Nostr culture is really turning into one bandwagon after another.
Discussion
I can get behind that. Is there a hashtag yet?
Is that because we're copying the Twitter interaction model of "followers", which likely cultivates conformity. But Nostr certainly allows other ways of interacting, including being anonymous if you want to.
To elaborate, Nostr perfectly supports using a new random public/private key for a specific message, if you want to remain anonymous. It doesn't cause any overhead in the network protocol to do this. So we can easily add a button to the client app to post anonymously.
I think to a certain degree it’s caused by echo chambers, which tend to drive off diverse content. This is a test of every social media, to see if it can outgrow it, or if entrenched “early” people make the experience so heinous for newbies they just leave.
On another side, it’s likely the same popularity contest that’s always existed - like you suggest.
Then on another side the “X is a shitcoin/fiat” culture is becoming toxic and obnoxious. It’s a statement that builds nothing, contributes no original or creative thought, and proposes no solution besides “get on the right bandwagon.”
It’s ironic that right now the bandwagon is “you need to buy a new phone to nostr” instead of “nostr cannot be stopped.” The power of nostr is that the App Store decision will make *zero* difference in the ability of people to use and benefit from nostr. Celebration is in order.
I'm thinking about it, but one idea is that we could follow topics instead of people. Or have multiple sub-identities covering different subjects. So one user could have a politics subtopic and a technology subtopic, and we can choose to follow only that subset of posts. That way we won't be unfollowing people because we disagree with their politics....
For me this is my "crap" account where I can shitpost or just be stupid in general. I am in the process of setting up another for technical work and my software projects, which I am going to keep separate.
Also there's the fear that accounts could end up being linked in some way, so people might not speak out about important social issues due to that.
To stop that Tor can be used, and also an AI powered anti-stylometry tool could be added to the client, which rewords peoples posts so they cannot be identified.
That's just the ideas off the top of my head now.
Also to prevent spam, we could have 3rd party moderation services, which are entirely optional to use, the client uses them to assign a score to each post, as the old Slashdot moderation system did. And users can select a threshold level to choose which posts are visible or not.
And these services can be AI powered, and users are free to choose between several of them, or even run them locally on their computer, it will not end up being a tool for censorship.
Anyway that's my preliminary thoughts on it.