunity that forecasters differentiated in that every user has a wallet there's a lot of kind of economic value flowing through forecaster every day whether it's you know indirect in the sense that it's people who are on forecaster are doing stuff on chain and then increasingly people who are doing it kind of peer to peer or within the farcaster ecosystem i think clanker is a good example of a farcaster native asset launching platform that naturally the kind of primary consumers of that are people on farcaster hypersub i think traditionally has been like a a good example of something that's been a little bit more paired with channels and i know cura you guys are are kind of building tools in this regard but there are a bunch of people who actually were able to come kind of compose a kind of basically a version of patreon still relatively rudimentary using on chain components and then actually kind of making it work with frames and token gating and and so the idea is like channels are pretty flexible primitive and i think that the the probably the right thing to do here is like actually offer a couple of like very clear case studies for people who have been successful using channels as a primitive and then specifically kind of like highlighting and it's like hey if you wanna run a community like success this is this is how you go about doing it and making that as easy as possible both within you know ideally within warpcast but the beauty of the protocol is other clients can actually go do this stuff and not be beholden to any other app so they can actually build a a new type of experience right something that feels more like reddit even if it's the same set of
data yep i love that what if you had i know that you there's been a lot of changes to channels a lot of things are developing are there other features that you would like to either see war see forecaster build in or other devs develop that you think would be helpful to channels like is there anything on your sort of secret your secret manifesto notion that you've been hiding
i think it's what i just said in the sense that i think reddit is a interesting kind of ux that is pretty different than twitter and i think if you start from reddit and work your way to channels versus starting from twitter and working your way to you know channels is like done or
you you
rather let me rephrase that it's like we we started with twitter and we're we're adding reddit like elements with channels versus starting with reddit and then like kind of adding twitter like elements and and so i think no one has actually done this other than plink which was sloke's original who now works on on kind of the work cast team that was his original client permissionally built and basically took every channel and turned it into something that looked like hacker news or reddit so
right
i think that is probably the the biggest opportunity is to kind of like just start from a client of little less fast in terms of like the the field okay when you have twitter it feels very real time you're always wanting to pull versus something that's a little bit more oriented towards exploration kind of oh i'm on this subreddit kind of feeling thing this channel maybe you have different feeds right like so i think one feature that people really like from reddit is the ability to sort by top and hot new and all this kind of stuff we've tried that with forecaster just like too much complexity right like farcaster is a feed app and it like really really focuses on whatever's in the home feed is actually the only thing that matters from the vast majority of people who are using it but the one thing that we have done i should say warpcast rather like yeah but but the the one thing we have done that is somewhat interesting and unique is we've actually trained a bunch of people to post in channels like it's like you have all these power users who basically are categorizing posts for frankly not a ton of benefit at this point like we've we've tried a bunch of experiments where we tried to give additional distribution and it hasn't hasn't quite clicked but because people actually use channels that behavior is now accessible to another app that could actually approach it to be like great i can just plug into this i can solve my bootstrapping problem and then potentially offer features that actually actively encourage channel participation and and and things like that and so
so that that's like what i i would be kinda focused on if i was like coming into the space today and and really working on on kind of taking channels as an opportunity
i like that i think that that makes a lot of sense and we had somebody asking about why didn't you start with reddit as a base instead of starting with the twitter base and i think it was i don't know i don't know what was the reason to
yeah i think reddit is too slow right i've seen reddit like there's a bit of path dependency as it started in february '5 it's like the first batch of yc which is crazy you know a lot of people
yeah
that was interesting
yeah i wasn't gonna put that on the screen thank you thanks gloria
but but but let me just kinda like you know dan internet history reddit's early version of yc actually sam altman was in that batch too like with his thing and you know aaron sports like i mean it's like a pretty stacked early like the twitch guys and reddit sold to conde nast for like $70,000,000 so like they had an exit and then they bought it back which is kinda crazy it's like conde nast owned this thing and didn't run it into the ground but then sold it back and then now this is a $30,000,000,000 company today
the other thing to remember was digg was actually much bigger than reddit like it was the front page of the internet
that's right
and then digg
made a
couple of bad ux changes and it actually sent a bunch of people over to reddit and that was actually a big growth area for reddit and so as as a result reddit's just been compounding for like two decades basically like and but it is a web centric forum centric if you look at the design it hasn't really changed much i mean they still allow you to use the old design like it it is a weird kind of vestigial internet thing that just is very hard to kill in the same way that like wikipedia or craigslist like that's
or google search it
yeah yeah yeah
but but i think it's like it's just once these communities and network effects take hold and and people get used to it like that that's pretty powerful
i think if you changed craigslist right now it would just go to zero like nobody would use it right they're using it because it's yeah they like it the way it is
power power of being early compounding in their work effects the problem with reddit and and especially when we were starting i think they've had a little bit of resurgence in the last couple of years just and i i actually did a cast about this yesterday like they've really benefited from llms and ai like probably the most transformative like amount of like old company that's benefited from it like presumably is is reddit because of the data is valuable like the yeah overall translation experience they can now provide and and the important thing is like the the kind of naturally organic behavior that started because google got so bad is people would query something and then add reddit to the end because they they want something for people not some seo yeah garbage anyways 2020 starting out though reddit is not really a mobile centric app and in the other thing is it's extremely slow in terms of like the post frequency compared to something like twitter right and i think if you're trying to bootstrap something new slow is bad like you actually want
yeah
liveness and so that was the kind of the thought of
the thinking
moving towards twitter arguably maybe the right solution would have been like texas boomer we should have gone after video right and i get that there's a different different version of the world where maybe that would have worked or not worked but we did what we did and and so i think the the trick though is i think it's it's always been a little challenging within warpcast which is very much twitter right with
right
call it twitter with crypto characteristics for for those at home who know that pun but trying to mash both reddit and twitter together just it just hasn't worked like i've worked on a bunch of things in my my entire career around product and channels is by far the thing that's keep my ass the most in terms of just like every time i think i have a business it doesn't quite work and i think starting from first principles i think that the way to make channels work is probably have a a dedicated client that like treats channels as the primary thing not
the home thing
that's interesting yeah and i think
we know if if that yeah
go ahead
sorry i didn't i just wanted to say that we know if dan wasn't working on warpcast if he was a dev he would work on a reddit client
he he would really work on a reddit client that was like warpcast
well because the the nice thing is the
data already exists right so it's it's you don't have to bootstrap it so it's
it's kinda like maybe this
is the second type of client that you would tack onto this and then kinda go on a different path you had a question before a little bit vulgar but we can kinda go back let me look yeah
when i
have vampire attack reddit instead of twitter okay so vampire attacks don't work like end stop no one has ever successfully vampire attack anything it is a fake construct that people got nerd sniped because sushiswap project due to uniswap but it
