I don't see how could that endeavor could be captured. Why?
Most of my work has been on Twitter and substack the last couple years. Substack because I have readers and emails and Twitter because I have some (modest) reach.
Both are highly flawed. I often want to make short posts, not full length essays, but you can’t email people 10x per day. Email only works if it’s occasional.
Twitter is flawed for 100 reasons. The algo sucks. It’s really dog shit. It’s the dystopian AI future where it’s not personal that you can’t reach the people who chose to follow you, just what the machine decided, and you have no recourse. Fighting it is futile. The algo is a dead end in its basic design.
Plus, you don’t own your work. I am a member of a minority class of people, those with something to say. I don’t simply lurk, I have shit to say, and I say it, for better or worse. In other words, I am of the class of people who create the network effect that gives Twitter its value.
And I am paying $16/month and getting paid zero. I am getting paid zero in part because the algo punishes me for building a following of credulous fantasy sports players (laptop class) and then deciding instead to post about what was happening in the real world. As a result, many prominent, verified accounts that followed me muted me, and the algo does not like that apparently.
So I can’t reach the people who want to read my thoughts on Twitter, and I can’t bombard people with short emails on Substack. Neither one works.
Nostr you can post like Twitter, and anyone who wants to see your post will see it.Plus they can zap you. But content discovery is still shit. You can use any client, but you have no way of reaching an audience besides people happening to see what you posted if they happen to be scrolling around the time you posted it. There are good long form tools like nostr:npub1w0rthyjyp2f5gful0gm2500pwyxfrx93a85289xdz0sd6hyef33sh2cu4x and nostr:npub1yzvxlwp7wawed5vgefwfmugvumtp8c8t0etk3g8sky4n0ndvyxesnxrf8q, but hardly anyone reads essays here. (Same on Twitter, btw, no one reads them. People actually read my substack essays (or so it seems.)
So they are all imperfect, but at least with nostr you don’t feel like you’re getting a raw deal. That is has the potential to work.
One idea I had was a service wherein you hire ~20 people to follow the ~10K non-bot accounts who post the most. Each person has a job of reading every post and re-posting, commenting on the best ones. These people would have to have good taste, like a quality DJ that knows what music to play. They’d be discovering and boosting quality content, no matter how small the following. Users would quickly learn to follow the Master Curator account. As it got zapped and followed, others would emerge, and people could choose which station to tune into (or tune into multiple.)
This could get captured eventually too, but it would be a major service and incentivize those with small followings to post.
Anyway, this is too long already. Made a new year’s resolution to post more here. It’s real social media at least.
Discussion
If it got popular, people could promote their friends, get paid to promote certain things, promote certain ideologies, etc.
But we live in an adversarial world. Isn't that expected? Wouldn't it be worse if they didn't have the freedom to do that?
I've been thinking about the possibilities of value4value recently. I now think this: If the momentum of value4value is concentrated in just a few hands, that could activate something called the law of comparative advantage, sometimes called the ricardian law of association and that would boost the underdogs on the nostr scene.
I think the idea you've proposed can be great because that could trigger a big source of revenue that would trickle down and make a chain of reaction through all Nostr. After all, we could say there are people that provide us more value than others here
I think all of this could succeed (if made organically tho)
yeah, they should have the freedom, just acknowledging that it too is subject to capture and eventually failure, though competition from uncaptured curators and reputational damage could mitigate it.
And yes the idea would be to have people who follow everyone who posts more than say x times per week so that the number is about 10K. And call the account Master Curator or something. It would be real work though, so you’d have to get funding to vet and pay a bunch of people and maybe cut them in on the zaps to the account. But it would (IMO) accelerate engagement/adoption on nostr via incentives. ANY npub with sufficient volume would qualify to be followed (unless dismissed for spam/low-quality content), and be in the running to be re-posted by the Curator.
Even better if the UI for the curator were built so that it hid the identities of the npubs, so there would be no advantage whatsoever to having more followers or a high profile. The Curator just looks at posts preselected from accounts who contribute content to the platform at a certain rate and boosts the ones it deems worthwhile.