Overview

Nouncaster (nouncaster.wtf) is a mobile app built on Farcaster to connect members of the Nouns community and relevant information in the ecosystem. It enables streamlined communication and connection across the community while ensuring the "stickiness" of the best and most important content.

Motivation

Content Ephemerality

The community's essential discussions and social content get lost in all the daily Nouner interactions. The community needs a platform that uplifts the best content to ensure everyone is updated on the most critical discussions, no matter how often they check-in.

Ecosystem fragmentation

Several digital channels allow Nounsfolk to consume and create content related to the community, leading to fragmentation of information and identity. Nouner communication should be more cohesive and easy to follow. We aim to act as a connective tissue to all the various discourses, endeavors, and ideas the Nouns DAO offers.

Core Features

In the future, we plan to explore and build on ideas like gamification, frames, interactivity, monetization, etc., but one fundamental concept that will uniquely define our platform from the beginning is “Nounishness.”

NounRank + User Filters

We believe that NounRank (Nounishness) is a necessary and critical mechanism for highlighting the most essential and high-quality content in a growing and diverse community like Nouns.

An algorithmic mechanism that leverages various ranking techniques to automatically determine the most relevant content and autonomously uplift content by individuals who consistently prove they produce high-quality content.

Feeds will be filtered based on Active Badge holders, Noun NFT holders, and Public (non-holders) users. We hope to expand the available user filters with the community's help. We have provided a deeper explanation of how NounRank will be implemented at the end of the proposal.

Home Feed (and Topics)

Whereas Warpcast has ‘Channels,’ of which /nouns is one, Nounscaster will implement this as Topics. This feature will give the user better control of their feed and the conversations they want to engage with. The home feed is where less-critical, day-to-day discussions take place. 

Posts in the “topics” a user has selected will be shown in this feed via state change on the UI rather than taking a user to an entirely new forum. The priority here is the cohesiveness of the user experience to limit clutter and continue to rely heavily on NounRank.

Three different ⌐◨-◨ badges (bronze, silver, and gold) will be used to show the tier of the post based on its NounRank score.

Nounsfeed

The Nounsfeed will display the most relevant content for Nouns community members by leveraging a combination of “Nounishness” (NounRank) and consensus (likes, comments, bookmarks, etc.). 

Items deemed “mission critical” will remain at the top over higher time frames. Users can filter by lower timeframes and priority if they choose. For example, if users only log in once weekly, they may want to see the most important things over the 7d timeframe. In contrast, a user who logs in multiple times daily may want to sift through more of the less relevant items over a shorter period.

Users can mark a post as 'read' to declutter their feed after engaging with it.

Community

Defragmenting the critical aspects of the ecosystem, including the daily auction, proposals, prop house items, and recent Noun sales, by unifying them in one easy-to-follow place. All other Nouns resources—official links (Discourse, Opensea, Etherscan, Github), educational content (Nouns.Center), and social links (Discord, Twitter)—will be linked here.

Profile

Your basic profile details and NounRank score will be displayed here. Your on-chain activity and the Nouns you own may also appear here.

Scope

The project will take place over a three-month epic, broken into three 4-week sprints. We have prioritized the most critical elements of the product to showcase our value proposition while laying the groundwork for future iterations and implementations:

Sprint 1: Design + NounRank algorithm v1, Home Feed & Groups.

Sprint 2: Nounsfeed, Profile.

Sprint 3: Nouns ecosystem integrations (Community).

Looking Beyond 3 Months

Groups v2+

Channels are not currently part of the core protocol, so we will implement a custom solution and later switch to the protocol-level integration when the capability becomes available.

Direct messaging

DMs are unavailable at the protocol level and introduce other privacy and security concerns. While this would be a great feature, it is non-critical to our value proposition and can be implemented later.

NounRank v2+

The NounRank algorithm can be expanded, improved, and enhanced to become more robust and effective at identifying the best content from the most relevant Nouns. A second version might implement LLMs or other ML layers to achieve the best possible algorithm that continuously learns from user input.

The Nouniverse

Looking forward, we hope to add and explore more Noun tailored experiences in terms of the following:

1. Governance – Similar to Nouns Camp, displaying votes with reasons.
2. Commerce and Minting – Similar to Interface, showing Nounsfolks activity onchain, with in-app minting.
3. Frames and Games – The community’s imagination is the only limit!

