Before you read further please understand that this comes from a place of love and admiration for this place. I have found more fun, friends, and real connection with people here than anywhere else on the web. I want this place to succeed.With all that said:Channels as a concept are currently overloaded. Lots of people use them as hashtags because that is the visible surface and impact. The intention was to be somewhere between a custom feed and a subreddit but they just completely lost the plot and don't achieve any of those aims.The way I see it they are a slice of Farcaster and importantly a part of the application surface that the user can purchase and customize. How or what those customizations are and how enforceable all of that is at a protocol level versus just inside the app is super important. Things like gated content, distribution, social clout or flexing, and ways to connect with a community are important aspects of online social media that channels don't currently meaningfully fulfill. Group chats connected to channels might be a good way to get community; global emotes for channels (published at a protocol level ideally) would be a fun and easy win (Twitch has users that just serve as emote hubs and people pay to use them in chat). Gated content is an easy one but we don't have a lot of Farcaster native content that makes sense yet so this feels cart before the horse, but you could easily see it adopting a model like Patreon but with less fees and overhead for channels. Distribution only applies to channels of a certain size and this worked before but feels like it has been abandoned and possibly gamed to death.All of this stuff has been suggested before for what it's worth and all of it has been ignored or reprioritized for various reasons, but it feels silly to ignore what works on other platforms that could be shoehorned in easily. (Please also learn the lessons from the horrible excursion into slapping a shitty, laggy, half-baked version of TikTok into here when we barely had any video content—just copying the hot thing isn't important, making the feature that gets us pumping out content or bringing in users is what matters, i.e., video is good, TikTok-ass feed bad.)The ideas I present all have prior art elsewhere but it's important that they go with the natural flow of what works for the user base here. So much time has been spent fighting the user base and it was just wasted; lately we have seen a change to introduce new features that make sense like audio spaces. I hope we can keep seeing this kind of development more in the future. It shows there is life here and can naturally synergize with what I have presented.