didn't actually
the reason is it in consumer apps people's habit is extremely strong and you'd have to pay an insane amount of money per person to get them to actually switch and even then it it probably won't happen because the the the network effect and the value of an existing network is the sum of everything right and so even if you get 20% or 80 like you you basically have to get the whole thing to actually have it matter
and here's the thing so you vampire attack what happens when you stop paying people like you just like magically created retention and like usage like no this looks like it's it's magical thinking and so i think like i i get a little
bit of a play out so many times
like first
principle tell me something that's actually worked from a
bank account
and crypto too with airdrops it's the same it's the same concept really with your with airdrops like you you think that it'll bring people in but as soon as you stop paying them sometimes that's it just doesn't work the what the airdrops that have worked really well have been to the ones who are people are using the product and because they're using the product they get this airdrop they continue using the product yeah and
or or or let's start you have a product that people actually really wanna use and and it's growing on and and the airdrop is actually a a tool to actually grow the thing that is actually working right and and i think that like there's so much short termism in in crypto of just like oh just give a token it's just like yes i i understand what the the argument from your perspective is it's like you get
free money
yeah but that free money doesn't last forever and it takes the thing that someone's trying to build
yeah
or a long lasting and durable
thing and it just like okay let's pull that forward and then just where where where does the value come from and i think like so much of of people in crypto is just like well i don't actually care about the long term value i just i just wanna get paid and so i was like okay great so coin operated people are coin operated news is eleven like
so i sometimes i'll show you the outcome
i think just just one one thing there on that point is you absolutely i think agree with it and you have to build a new habit or a differentiated habit to actually build that new set of network right and it's a slow thing in crypto we're used fast things hey let me let's move liquidity right so i think at the end of the day if we have to even when we think about crypto social we have to explore new frontiers for new form factors which the same or new people might be excited about i think clanker is a great example on warpcast they were able to engage have their own user base but they were differentiated pretty well right and the user base is still the same but you're building a new habit all the people who who thought that they would not you know launch meme coins on a feed they're having fun launching meme coins on a feed and that's fine right and so so i think that's one of the the real kind of hidden truths which we don't entertain because in crypto we we feel a lot about hey let's just schedule this from here and there and give them money yeah very very short term kind of mindset
we do have a good question here from basement five k do you have any plans on making channels more navigable like being able to switch natively search a channel forecast by user x or search keywords within a channel and only post related to those keywords show in the feed so a little i guess really kinda the focus here is on search but within yeah
so i am pretty sure we have some advanced search right now so let me just see if i like
it does search channels it definitely
yeah yeah yeah so if you go to like search on web we have filter by user filter by channel so that exists i think that the the tough reality is all of these features are good ideas and improvements that like yes that would make things nicer good good kind of like ux the the reality is they don't get used so they get used by 5% of people and so for the people that wanna use that it's like great this is delightful this is amazing but right you're already on farcaster like you're already you're already here and so i think what's challenging is yes can we increase delight for the existing people who are here like make them like farcaster even more absolutely like totally possible but the the challenge is if we do not grow the social network and i sound like a broken record because i always go back to this like the thing doesn't actually work it kinda continues to be this subscale group of people who are really passionate about this thing but like i think the promise and the excitement of forecaster is the ability for it to have tens of millions hundreds of millions a billion plus people using a protocol and so i think like improved search again it it it it is objectively improving the experience but it is not the thing that is preventing people you know from signing up i think the primary piece reason people don't sign up is like they don't have a clear value prop it's like why should i sign up why should i care right i think one one way to think about social social networks social media i prefer social networks because it's more people oriented than than media although i like crypto native social media or media
is i did i wasn't offended is
it is the what facebook measures their their like north star metric in their all their earnings reports is time spent right yeah it's literally not even daily active users because they have so many people using it billions of people but it is actually how can we increase the amount of time across our our portfolio of products right instagram facebook whatsapp spent in our app which for them it is because they make money off of that so like ads is a function of time spent however when you actually think about what consumers are using social networks for is is generally like some version of they wanna be entertained you could argue maybe there's a little bit of professional purpose but entertainment is a is like you're competing with netflix you're completing with video games you're completing competing with going out to eat restaurant with friends like you're competing with time with your kids like it is the most zero sum like highly competitive thing and so that is actually the thing that we have to like stay like maniacally focused on and and it and it actually kinda sucks because like there's so much that personally like i get a lot of delight out of all these like little knobs and and things like whenever i'm using software but in terms of like staying really focused on if we can't crack like the the value prop and actually drive user growth then then everything kind of is it it doesn't it doesn't like work right like it will always just be this this science experiment right
i'm gonna go with this one last question because i know we got to let you go we have our next panelist coming in what is your latest thesis that you're working on with to massively get new users to farcaster from a first principle point of view
there is no answer it's it's a lot of
multiple different things
experimentation we're increasing the number of invites that we give out to people we're thinking about how we can tie invites and and kind of like using the network to rewards we think that building a better on chain user experience with the wallet plus frames encourages more people building interesting new things in crypto to kind of launch frame first and and so that world like helps but there is no magic bullet because again it goes back to is the the most critical question to answer for anybody is why should i care i have a zillion other things competing for my time and i think everyone if you talk to people on farcaster rather like farcaster everyone has a different answer there is actually not a universal answer the closest thing to universal answer which a lot of people on farcaster find like little like i don't know if i like it it's make money like and it's a variety of ways to make money some people are here like i wanna try to make money trading i wanna make money airdrop like i wanna you know whatever other people are like i actually wanna build a business i wanna build gm farcaster i wanna start a start up so i think there's a universal kind of theme there around there's economic opportunity on forecaster in a variety of different ways and and largely driven by the fact that it is both kind of crypto native so the economic stuff can
can social economy but
also because it's it's it's kind of open permissionless decentralized and programmable right and so if you have a great idea for a client and client that can go after like making channels great you're able to go do that
awesome alright
i got i
know we have to let you go thank you so much dan this has been awesome
thanks dan
we appreciate you
have a good one thank you
thank you
that was great so great glad we were able to have him here we missed a few of your questions sorry about that we are going to bring up our next panel so i'm bringing up bizarre beasts flex thesaurus rex jonathan colton and peachy to the stage right now so welcome everyone let me make you a little bit bigger there excited to have you all here so what the first thing i want to do for as we start this panel talking about again we're talking about channels and on chain communities i want to start by having each of you just quick intro talk about what channels that you are either or communities that you are involved in managing you know modding whatever connection you might have and let me start with bizarre beast and then i'll go to flexosaurus rex
