Ok I'm on iris.to right now and it seems to have the best indicators on messages for likes, replies, etc - but my follower count is way off. Curious why relays have such crazy diverging data on things like follower count?
Also what desktop clients do you use for #Nostr? Looking for a list to explore much like I did with LNURL providers.
Snort.social, nostrgram.co and iris for me on desktop
https://heyapollo.com/category/nostr
All the clients and reviews are on Apollo
Think itās due to when they receive the contact list.
Try gossip by #[2] - he can explain this stuff far better
Iris desktop works well for me
For desktop iris.to is my favorite
nostrgram.co has a lot of filters and layouts to choose from and a rollback recovery feature if you lose your follows or follower lists (not sure how that happens but it does). It has a really cool feed option of your follows + their follows, which gives you a one degree of separation feed.
gossip and morespeech are the graphical desktop clients I'm aware of.
As for follower count, it is expensive and unreliable to compute. You need to ask for every ContactList that includes you, from as many relays as you can, and then unique the authors returned. If you have 1000 followers, that's up to 1000 ContactLists returned PER-RELAY, and ContactLists can be very large events.
Gossip does not count this. Narcissists can use a command line tool from time to time to do this count. I have one that is unpublished, maybe I will publish it.
Follower count was def a mistake for us at Twitter
Maybe not a mistake, but def changes everything
Why does follower count even matter anyway? Seems pointless unless youāre trying to flex so you can be an influencer of sorts.
Dopamine addiction. Same with likes.
It is important to know how many entities want to read you
I mean... given how many people make a living off being an "influencer" it does seem like follower count is a pretty important metric for many people.
But I agree. It should not matter. Engagement numbers with the content that is created should be enough for "influencers" to negotiate their rates.
Shouldnāt zaps for quality content kill the influencer model?
I'd say it will fuel it even more. First, you focus in making great content which will earn you actual money, so you make even more great content, and then when you have a huge following, you earn extra money from putting product placements into your great content.
Bow you just have to find the sweet spot where the product placement earns you more than the lost zaps from people who are pissed by the product placement (which should be trivial, most people don't give a shit).
So now, zaps actually enable wannabe influencers to bootstrap their "venture" since they can now earn a little money right from the start, before they even got really big.
damn typos šwill there ever be an edit button for Nostr? š„ŗ
Besides being polite I donāt see a reason for likes. What would be the effects of eliminating likes and follower count? You could still follow someone but it doesnāt need to show a count anywhere. No more likes or followers. Just put out whatever content you want and receive zaps from people that find value.
Likes / follower count can be signals that allow algos to pick the best messages out of an ocean of infinite noise. Of course likes and followers, being free, can be gamed, so zaps would be better.
Why have likes, zaps, reposts, etc? They are social signals to filter and/or measure the potential relevance of content and people. If thereās something that works better then sure itād be great, but knowing that 10k people follow someone, while another has 40 followers is, in fact, useful. Same as when scrolling through 100 comments you might stop on one with a ton of likes to find itās fucking hilarious & didnāt have to read an hour of garbage to find it.
The social networking sphere has 1,000,000x the data, people, comments & posts as what anyone can possibly navigate. All the āsocial signalā tools are just imperfect shortcuts to sorting through the ocean of social media to find relevance. š¤·š»āāļø
ā¤ļø #[2]
Agree. It's all grist for the mill (useful information)
Yeah, I can see how it might provide signal or some sort of legitimacy to help sort through the noise. But, itās better that it be organic and āearned.ā In other words, follow me because I add value to your life. And, zap sats to me if you really enjoy or appreciate something. This is often not the case in social media. Instead, people pay for followers or even ask for people to follow them or like a post shared so they can reach a certain threshold/goal.
PS for the record I follow Guy Swann because I like the content and appreciate his contributions. š
spot on
I thought p we needed the follower count because this is how you know that one account is "better" than the other, but now that I'm thinking about it this is not necessarily true
Totally. IMO, the like / follower count feeds a starving narcissistic appetite, politicizes benign content, and reduces the dissemination of original thought.
Kind of reminds me of 8th grade kids jockeying to be popular for popular sake. Remember those kids that were popular and had a loud voice about things only because they were supposed to be the popular ones but were in reality quite an empty shell?
Itās interesting to say the least as to how it changes behavior & peopleās perception of others. At times it seems obviously useful, while there are also absolutely cases where it seems to have very negative effects.
Not to mention so many people *do* care about it and itās a major driver for them to engage at all. Hard to say what the net benefit or cost is, especially if bootstrapping a competing network. š¤
Why was it a mistake? How else would you structure the people that provide the best (subjective) content that others want to follow?
If I had to argue in the negative, I could say it could shift focus from what is the best content, to the network effect of what *other people are looking at.*
Seems pretty easy to observe how much of content and connections occur completely reactionary to the social sphere. āOh look 100k people follow this person, I should follow them.ā And then you get this sort of feedback loop circle jerk where people who might not even have good content or interesting things to say have massively growing reach *because* they have massive reach.
Kind of like in fiat finance how the only companies that get loans are the ones that are already massive, therefore they are the most likely to simply keep up with inflation & make nominal gains, then the smaller, promising, truly innovative competitors get drowned under bigness for the sake of bigness.
Anyway that would be my counter argument. @jack might have been suggesting a completely different idea š
The Kardashian effect
They have the name because they were first to monopolize it, but they had to keep the fame. No small feat.
The counter argument is very fair. Though, doesnāt that self select out over time. If the people with 100k follows or 10 million put out crap content, they lose followers quickly. It take a LOT to build a large base.
Now, this could raise the question of āshould there be people with 10mm followers,ā or cult of personalities, but this just comes down to human nature. The vast majority want to be led and the platforms that will do the best are the ones that make it easiest for people to be led.
Curious about how #[4] would address this? I completely agree that follower count is a problem but itās the only way good way to get your writing out there. This is a problem because it disadvantages people who post less frequently or who join the protocol later.
As a result we donāt see the best content, but the content with the most followers a lot of the time.
Same as zaps are for nostr
Changes the dynamic around tipping
Becomes a proxy for quality of content, which can be gamed with wash-zaps
I would love to hear more context on this. Like, what behaviors did you see (was it more of a problem of bots/spam or just fixation on "being popular").
How Twitter Gamifies Communication - C. Thi Nguyen
Follower count created a tool that could be weaponized ā huge psyop in being manipulated by group think ā humans innately want to move with and be a part of the crowd
And that's in a context where you can ACTUALLY count followers. You can't actually count followers for real in nostr.
Couldnāt you ask for the system your calling from to compile it and then just pull the one number?
Still has to be done per relay, but then you have to know which ones are double counted. When he describes it that way I can see why itās a real problem.
There are hundreds of relays. Which one are you going to ask? How is it going to know about your followers over there on the Timbuktu relay?
Do we have the same difficulty with likes? Or with other things?
When we search something isn't the system taking into account the follower count to push results from users with many followers on top?
iris.to, desktop pc
Yeah, will be a challenge with the relay architecture. Only solution will be big centralised harvesting servers (clients) to collate their ābest pictureā for each user and then provide stats. And this will not solve āstealth followersā when they get built into some clients.
Nostrid is a desktop client for Windows, MacOS and Linux: https://github.com/lapulpeta/Nostrid/releases/tag/v1.25
