That's interesting. How do you find these things?
How BeReal missed its moment
To become the next big social app, competitors have to move faster
by Casey Newton: https://www.platformer.news/p/how-bereal-missed-its-moment
"It would be a shame, though, because novel viewpoints on social networks are hard to come by. On one hand, with Twitter in flames, this year has seen a precambrian explosion in new social apps: collectively, Mastodon, T2, Post, Nostr, Bluesky, the untitled Meta project, and Artifact represent the biggest new push into Twitter’s old territory than we have seen in a decade.
So far, though, none has identified a truly novel new feature. (Artifact, which is attempting to build a comments layer for the daily news, is the possible exception.) And while apps like these have often succeeded in the past by cloning each other, I can’t help but feel like there’s a basic laziness in the approach that (Artifact aside) these companies have taken.
It’s not enough to promise abstract benefits of running on a decentralized server (as do Bluesky and Nostr) or offer a pipe dream of more “civil” conversations (as Post does). Instead, you have to ship features — the way TikTok is constantly introducing new video effects, or Snapchat adds new augmented reality filters. It’s not enough to invite users in and expect them to create magic. You have to make it seem like you’re trying, too.”
I think zaps might actually be a plus for nostr, as much as I’m not a maximalist… another is all the microapps… we’re going to exeriment with expiring posts in Nos… I think we need to experiment with a TON of things. In one way Nostr is got an advantage in that the open protocol and community lets us try all of the things quickly, rather than filtering through the lens of a product manager searching out the best thing.
I think Secure Scuttlebutt didn’t take off because it was held back by too much technical debt… that could happen to nostr too, but it’s not that way yet. We need to make Nostr do new things that people want to do.
Substack + Payments + Social Sharing might be one.
Expiring Content - posts delete themselves after 1 week is another.
Micro apps is another.
What are your ideas of others?
Discussion
Casey Newton has been writing about social media and tech for a very long time. His platformer newsletter is fantastic. They’ve been the primary source for leaks coming out of twitter chronicling Elon’s mess.
He’s got a podcast, Hard Fork, which I enjoy: https://www.nytimes.com/column/hard-fork
The other podcast I try and listen to every episode of is TechMeme Ride Home which is a nicely edited 15 minute daily podcast about tech and startup news: https://www.ridehome.info/show/techmeme-ride-home/
The ride home podcasts often suggests long reads which are good and has longer interviews with specific people.
Techmeme Ridehome really is the best daily update podcast I’ve ever listened to. Would love to get Brian on nostr. I bet he would find some aspects of it quite compelling
We totally gotta get Casey to join Nostr so he can post these often! But he is already on Bluesky and Mastodon too so may be a bit of a thing to manage all of these platforms :D
We’re working on an update to rsslay that converts the posts to markdown and posts with a kind:30023 event instead of the summary that’s posted with kind:1. I want it because I want full articles from rss on nostr that I can share and interact with, specifically some of the substack newsletters I subscribe to.
#[4] is doing the dev on updating rsslay.
forgot Kara Swishers literal housemate, but I do agree one of the voices I enjoy to hate watch and stay balanced and informed what others are thinking with 😅