hey how's it going i actually started the bizarre beast channel
that would
be appropriate because it would be
weird if someone else did
it would be bizarre for sure bizarre so actually and it it kind of developed into a a beast of its own initially it was just to grow my art and share what i was working on but over time the community that built around me started to become so passionate and engaged that i in essence opened the channel up to all those people and started an additional dedicated art channel just called bizarre beast artwork so those are the two channels i manage
so we've got two one so you just found a lot of other bizarre beasts who are like i'm there yes and then i love that
yeah they're passionate about the artwork and passionate about building their on chain experience and having a good time and making friends
so it's been really good love that flex are you there can you give us a quick little intro hey there yeah
i'm here it might be very loud i'm sorry i just got off the train in rome from milan so
somebody's been traveling through europe
yeah i'm i'm country hopping currently so hey i'm flextasaurus rex the main channels that i have started on podcast are flex for good crystals which is a gym and minerals channel and then also space art which is all about space art very self explanatory i'm also now an adjacent i just became a announcer actually whoop whoop and you know i'm just a big fan of warcast and and been here present trying to help grow the economy and the the the creator economy especially so happy to do that
if you say nouns i i am required to put these on so oh so there i did that history they said it like three times it was the panel i was not moderating and i like literally popped on with the glasses and popped back down it was it was funny had to
do it i won't i i won't chant it we'll just leave it at that but yeah thanks thanks for having me here
it's just like beetlejuice jonathan colton let me go to you next and if you can give us an intro and talk about the channels that that you've been building cool and community sharing building
i just got a text from basement 5 k he wanted me to give a shout out to the unique vehicles channel which is a great channel by the way so i'm jonathan most people know me as jc and i own the nature channel which i call the central park of forecaster currently number two number two in engagement across the entire network i was a cohost of i took a photo which is also a fantastic channel
great channel
yeah inceptionally had had the vision for that channel and i cohosted with him and you know couple other channels we we we founded a positive sum earlier this year eric s and i and so i am a big fan of all things farcaster
and you also do some amazing writing as well thank you yeah yeah and peachy last but certainly not least the queen of many channels what's you wanna give a quick intro as well
gm gm everybody thanks for the warm intro yeah so my name's peachy and i have i think 13 channels on firecaster most of them are active right now channel changes kind of threw me through
i didn't even know it was that many i thought it was like five
it's a bunch and they've all kind of started for different reasons so i started anime outcast for my pfp project anime manga because i was looking for an anime community and i was not welcome in the other anime community so dan told me you know make your own channel and i did and it seems to have worked out so seems like
an opportunity for your for your own channel there you
go opportunity for your own channel so i i do tell people if if there's a channel that you love but you think it's you know not managed well or is not inviting you know to new people like hey take that topic and spin it into your own thing it's very very possible i own a lot of japan themed channels i travel to japan quite often i really love them and japanese casters had a hard time kind of plugging themselves into farcaster early so i made a lot of very specific channels just for them so like sakura which is cherry blossoms momiji which is the red leaves in the fall kyoto because everyone who lives in japan visits kyoto at some point so it was really more to carve out space and when channels were more important six or seven months ago it was a place for them to post their cast instead of just casting into the void and know that someone would scroll it and see it and as we got more people in there you know it it definitely worked out and the last channel that i spend a lot of time in is farcaster union and that was actually a channel that kinda spun out of my show power hour where we used to talk about power badges and power badges went away and it was like well let's just talk about you know other things on farcaster you need to pay attention to but the real reason i started it was because i couldn't post in farcaster or warpcast when channel changes went live and i thought it was really important that like the average person on farcaster had a channel they could cast in to talk about farcaster until those channels kind of found their way and now they're public so it's not you know a huge thing so ours is a lot more topical but i think it shows that channels kinda come and go they grow they ebb and flow and i think that's the way like some channels are gonna thrive in this new channel economy and some channels you know we'll see what they look like in a year maybe they're not you know always necessary maybe they're temporary and that's okay
and that's totally okay by the way i'm just having this vision of you like norma rae with the union sign which i love that you are always thinking about sort of like a a broader audience and like helping folks who might be either getting sucked in by as you know labeled as spam or like having a hard time finding their footing and i really appreciate that about you i think that is something that's very special and that you've done an amazing job with certain communities just helping them get acclimated and find their find their footing and it's been fantastic
thank you i'm all warm and fuzzy inside thank you so much
thank you for that though we really appreciate it and by the way i love your sparkly pfp there
so let's dive in and if you have questions for any of these folks please drop them in the chat and i will try to get to as many as possible i knew we were gonna run out of time with dan so we didn't get to too many but we'll do our best this we're gonna start with some questions from the cura open rank team who's been putting this amazing virtual summit together so they did all the prep here so their first question is what makes farcaster channels an attractive space for artists and creators compared with other platforms and you know just in essentially like how are you know how is this helping with artists what has been your experience and i'll start with bizarre beasts and we'll just kinda work our way around like we just did
you know i i've been involved in social media and the web space for many years now trying to establish a strong foundation in order to which to grow a business from i have honestly found that web two social is diabolically opposed to sometimes smaller or new artists establishing themselves and growing a base and the second thing that i find that web two social is lacking in which is community building around a certain idea or topic rather than just following and engaging or categorizing through hashtags so for my experience as a business owner and artist the idea of farcaster channels was really revolutionary i didn't know what it would mean until i joined the platform and started to engage and understand how channels work and how users are engaging with channels so from that perspective really from day one once i understood how the system worked i was able to immediately start i think dan said it best one on one hand to hand combat style from day one i just went out one on one creating custom artwork for small communities and niche niche channels and establishing relationships and slowly over time building a community that stuck around rather than just liked and left so it's really a powerful tool
it helps if my mic is not muted flex how about you that was great bizom biz how about you
yeah i thought my been
your experience sorry my bad
yeah so you know with the channel switch over i definitely just started to get back into using my channels to their fullest degree but i'm also the moderator of the tezosar channel and to me you know one of the real promises of of farcaster is that we have this crypto native grid that people can draw from so channels you know it's almost a virtual single and that it's a specific topic like if there's a tesla's art channel i know i can go there and find tesla's art the crystal channel i know i can probably go there and hopefully find some crystals you know so in that way there's a very specific sort of you know format that people can draw from to go and experience these different things that they're interested in and then on top of that to answer the other part of your question is you know why is it particularly advantageous on work assets well we have that you know that crypto grid we have wallets that are being built in we have the ability to man hard and frame we have the ability to send each other and tip each other crypto if we care to tokens you know you know non profit if you're doing a good job i might send you a few you know tokens for for the great work you're doing this space
