Ok had some time to sleep on this. My problems with the new Balaji rules for Farcaster and why I voted no: - The consent is coerced. "Not now" and "Vote to leave" both make your account read-only. You either submit or lose your voice in the client you built your audience on. - It isn't really a vote. Voting to stay means handing the core team the power to rewrite the Network Code whenever they like, with no ongoing say for you. That's closer to a loyalty oath than to democracy, and the onchain NFT makes who signed public and permanent. Plus dangling an NFT to a web3 audience feels like an attempt to buy votes from degens who love minting NFTs. - The rules reach back in time. The new code applies to your past posts, written before any of these rules existed. I’ve seen countless reports of users being banned already the minute they log back in, from something they said years ago. - The standards are vague. "Starting or feeding fights," "low-quality posts," "clear hoaxes" and "hyping token prices repeatedly" can stretch to cover almost any dissent. HIGHLY subjective and becomes a kingdom, not a democracy. - "Rule of code" is mostly marketing. The prompts can change at any time, they admit to "manual judgment calls," and nothing mentions appeals or notice before a penalty. - Membership is ideological. The app is pitched as a community "for techno-optimists," and people who "don't like the idea of Singapore" are told to leave. That filters people by viewpoint, not conduct. And Singapore is a strange model to pick for speech, given its fake-news law and its record of defamation suits. I am a proud techno-optimist. But I am also a proud freedom of speech absolutist, and proponent of decentralization. Calling this approach “techno optimism” feels more like gaslighting and a power trip on Balaji’s part to me.

The way crypto gives grants is so stupid lol no outcomes just vibes things that could make a big difference probably cost less than 10k and one determined person, and yet millions go to groups of people by means of nepotism. sad.