People might now be aware of this, but nostr is such an easy target for personalised ads and big data. While the web struggles to establish static identifiers and user profiles, nostr has all of it built in. Your identifier is your pubkey. Your profile data already is publicly available. It is a piece of cake for an advertiser to serve targeted ads to you, just by knowing your public key.

Here is a simplified example: I could go ahead and analyse relay traffic, then proceed to build a database that maps pubkeys to interest and demographics (for example by running all your notes through an LLM). Then I could go to any advertiser and tell them that I can offer them an audience „Male 21-35 yo, interested in tech and steaks“. Display campaigns with similar targets yield 3-6$ CPM on the traditional web.

Finally I would approach Will (who would surely decline, but just for the sake of this example) and tell him that he could earn 200$ per day be simply requesting a display ad from my server every ten posts on Damus feed. All he needed to do is to implement my SDK and send the users public key with the request…

This gets even worse on the web, because JavaScript and cookies…

This is a dystopia that might become reality if client developers can not find a less shitty way to monetise… nostr:note1ltskvvkn4avertvjlpyrw5jhcc9jgwxxx5cfpkrnr7kd99z7kh0s09rtec