and i
think and i think i have before don't check don't
you probably have
i think i probably have so you know for me those things are the way that crypto is evolving and we don't have any other social grid you know for me i've been a content creator on instagram for over twelve years my web two business has nearly a hundred thousand followers from way back from what i used to do in the space and you know even that is not as far reaching of a tool as it is on workouts now with channels because of the fact that we have this this experimentation and this ability to reach out to other builders and connect in the way that we can now
i think we you know we talked a little bit yesterday about the different types of channels right you have your very large topic channels like ethereum or farcaster or whatever and then you have channels like even gm farcaster is more like a i'd call it like a an announcement channel almost where we're sharing all our stuff so that you can easily find it all in one place rather than having to go to a website or whatever but some of the other channels are more
community based i think that's really powerful yeah
yeah and i think there's so like when i'm thinking about like the tezos channel for example being able to find and connect with other people who are creating on that platform i think is really helpful or if i'm like hey i'm looking for you know to buy some art on tezos being able to drop in there and see what people are sharing and then dive in i think is gonna be is super helpful and gives you that one stop shop which i think can be valuable to the artists as well jonathan let's go to you for that same question what makes farcaster channels an attractive space for artists and creators compared to other platforms
i think you know community and distribution right you know when i joined i was super lost and when we started spinning up i took a photo and all of a sudden like there was a rush of great artists coming in from instagram and twitter who i knew i would send them dms right and all of a sudden we had like this budding roster of great talent in the channel and it's kind of a flywheel you know they're getting distribution you know we're getting new members plus people knew each other so you know community and distribution clearly the top two that's why i came here from twitter and instagram in the first place and then i think the other thing is is that when you look at you know community and distribution angle you start to realize that channels become almost like pools of ideal customers right mhmm because one of the unexplored areas that we kind of got with of with moxie in its earlier iteration was advertising and channels and and i i think that's unexplored territory you know for forecast or that sort of tbd right all of a sudden you're gonna have a large pool of customers who are receptive to your thing in one particular channel so i think there's future value there as well
yeah i can see that as well like that's definitely something we've talked to a few people about who were building different sort of ad serving things that didn't quite take but you can kind of see the vision of when eventually it will take you know what i mean eventually it will make sense but it also feels like it has to be done in a very organic manner that doesn't feel disruptive to sort of the feed if that makes sense
absolutely yeah
yeah like you know if people want something you know you know like you're gonna you know people are gonna dial that in in the future we just i don't think we're there in terms of like network traffic and thorough put yet
yeah goes back to dan talking about that that that's the number one thing is growing the number of number of folks and by the way are you playing a drinking game
sixty basement five so you said something and he said drink so i assume
oh yeah
oh you know he wants me to say distribution because that's you know
that's it
that's you know i i also i also
have a dog
five k has got a drinking game going on for those of you who own
the the distribution channel on forecasters so and that's why that's where i post a lot of the stuff that i send you
that's funny i and that's that's some of the writing i was talking about as well peachy how about for you what makes farcaster channels an attractive space for artists and creators compared with other platforms
yeah so i wanna riff off of something dan said earlier you know how of course you can start a subreddit and you can start a discord but things can change quite suddenly and as a person who is deplatformed from twitter for talking about you know cannabis and again i wasn't telling people where to buy cannabis on the internet i was talking about cannabis policy and sharing like rough drafts of bills and i got deplatformed and i was just really frustrated
i didn't know that part of your story that's the
one yeah i did not intend to be an artist on farcaster that's a whole nother conversation but you know i i came here for for free and open space and the reason i stay is because of the farcaster legos because what i'm doing with anime manga is literally impossible on any other platform i could not do this on reddit i could not do it on discord i could not do it on twitter my channel is a is a paid channel and it has been since may of twenty twenty four because the whole thing is post to earn post good content you will get rewarded so since may people in my channel have been getting rewarded with rounds or tips you know whatever was kinda there and then thanks to cura now we have channel tokens and i don't want that token to be a meme coin and a pump and dump and all over the rest of the internet i just want it to be for my channel and i just want it to be a place where i don't have to manually reward good content the community can automatically reward good content with what they love and that is something that if i try to build that myself i'm not a developer i'm like i'm dangerous enough to like mess things up and you know occasionally break things but like i don't know how to code without the help of a lot of ai tools so the fact that i can build a channel i can start to plug in a hypergate for access you know and it's it's less than a dollar the whole point is if you cast a few great things you know in a in the course of a month you'll get your dollar back and maybe make some more and everybody in my community up until yesterday great job warpedcast team by the way doubling the amount of people with level two spam labels which means there's twice as many accounts now that are eligible for war cast rewards
okay so that's a good thing it went in the right direction i saw your post and i was like is this bad thing or good thing i don't know what level two means so i had a little panic i'm like oh no yes is she is she gonna lose it or is
it good okay
yes level two is the good one level zero is the bad one i need to reiterate that every cast but basically
yeah
last week a thousand people lost their labels so we had a thousand people go from good to like we're not sure this week we doubled the amount of good so until yesterday most of my community wasn't unfortunately labeled as spam so they weren't eligible for wordpass rewards
do you think most of that's coming from like the language barrier or like what is that
where is
that coming from
i think it's a mix like i think a lot of people don't understand the culture of farcaster and particularly warpedcast like it is a social network not social media and that is really hard nuance to explain and then if you're not a native english speaker explaining that gets even more difficult so i think my community leans non native english leans kind of new and leans a little bit meme y and fun which can sometimes be interpreted by
the algorithm as spammy okay
yeah
so i love channels because you know the spam algorithm is not active in channels it's your channel your rules and now we can reward people for their content even if the greater farcaster network isn't totally into anime that doesn't matter if my people are into anime they can come into my space they can hang out and they can do well so maybe they're not eligible for farcaster rewards doesn't matter in my channel you're eligible if you just like authentically hang out give your likes and your recast graciously to the community engage with people and now people are making friends and we're seeing our leaderboard change dramatically we're seeing people come in and within three days of posting making it to the leaderboard and the next week having some anime tokens to claim and i think that's a good motivator i i see the same thing as happening in nature right like everybody can go outside and take a picture of grass we're not asking for this huge lift we're not asking for you to become a content creator overnight we're not asking for you to become an artist overnight we're saying share something that's personal to you that's authentic to you find the right channel to put it in and you can do well here even if maybe you know you're not on that leaderboard yet and i say yet because it's changing it's getting better and the team is expanding it and we can all imagine what that looks like when there's 5,000 people on the leaderboard you know there's a million feeds now like every day we're getting more but i think have we hit a million cool space i think we did i think a few hours ago