Team

Development 

Nick Saponaro will lead the development. His experience spans mobile and web development with a deep understanding of web3 and blockchain. He is a blockchain patent holder with experience bringing multiple crypto products, such as DiviWallet, to a global market. He is a full-stack engineer who has been involved in the crypto space since 2013 and has a wide network of professional web3 developers he can enlist as needed.

Projects:

https://diviwallet.com

https://dividefi.com

https://chalkapp.co

https://diviswap.com

Product & Design

Camarilla will be responsible for product and design. He is a two-time founder with a background in Electrical Engineering. He has previously led a Web3 wiki engine to bring Wikipedia onchain in 2021, and an e-commerce startup before that. He is the CEO/Head of Product at OCTAV3, a music fandom and streaming platform; a social consumer product similar to Nouncaster.

Projects:

OCTAV3 demo – https://youtu.be/UwR5LPJT0Yw

Contact:

Warpcast – https://warpcast.com/nickysap;https://warpcast.com/camarilla 

X – https://twitter.com/nicky_sap;https://twitter.com/camarilla_ 

Telegram – https://t.me/nicksap;https://t.me/camarilla33

Github – https://github.com/99darwin; https://github.com/camarilla33 

LinkedIn – https://linkedin.com/in/nicksaponaro; https://www.linkedin.com/in/katlego-makoni/

Technology Stack:

Check out the Nouncaster Github Repo

• Blockchain: EVM (Ethereum L1, Base)
• Protocol: Farcaster
• Frontend: React Native
• Backend: Apollo Server + MongoDB, GraphQL
• Hosting: Vercel / AWS

NounRank (Deep Dive)

(Post A has two (2) likes. Post B has one (1) like. However, Post B is ranked higher because users inherit their followers' scores. The user with the most ‘quality’ followers has the highest score and quality)

PageRank inspires the proposed "Noun Rank" algorithm and aims to rank posts on our feeds based on the "Nounishness" of the users in the app and community. The key points are:

1. NounRank Score: Each user has a score. Traits like the number of Nouns owned, community participation & duration, and voting history contribute to a higher overall NounRank score for the user.
2. Post Interaction Weights: Post interactions (repost, comment, like, bookmark) have varying weights –  in the above figure, L represents the weight for likes.
3. Post Ranking: A post's score is calculated by multiplying the NounRank scores of the interacting users and the respective interaction weights. Posts with higher scores are ranked higher.

For example, in the above figure, if a single user with a NounRank score of 4 likes (weight of 2) a post, the post's score would be 4 2 = 8. This score would be higher than a post where two users with a combined NounRank score of 2 like a post (weight of 2), resulting in a post score of 2 2 = 4.

The algorithm aims to promote posts that receive high-quality interactions from users with strong "Nounishness," as determined by their Noun ownership, community participation, and other traits.

The particular post-interaction also matters. Instinctively, a repost would have the highest weight, followed by comments, likes, and bookmarks.

While the specific trait scores and interaction weights are subject to change, the proposed system incentivizes active community participation and not only Noun ownership, thereby surfacing content aligned with the Noun community's principles.

Addendum: Possible Traits and Their Scores

• Owning a Noun: 1
• Owning multiple Nouns: Square root of the number of Nouns owned (e.g., 9 Nouns = 3, 100 Nouns = 10)
• Number of prop votes: 1.2
• Number of prop votes with a reason: 1.5
• Community membership for less than three (3) months: 1.5
• Community membership for three (3) months or more: 2
• Community membership for 12 months or more: 3
• OG Nouns (first six (6) months): 5
• Total accumulated post score: Post score divided by 10 (The score of a user’s past posts will also act as a trait)

The scores for owning multiple Nouns follow a "quadratic cost" model, where the score increases at a decreasing rate as the number of Nouns owned increases. This is to incentivize a more distributed ownership of Nouns.

To Recap – 

• The total NounRank score for a user is calculated by summing up the scores from all applicable traits.

This score, along with the weights assigned to different post interactions (repost, comment, like, bookmark), determines theranking of posts on the feed.