Farcaster FIDs + following + engagement analysis 20240708

by @artlu aka fafo.artlu.eth

Data analysis triggered by proxystudio.eth's observations about possibility of growing an account from scratch.

Opinionated Conclusions

• ~40 accounts reached Proxy's raw following count

  • ~25% appear to be clearly individual humans
  • significant portion are brands or projects
  • reasonable people may ask whether the Proxy account is a pure human, or strongly attached to a project

• ZERO accounts of similar engagement arrived after Proxy. (Bitfloorsghost.eth was about the same time.)

• Notable:

  • a cohort of 5~25 accounts of similar engagement arrived slightly earlier. See original thread for shoutouts

  • significant numbers of accounts at 5k-15k followers, with somewhat lower engagement ranks

Background

My iniitial claim that fewer than 5 accounts had been able to achieve the same growth. No data yet at the time.

Proxy challenged me for data.

3 testable hypotheses:

1. "Proxy Studio grew from 0 to top 300 users by engagement, between Feb 5, 2024 and July 5th, 2024."

2. "fewer than 5 accounts grew from [0] to [Proxy's current follower count, which is 16.3~16.5k] over that same time period"

3. "The market expected 500 accounts to grow to >5k followers over that time period." Suggesting that the number that actually did is a disappointing number

Pre-registered my data approach here.

Data

1. FIDs and Follower Count

2. OpenRank Engagement Rank (global)

3. OpenRank Following Rank (global)

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N.B. about OpenRank data, see @rjs's illuminative discussion including the normative claim that OpenRank "Engagement" Ranking is *ridiculously heavily* skewed towards the earliest users of Farcast

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FIDs and Follower Count

A public Neynar query https://data.hubs.neynar.com/queries/756

SELECT l.target_fid, ud.value, count(1) AS followers
FROM links l
  LEFT JOIN user_data ud ON l.target_fid = ud.fid AND ud.type = 6
WHERE l.type = 'follow' AND l.deleted_at IS NULL AND ud.deleted_at IS NULL
  AND (target_fid > 20939 OR target_fid IN (6546))
GROUP BY target_fid, ud.value
HAVING count(1) > 4500
ORDER BY count(1) DESC

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Engagement Rank (global)

A public OpenRank query

curl 'https://graph.cast.k3l.io/scores/global/engagement/rankings?limit=1000' | jq -r '["rank", "fid", "fname"], (.result.[] | [.rank, .fid, .fname]) | @csv' > openrank_engagement_20240706.csv

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Following Rank (global)

A public OpenRank query

curl 'https://graph.cast.k3l.io/scores/global/following/rankings?limit=1000' | jq -r '["rank", "fid", "fname"], (.result.[] | [.rank, .fid, .fname]) | @csv' > openrank_following_20240707.csv