okay because i i saw it when it was like 35 left and like the urge to go and just like spin up 35 new accounts was very strong but i pulled myself away from it so
so i saw a a dune dashboard and it did not have who had fid number 1000000 so i have a feeling that fid 1,000,000 maybe went to the warpcast team
they might have been waiting to snipe it
yeah
i i can't guarantee it but i thought it was a thing that it was missing fid 1,000,000
that's funny either that or it's like a y two k kind of problem where it didn't know how to how to calculate that million i don't know that's that's interesting i i wanna sort of pivot from sort of the questions we had laid out to just talk about building community a lot of times in farfaster we talk about this irl to url to irl connections and i'm curious in terms of community building within you you know you've all talked about sort of different aspects of this where you started you know bizarre beasts for example starting with you're just posting your art and then all of a sudden you have this community to you know peachy who very specifically is you know building communities how are you like engaging folks every day getting them to come back incentivizing sort of sure people connecting beyond just sort of posting on your in in your channel and i'll start with bazaar beast and we'll just make our way around there
sure so i mean we're all here because we're into crypto you know we all love tokens so i really kind of approached this community with three things in mind community culture and coinage and what really empowered the growth and stickiness of my community from the very beginning was my moxie creator coin there was a way for me to tie my ambition my artwork mints i can split revenue with my fans by burning the token if i sell a painting i can split revenue with my fans and burn the token there's a lot of ways economically that i can incorporate the culture that i'm building with my artwork into the community that's forming to where it's advantageous for everyone involved not just me to collect my artwork because everybody grows economically through the coins that we have available and i'm really excited about taking that to the next level just like pichy has been talking about and jonathan with a channel token through cura which i'm putting some documentation for right now with the the cura team which will really empower the community that's formed to grow even more because i've been running rounds and doing many things really out of my pocket at times and this will help take the lid off of those limitations and help it grow and make it more rewarding for those members in the community that are giving the most support
i think you just mentioned rounds and we haven't really touched on that which i'm sorry seneca don't be mad at me it's another great tool it's a great another really useful tool and you can use it with any type of erc 20 token
yeah
so it can plug into a lot of different in a lot of different ways so for those who may not be familiar you can go to /rounds on warpcast or go to rounds.wtf and learn more there if you're interested in using it in your channel
it's a
great tool yeah it's a great tool and that was if you're not familiar that is built by or funded by nouns and it started as prophouse and then moved to browns flex how about you how are you engaging your community getting them to come back you know day after day and sort of build a community rather than just like a spot where people you know drop a note here and there
yeah lately i haven't been really at all so you know it's been one of those things
so glad i asked you this question then
yeah i'm so happy thank you for putting me on the spot
you know for me it's really experiential right like the things that i do in the space as an artist as a creator they really just invoke a sense of who i am and i try to bring that energy to the space and engage people really on a on a personal level and i i think this really comes down to like what we were talking about earlier about specificity of channel content and like for me it's like you know with the crystal's channel that's a very specific thing that draws from something in my past right and people find intuitively interesting regardless of of me i could be trying to repel them but if i post a nice crystal they're probably gonna wanna look at it regardless right so you know the cura team i'm really excited to learn more about the tools they've been together you know when we did the art festival last september in manhattan was subjective i used cura's moderation tools to at that point build a a really robust community around that we had 800 people on that channel they got a lot of additional attention as a result jonathan was there actually which is very nice to see him and you know i think that for me that's gonna continue to be the mission it's to just keep you know showing my journey through the space and trying to connect people to do things and build and that's one of the really the the things i really love about warpaths is so many people are willing to build in the open and and help each other get a leg up so you know for me i think that that's kind of the next evolution of channels which is to continue the evolution and i haven't really thought much about tokens as rewards but you know rounds like you said great tool tokens are obviously a great tool flows if anyone else know about flow shout out to rocketman as well so you know i think we're gonna continue to see these kind of social grade applications grow and become more robust as channels evolve
i'd love to see flows grow beyond nouns and be able to anybody to use that and to fund their own me too i think that would be useful i think that that's so flows is a similar think i can't say it's similar to rounds but it has a similar type of mechanic where you're but it's on a stream so you're earning all all along set to a certain amount so it could be it could be an interesting tooling that could be used by anybody would be maybe something to pursue there yeah very cool thank you thanks flex and you did actually one thing i did what you kinda brought to mind when you were talking was we also have ephemeral channels right we have like you can use a channel for a contest and use something like rounds or cure or something to moderate that yep you can you know have it have it just tied to an event so it's gonna you know it's not necessarily gonna be active every day but around those events it's going to be useful and active and it makes it easier to find the people who are interested in the same things you are so i do think yeah i mean it's super helpful
as a connector it's it's kind of an amazing tool like i was talking about earlier the aggregate interest and you know like for me like spacestar for example like that's a channel i started that has thousands of members in it i'm not really necessarily active in every day if i encounter a cool piece of spaceart i'll i'll go post it and promote it but you know there's still people in there posting every single day that are really passionate about that content and for me that's really heartening to see that people care enough to contribute to community in that way and we're such a small small you know ecosystem still we're really totally see the next wave of growth bringing that kind of 10 x factor where you see that tipping point and it's this thing that happens in psychology where they say that if 10% of people within a culture adapt adopt something or adapt to it then it can become more widespread in its adoption and i think we're right there with forecast right now
i think we're getting close yep i agree jonathan how are you keeping folks engaged and building community in your channels
that's a tough one because you know there's so much stuff changing on the platform all the time and so what i've been doing is i have like theme days every week so monday is you know typically mountain monday tree tuesday water wednesday you know today is foggy friday flowing friday floral friday and so you know it gives all the different type of
do we just skip thursday or or
you know thursday often has a tree theme i think
okay
you know
you know thirsty thirsty thirsty i know i was thinking thirsty you're nature thirst trap there that could get that could get interesting yeah
yeah sunset saturday and so like it gives everybody like a rhythm of casting you know especially if they like a certain type of image like peachy likes waterfalls and like she has like great you know waterfall pictures in kyoto with you know you know great fall colors you know so everybody has maybe a favorite but they're not like a regular in the channel so they pop in drop something you know it's
just be like i'm just here on thirsty thursdays only and that's it
yeah exactly you know it gives like a cadence a rhythm you know people look forward to those days because you know they might have like a a specific theme that they really like so it's it's been like a healthy thing and i and and and i had asked people in the success channel maridis helped me you know ask the whole channel like you know what do you guys think how do we keep the channel organic and growing and themes were consistently the most popular thing so we've been running theme days for like six months and i think you know that helps everybody feel connected
i think that's really smart for those type of channels for our channels i it makes a lot of sense especially where you have a sort of a broader topic channel being able to kind of almost create subreddits if you will yeah you know with a larger channel yeah so i love that
