Nobody was willing to spend their sats in quantities sufficient to sustain a viable decentralized economy on the network. KYC’d fiat payment methods and ad-supported revenue models crept in and the economies of scale led to centralization of relays/servers until users realized they were now just using a shittier version of the major social networks with a smaller user base so they went back where their friends are.
Discussion
Already seeing zap droughts
Yup
💯 definitely has fallen off. Hard to incentive content creation if all people are willing to tip for it is a half-penny worth of sats here and there, lol. Bridges between fiat and sats could. Services like Strike can pay directly from your fiat balance to a Lightning invoice and the recipient can receive it in sats. Something like strike allows people who don’t want to deal with bitcoin to still use it where needed, and it allows bitcoiners who prefer to spend their fiat to do so, while still allowing the network to be interoperable via sats. Still run into some kyc that way though.
*could help.
Can’t blame them. V4V economy seems expensive. That’s why advertisers bore the cost traditionally. They could afford to.
Can’t state it enuff that if the "influencers" can’t make a living off of "the nostr" that they won’t stay & their followers won’t either.
Doesn’t matter though, Nostr is complete free-speech. That itself has value with or without influencers.
I agree but it seems the majority of people don’t agree with that yet
Relays and apps require resources to be run and maintained. Where does the money come from to sustain them?
True fans. Supporters who want to see this thing take off.
We need a big influencer media company to point all their content to a zap.steam pay to access only type thing for it to really catch on & only post content on though nostr
I agree. I think the limitations of the size of the bitcoin user base adds an additional challenge. Any new project (app, artist, creator, etc) seeking to monetize is going to run into struggles at first and need to rely on their biggest supporters to get them off the ground. When the pool of potential supporters is limited to only people who know how to use bitcoin, that shrinks the available funds for new projects. The catch 22 is that bitcoin is perfectly suited for a decentralized network like this. More people have fiat to spend, but that also introduces kyc and other potential regulations.
Taibbi for example
Content is king.
The community is still so small that everyone is competing for a tiny portion of a small group that is willing to pay for anything. This has led to having to build huge offerings in order to gain customers.
Unless you’re willing to roll out a global network with additional features at this point being an operator is a passion project.
What’s the solution?
I wish I knew nostr:npub1lrnvvs6z78s9yjqxxr38uyqkmn34lsaxznnqgd877j4z2qej3j5s09qnw5
I lack my usual snark on this subject for the simple reason I think it’s super complex. I don’t see ad supported services as being that way out of malice. I believe some smart guys wanted to build something and get paid for their troubles, and found a way to do so.
It’s a cultural issue. We are used to things being free. People (in generality) aren’t going to pay for something that they can get elsewhere for free, unless they have some other more ideological reason - or as others have mentioned, the service is much better (premium). Among those services with premium offerings, it is a very small percentage of people who opt into this, and overwhelming majority stay free and are carried on the backs of the small premium base. It’s still a mutual benefit, since nobody would want premium if there weren’t tons of people to interact with.
That’s the societal issue with a v4v economy. The majority of users will not give value, since value is provided by others for “free,” and many things of value are also fairly invisible. I posit the average user will not give a damn about your average relay until it’s gone - because it’s invisible.
It’s also worth noting that almost every service that has a premium tier survived *years* of financial loss and riding on VC money to get to that threshold of user base where the 1% of premium users could turn a profit.
There is a solution to all of this and it’s just a transaction fee - even if voluntary. You can also scale it by % instead of a fixed number. Higher transaction value = higher fee. Many may not pay but if you achieve decent scale that may be enough to cover costs and even turn a profit.
Coming with paid tiers it may be sufficient to sustain clients and relays and even content creators. You just need scale.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the cultural issue part. People expect things for free on the internet.
Even though I think most of us on nostr understand this, it's not actually free you're paying with your data. And I do think people are starting to wake up to this fact. But until a larger population of people wakes up to the fact that on these "free" platforms you are actualy the product a Sustainable value for value style, economy will not persist for long.
Sir it's a bear market
Yep. It’s a catch 22 for people who simultaneously want a decentralized social network while also wanting to scrimp and save every satoshi they can.
This is why I believe what's needed is to help us all learn how to establish multiple satoshi income streams every way possible. For our goods, for our services, and for our ideas, we establish "bodies" of work attached to our Nostr accounts that are continuously streaming sats into our wallets.
Only then does sending them back out again become less painful. It must also become normalized to be on zero fiat (or or close to near zero), transitioning back to slave debt-notes ONLY when necessary to interact with those still in the fiat plantataions.
It's also FAR easier to spend anything once full stack sovereignty over nearly all daily basic need has been established. As in clear title to land/house and energy, water, food, and waste management ALL managed on site. Siege proof sovereignty enables a higher velocity of money flows through our wallets.
This is the Way.
Fucking developers only talking to developers again.
Nailed it
Almost like mixing the economy with a social network is literally one of the most retarded ideas anyone has ever had.
🥲
☝ how not to kill nostr. this should go up on a wiki or something for reference of things we shouldn't do.
one of my talks at Nostrasia will roughly be about this
💜
I think services like Strike could help to some degree. Strike allows you to make payments directly from fiat to sats. People that want to send/receive sats can do so, and people that would rather deal in dollars/fiat can do so. It does introduce some kyc into the payments side of things, but only for those users who choose to use those services. Solutions like that would at least give more non-bitcoiners the option of participating economically in the network.
This 👆
