On Hubs
Why we don't pay economic rewards for Hubs
1. We've said from the beginning, people will run Hubs without direct economic incentives. This has proven correct. 10K+ Hubs on the network.
2. This number is artificially high as there are likely many Hub operators hoping for a future economic reward. There will not be a reward.
3. Rewards don't make sense as there's no good way to prove that a Hub was honest and performant for a long period of time. Any deterministic system tied to an economic reward would create an incentive for fraud to fake running a Hub to get paid.
3. This is why Bitcoin and Ethereum do not pay node operators. Economic rewards are independent from running a node. Coinbase ran BTC / ETH nodes for years (pre-staking).
4. Our original goal was get to ~100 independent, good Hubs. Given network size, activity, number of companies building on Farcaster, seems like that number is achievable between 1) companies with an economic interest in access to the network and 2) altruistic individuals for hobbyist or ideological reasons.
1. Gated polls based on criteria — you can only vote if...
a. Onchain activity — age of wallet, token balance, holding an NFT
b. Farcaster activity — age of account, # of followers, OpenRank or Power Badge
2. Remind me — useful for live virtual events like Farhouse, Unlonely, /tabletop game night; creates a frame with a single button to remind the user via a programmatic DC 1 hour or 15 minutes before event is live
3. Waitlist — useful for building excitement about a consumer app launch; creates a frame with single button to join the wailist; admin UI is a table of FIDs and relevant metrics, ability to invite users to the app via a programmatic DC
4. Prop bet — creates a frame with a description, $ amount, odds and resolver (i.e. 3rd party who decides who won the bet) for a prop bet against the caster. Transaction on Base in USDC? Degen?
5. Copy trade — creates a frame with a single button / txn that allows you to clone a portfolio (via a consolidated multi-swap txn, not sure if possible)
6. Amazon product link frame — create a frame with an Amazon product, frame creator has an affiliates account, pays you out a % in a crypto
7. Fundraiser — GoFundMe campaign in a frame. Allow the ability for the author to specify another Farcaster user, e.g. a charity, funds go to connected address, track successful payments / leaderboard for biggest contributors
8. LLM actions - improve your grammar, make the cast funnier, more succinct; generate an image with DALL-E
9. Imgflip - similar to a GIF keyboard, search for a meme template and then have the ability to add Impact text on top and bottom of the image
10. What channel should I cast in - analyze cast text and then look at what channels have been most active recently
11. Boost my cast - select your mutual follows before you cast, action waits for the next cast to propogate on the network and then DCs a link to your friends to like it
12. Grab most recent [x] - give the action your Twitter username, and it shows you the raw text of the last few tweets, making it easy to cross-post; could be the same for most recent mint, transaction, trade, etc.
Useful to be precise here: "bots" is a catch all term that people use to describe low effort, uninteresting or otherwise off-topic content.
However, a "bot" is traditionally thought of as a programmatic account, i.e. controlled by a script or software. e.g. bot net
When people on Farcaster refer to "bots" they are more often referring to actual people using a mobile device (with the aid of translation tools and ChatGPT) who post uninteresting content (from their pov).
They are casting and replying in hopes of appearing to be a "real account" because they have learned that turns into a future economic reward in crypto. Recent tipping meta has increased the expected value of these accounts.
It's possible to algorithmically label these accounts, but then you create a "shadowban" meta. So you massively increase the number of support messages and complaints. This was the state of the world before priority mode.
We're going to keep iterating here, but our pov is:
1. Priority mode works pretty well out of the box
2. We need to offer ways for actual interesting accounts to break through
3. We'll likely bring back some version of spam labeling since priority mode has created it's own set of customer support complaints.
"Why don't you just use onchain signals?"
a. Based on our waitlist last year of 300K sign ups, "bots" have plenty of Ethereum addresses with assets.