for sure
and then peachy we're we're getting to the we're the at the end of our panel here we do have a few folks waiting in the green room but they are all here now so we're gonna shift off in just a moment but peachy i want to give you this question as well you've talked a little bit about it already but what ways are you engaging folks in your channels that might be useful tips for others and keeping them coming back
i would just i would say anime manga does similar things we have manga monday we have tune tuesday you know fan friday it's very similar i'm using the warpcast rituals which are only available on desktop but you can it's basically scheduled cast for channels i find they're very powerful the only thing i've had to think about recently though is with cura channel tokens now as the moderator and the person who's creating the rituals it messes with the leaderboard when i post every day and pin my post it gives me the most engagement so it's something that i've had to really think about and i've been testing in my channel the past couple of weeks to sometimes still cast the theme but occasionally not pin it or change when i pin it so that people remember the theme is there but i'm trying to encourage them to cast top level instead of responding to me because i don't want to be number one on the leaderboard i want the community to take a chance and i realize that that's kind of the double edged sword if you're the most active person in your channel you're going to get the top of the leaderboard and that's not my intention so it's made me really think how do i want to do this going forward to make sure that i can still guide the community on some topics and give them some ideas but not necessarily have them respond to me to take that idea and then cast it instead of responding directly
top level cast rather than reply yeah
exactly so it's a new kind of way to think about engaging with your community to say don't engage with me use this as a stepping stone to build your own engagement and that's been a really fun challenging thing to think about so i'm excited to see that and i appreciate that sometimes we need a new tool to be like hey you're the most active caster in your channel do you want to be and it's like no i don't actually want to be the most active caster in my channel i want to be active but not the most active i want to see who else wants to you know step up and get showcased so it's been a really good just different way to slice and dice and think about channels
love that also i have we have breaking news gt said the 1,000,000 fid was not sniped by the fc team so there you go mystery remains alright this has been awesome thank you all for joining us today and thank you kira team for bringing this amazing stacked group together as that was when you guys started that was the comment this is a stacked panel what a lineup so all of that so i agree it's been amazing so thank you all for being here this is it this is what it was this episode is stacked so thank you all for being here and we're gonna bring up our next crew so i'm gonna you guys can all drop down and we'll see you on the timeline but thank you so much
thanks bob bye guys
bye bye and while we do this shift off i'm gonna put this up for our next final panel and bring up the rest of the crew here so sahil mcbain k mac and johnny coming to the stage and i am going to jump down and sahil is gonna be moderating this and then i'll come back at the end to do a little sign off but hi friends before i go i'll see you i'll be watching it from the green room
thank you i think this is cool we're from one stack group to another hey guys thanks for thanks for joining this is the last panel of today and and and yeah we can save save we can save we've saved the best for the last for sure now that nanishprophet is not here but cool to have you guys we'll jump right in we have about twenty five minutes so i think this is oh we know who's a super admin
here there
anyway so i think we've been talking about channels and communities since yesterday and for me you guys are the flag bearers of that on forecaster you're you're all great channel entrepreneurs so it'd be good to get into the weeds and and think about how we can improve what we can do with channels on forecast really that that's kind of the highest level theme we started today with with dan sharing his wish list for channels you know we've heard amazing things about channels could be like subreddits or discord channels i think all of us are either building tooling or using channels in different ways and let's surface that today and see what we can kind of share as good case practices with folks so to get started for anyone who's listening in of course i think it's hard to miss ben nonlinear and pmac on the timeline you can know more about them i'm gonna put them on the spot and ask them to to share their you know one line pitch for their channel what they're doing but i'll while i think about it i'll i'll do a quick intro so we have mukden who's moderating the pay renting channel and and the founder's channel and many more perhaps and we'll talk about it he's also recently launched planpad which is a great tool for channel moderators to create an economic led for their channels we have kmak who's been moderating the football channel but there's many others i i think shower thoughts is is also one of those cool channels that that he's he's running and then we have nonlinear who's who's founder of hypersub serving all possible channels with with an amazing tool as well as the moderator and owner of the memes channel which is the top three channels on farcaster ever since channels were created so it's awesome to hear from all all these folks i have a few questions but maybe let's start with nonlinear johnny your one line pitch for memes and your vision for memes as a channel on farcaster
i guess the pitch would be you know laugh like go to the memes channel to see good memes to have a laugh to steal some memes post them elsewhere post them in your family group chat and then as far as the the goal you know i think it's to try to create some kind of sustainable economic engine wherein there's money coming in through various means whether that's you know advertising tokens membership like i think that we're in this discovery phase right now of of crypto
specifically for like consumer use cases for communities i don't think anyone's really figured it out yet and so i think of the channel as this kind of fertile ground you know like to try things and not be precious about it to experiment with different models to see how they work or don't work so that you know we can learn from it that i can learn from it and that others can learn from it but the goal is is is to not just create value but to capture value and then to share that value with the people that make the channel special
that's awesome mcbain you wanna you wanna talk about parenting founders or or any other channel
yeah parenting is is probably the most like wholesome thing that i have going on right now in my life it's it's a super fun channel i created clinkpad and i actually banned it from parenting because i just don't wanna ruin the vibe in parenting but no i think it's it's really great in that it's a it's like a refuge from all of the rest of crypto but you also get to talk with crypto friends and so it's like people you have this cool and common thing with but you get to commiserate about other stuff which i think is really great we did something a while ago which i'd love to do more of which is we will from splits had a baby and then we as a channel bought him a gift card to like buy dinners and so he could get his favorite dinner for his wife when they you know were in the postpartum stage which was cool so my my dream for parenting would be every time somebody has a baby we'd send like one of those in the nordic countries they send you a box when you have a baby that's everything you need to keep them alive for three months and it also doubles as a as a bassinet so i'd love to be able to like do that through parenting which is really cool also shout out the hockey channel i've i run that because i play hockey and america lost to mcdavid and team last night which is okay but yeah just channel like everything johnny said it's it's an incredible place there's opportunity to to own a community and that's that everyone has money and you can natively you know create and share value i think is so exciting i think there's there's an opportunity i've yet to see seized yet which is like take all the raw input of a channel focus it publish the the best of that to other channels somewhere else monetize it and then return that money back to the people in the channel i've i've yet to see that loop fully created yet but i think it's gonna be a no brainer when it happens
that's awesome yeah i i think we'll get into you and johnny both touched on interesting themes around how do you create this economic layer and bring that value back to channels and communities i think that's something with where we really explore the design surface of where crypto comes in with social and i think that'd be a fun chat but let's hear from k mac on i don't know which channel he's gonna choose
to talk about football oh
go out
yeah football all the
way away so the main mission is is a little amorphous football is full of rival gangs like there are parts of london you can't walk through with the wrong color that's all coming online so there's nothing here that says oh it's one thing we're gonna try to align and and have a common passion and a thread pulled through the channel but really this is gonna be a lot of different contexts it's gonna be different countries different leagues different teams people that love players people that love managers so it's gonna be very much decentralized but with their own little sub communities as part of it but the one of the big things that that drives me is how can we make people profit from their passion so that that would be maybe the one liner like we want football we want those fans to profit from their passion
okay that's amazing i think that's very in line with that we're getting great comments for for all the channels but i think the profit and community is a good team we can explore in a bit but i think one thing that i wanna also surface which is becoming clear is that so far on farcaster we've we've seen a lot of for in its current form warbcast is well suited for creators you know it's a twitter like mold form factor and you guys with with the things you're building with your channels are more the the nucleus is communities right you're trying to bring people together around a common topic around a common theme or a common shared goal and try and and try and drive engagement and and grow your channel and grow your people who who can participate and in that sense then you're you're kind of what's what's our reference to web two it's reddit it's discord channels it's facebook groups like there's a bunch of what mcbean said about parenting you still go to facebook and actually find great content on facebook groups around parenting maybe not great let me take that back but it it is a place where there's sufficient content similar is the case with reddit when you wanna find memes or or or 4chan johnny when when you think about what's a compatible web tool for for memes and for for k mac and football you would also think about places like reddit or or other so you're kind of competing i don't wanna say compete but there are good references for community venues in web too and we're just getting started on far on using farfaster for that right so what are some of the tools i'm curious about how you think about what is the minimum viable like table stakes of tools and interfaces which create us a great clarity ux for users who wanna chat about football who wanna actually make it easy to contribute or view memes or or be be a parent and not have the same hoops to cross as any other crypto social app right and it's pretty much like facebook groups or discord channels and or reddit so i'm i'm curious how do you guys think about these tools and interfaces that is kind of one of the central themes of the of the panel that we wanted to discuss what are you currently using what do you find useful so that other channel mods who are listening or tuning in right now or later come back you know they can they can learn from it but ben we we can start with you if if you'd
like i mean in terms of minimum viability right it's just warpcast they've they've done a really good job many many people have tried to front run warpcast features and it's not a a winning game i think i think the best thing to do is to just use that it the the more detailed features come when you're really trying to verticalize and monetize it and and the important thing is to decide for yourself what kind of channel it's gonna be right so for for parenting it's a it's a wholesome community it's much more like my physical neighborhood right but for hockey it's much more like a subreddit right like i want i can see a world where we try to monetize it and try and you know grow it to to get more value out of it and that i'd wanna use things like cura and and hypersub and you know maybe you know other things so it starts with what community what are you trying to build out of that channel and then you can decide your tooling
johnny
yeah i think that's well said i i i would agree with that i mean i and i think that the the actual hard part is the building you know like of the community i mean it's a it's a a strange emergent phenomenon you know and it's hard to repeat you know like what worked for reddit you know decades ago at this point like does is not gonna work for farcaster and probably whatever for works for farcaster is not is not gonna be repeatable these are like these very unique combination of of things you know and they're at certain moments in time so that part i feel like is really hard to get right and
the best yeah like all you can really do as a as a channel owner is just show up and do your best and and try to create a vibe and a culture and a and an energy that attracts other people that makes them wanna participate as well and i mean but ultimately we're kinda downstream of i would say merkle to to like like majority downstream of merkle and to a lesser extent i think other developers but then really it's like i think that the you asked this question about like what's the table stake thing or like what what's like the the bare minimum that you need and and i actually think that that that that bar has gotten super super high you know in the last like i don't know five ten years like the demands on attention are are like is probably the like the most competitive game in the world and you're competing with like superpowers you know it's like david and goliath if if if if david is like one inch tall and goliath is like a thousand feet tall like it's so asymmetric
and and you need really good content you need really good feeds you know and i feel like crypto is in this process of trying to figure out a new competitive access which is like economics you know which is we can look at these incumbents and we're like damn you know how much money is reddit worth like what's their mark well you know what what's their market cap it's it's like enormous
$30,000,000,000
right $30,000,000,000 it just came out a day or two ago or whatever
well how much of that is going back to the people who make it what it is you know close to zero and so i think like i think it's it's a good competitive access it's a good lens through which to look at how to compete with incumbents but we haven't i feel like it's still very unclear like what the winning strategy is there and so we're still you know it's like is it is it is it tokens is it memberships is it some kind of point system like what's the model here how do we take advantage of this like rich raw material that we have which is like economic primitives programmable economic primitives how do we use that you know it's like we have this i i often think about like crypto is this like alien technology and we like haven't we like don't know how to use it yet we're kinda like these apes like pressing buttons and we're like like this and like you know like the trunk of the car opens we're like no not like that okay
kinda kind of like no
we figure that out it's like there there's gonna be something powerful there but it's still like you you still have to solve the table stakes problem of like you need very good content you need a very very good feed you need a very good consumer user experience and that's baseline those are just hygiene factors you know
right so so it's very interesting and we'll get to what i think would to hypersub and to clangpad as well but it's almost like you're thinking in two buckets one is we need to have good content liquidity that's a bare minimum like and that comes that's downstream of more users good users less spam you need good feeds you can't compete on just feeds to mcbain's earlier point like you can't just try and say hey my feed is better so come move to my client you need something else but these are just the baseline features right and then it's the competitive differentiation which is the economic access which is kind of what web two cannot do by design and now we can use this kind of decentralized tech stack for communities which includes ethereum or any blockchain forecaster and open social graph and a bunch of other tools which can actually unlock this new value you know value creation is actually is there but how does value kind of dispersal happens so that's kind of the the we we know we can use crypto in some way but we need a lot of experiments to do that and while we kind of have these baseline hey i i just can't show spam to people they will not come to parenting or they will not come to football and you can't just get an average reddit user to say hey come spend time on my channel because it it's it's better so so i think that's a that's a good framing johnny kevin k mac i'm curious how do you think about this
so i i don't use reddit i i might be like the only person in the world that doesn't and i try not to think about competitors and really approach it from a com a place of abundance what do we have here what kind of legos and i think johnny nailed it we have these economic primitives and attention is the thing of value and now we can make attention something that value is transferred with the tap of a of a a heart or a wow wow right so really kind of focusing on okay what's unique that crypto brings to the equation that others don't and i think you know not merkel's amazing and they've made amazing contributions but they've also stunted the ecosystem and many people left good depths really good teams and i think that that that knob has turned a little bit and they're starting to embrace and really have a kind of a devex first experience that is the only way that we're gonna bring in football fans that are on reddit or out on youtube or whatnot is if we can actually have them onboard and go get them in a very smooth and easy way without having to rejigger five times how to authenticate and write a signer five times over a year that's just unsustainable for a small start up and i think that's changing we're we've matured to a point the trade off was speed right and i get it and i complete massive respect for the team over there but it is time to act more like an operating system an operating system for communities and the devs that are building them right
i i think that's that's super cool as well and so another thing is let's assume in the next few weeks or months we'll have a great parity ux you can anyone can be onboarded onto forecaster and find good communities they can easily create a forecaster account which has an embedded wallet so the to end social onboarding experience is great and we can have great feeds we can figure out these like spam datasets etcetera so a lot of work merkel merkel is doing will help us get that baseline i wanna dive in a bit on now the economic engine part i think that is kind of an interesting design space right and we have hypersub and we have clankpad as two great examples of that you build a you build a community on firecaster you can get it easily there's a lot of getting tools you can you know create subscriptions you can create everything that exists as a monetization layer for you know bringing in people seeing what the treasury stack of of a community is and then start start to disperse it people can every post could be having some value right within a channel how do you how do you pass that value back how do you how that discovery happens so there's bunch of these things which can be an economic engine for a community which is the kind of the differentiation piece i i want to probably start with johnny if with with all these controlling for all these issues we see on onboarding on forecast etcetera if you had to have a wish list of what what would be the ideal kind of growth and end state for building this crypto social experience for communities which is having this differentiated economic engine share more about that so that devs and community builders can start running these experiments whether it's with hypersaw or or or anything else how how do you think about it johnny put that and memes is a great example why i wanna start with you is it is probably the channel which has an economic engine and it already you're you're you've been
earning money from the hyper subs and distributing it back you've been building the tool to serve main channel dogfooding everything so talk us about where do you see this going like controlling for all the issues that we can solve
yeah it's a good question i mean the i guess the the the short and simple answer is like i don't know the the longer you know answer just i i can kinda just stream of conscious kinda share how i think about this which is that
you need a stable substrate wherein technological fucking around and finding out can happen and i think that warcast you know like merkel has has done a really good job with that it's not it's not great you know like there's all kinds it breaks you know the developer experience has been like very volatile you know they're working on that like growth has kind of happened in fits and starts but like if you just try to squint and and look into the future you just imagine all of those things getting cleaned up and you also imagine there being like really good content so to me that this is like you have these like real fundamental issues that you have to solve for like these like network effect problems that are just like timeless and very difficult problems to solve which is you like want a lot of really high con quality content creators and then you want a lot of content consumers and you want them to converge in the product every day all day like that's super super hard to create so you see that merkel doing things like oh we'll pay you we have this rewards that's cool and it's also something that twitter does at a way bigger scale you know so it's like how do you differentiate i think that you have these like real fundamental issues that have to be solved
before you can even really see what's working and what isn't working but i but i but i just if you if you squint and you like make this big assumption that that will get solved that either the merkel team or some other team coinbase maybe i don't know they will figure out how to magically get like thousands of awesome community builders and content creators and then all of the associated audiences that those people have to somehow start posting on farcaster let's just say that that that that happens cool i think that the the answer to well what's the winning monetization strategy it's like not a thing you it's it's not knowable you can't know this a priori it's almost like free market capitalism it's like it's like the what you really need are things like you need a stable currency you need you need contracts you know you need property rights you need this like basic kind of economic ingredients and then what bubbles up from that who who knows and so i feel like we have we have the one but not the other like we have all these developers that are building all these really cool economic primitives and are kinda ready to go and lots of i think developer appetite to ex continue iterating and experimenting on that like zuora just launched this new launcher today cool model maybe it'll work maybe it won't i don't know but the point is that it's this iterative stochastic process this entire ecosystem is on but it's happening at such a small scale because we don't have a lot of creators and users that it's hard to know if it's really working and it and if it can work at scale i think like you have to have that and then once you have it you need a very stable environment in which lunatics like the people on this call can rapidly iterate you know and and i think like the problem is that what we've had up to this point is just volatility everywhere like volatility in the user base volatility on the protocol and like volatility on the application layer and so you just like you're in this sort of chaotic storm of disorder and you're like what the fuck is going on here like how do you like what what's true what's real like what's not it's just very hard to to sense me in this environment so anyway that's like my like more rambling like like i'm i'm like okay this this is what i want like i want a very stable protocol and i want and i want a lot of creators and a lot of consumers and then once we once that's established like i think that we're gonna answer the question you asked in this stochastic manner like through a lot of iteration through a lot of experiments but like you kinda need this it was like this thing about like how life emerges on planets
like we
and for the life to kinda iterate and if you have comets hitting it all the time then it's like you're you're never gonna get past the like amoeba phase and it feels a little bit like crypto has been like that for the past few years
i think that yeah that's words of wisdom from johnny on a friday morning i think we should the last two minutes we will try and cut them out and make sure we pin it on gm forecaster they should be on for the entire week
and that's fine beautiful absolutely beautiful well and then the forecaster os i mean this panel has been the perfect way to end this virtual summit johnny mac i just adore you like so much like just beautiful just beautiful words
i mean there's three macs
there's three macs on this call you can
i know it's like it's was that by design it was the big mac show is what it is it's all about i you know there's a when token and should you ever wanna you know launch something
new podcast dropping soon yeah
we need like mac
broadcaster network
we have yeah
let's we've got we've got the setup right here i think mcbain you still have access i'm pretty sure unless i took you out to put somebody else in i can't remember but yeah but we can add you back so this has been awesome i really appreciate all this wisdom it has been so fun to sort of sit back and just listen so he'll fantastic job moderating this has been wonderful we're going to be putting all of this these two days out into our regular podcast feed so it'll be on spotify and apple and youtube and all the places with some show notes and anything else that you wanna say to wrap this up sahil
so i think this was great thanks for taking the time guys and we'll definitely follow-up i think there's a bunch of people who are excited about channel as some of us here on the panel and let's keep going i think let's focus on the process and the meta framework like johnny said and we'll we'll do better week on week so i think that's and i know all of us here are trying our best and that's why we're here showing up you know every day and thanks so much for nanish pro for using gm farcaster to to kinda stir up the most important conversations that can happen on the time but this great way to kind of you know scale them as well but this has
been fantastic fantastic and i'll see some of you in east denver next week farcaster meetup on saturday gm farcaster brunch on saturday morning looking forward to seeing all of you and with that
can we get a unison
can we do it in unison
we can do it in unison you ready one two three bye bye
bye bye
bye bye that was not in unison bye bye bye bye everybody