What if nostr sucks because (1) there are no tools for suppressing bots and therefore (2) real celebrities (the ones with millions of followers) don't want to post here and therefore (3) normies (i.e. the millions of people who follow celebrities) don't want to post here either (because their favorite people aren't here)
Discussion
nostr sucks because there aren't enough normies?
feature not a bug
One might think "normies suck, they wouldn't improve the place" but I think that's wrong because normies aren't *completely* normies
Almost everyone has several different interests, and those who don't share interest F are normies from the perspective of fans of F. But that doesn't mean they aren't interesting people worth hearing from. Joe Shmoe isn't interested in bitcoin but maybe he's interested in history, or playing cards, or something else I like. So I want him to be here and I want to hear from him.
But Joe isn't here because he goes where his favorite celebrities are, and they aren't here because there aren't good enough tools for managing an overwhelming number of messages. If celebrity absence creates normie absence, and if normie absence creates a worse experience, then nostr will have a worse experience than places where normies gather.
There aren’t enough racists actually
That’s why
1 has a solution, paid relays. i dont see bots anyway. influencers dont come because 1) they dont need, they dont have much to gain, mostly bc there is no Algo that they can leverage and use in their favor.
It depends how you look at it. We can say what if Nostr is better because (1) "useful" bots can easily be built without some API subscription. (2) Less celebrities and more diverse normies makes space nicer (3) and better in terms of maturity.
It's just better or I'm getting old idk
“real celebs” would rather use influence to co-opt the ownership of the permissioned systems anyway, even if there were better bot/spam tools
I'm having a good time and it would suck to see it go down in flames. If I started feeling the heat, I'd quit my fiat job and devote 40 hours a week to bot suppression.....until my wife starts asking poignant questions. 🫡
There's actually quite robust ways to mitigate spam with web of trust or pagerank. They're just not widely deployed or talked about enough. But if you use Coracle or Iris today you see no spam.
1) Why did you say that? There are; maybe not perfect and applied everywhere, but WoT and pagerank work quite well.
I didn't know any clients implemented WoT or pagerank
I also doubt these are sufficient
If the members of BTS were on nostr, I suspect they would see over a million DMs every day when they log in, even with WoT and pagerank
And I doubt they would want to stick around in that kind of environment
Coracle and Voyage have WoT, for sure.
Many personal relays offer WoT.
nostr:npub1kpt95rv4q3mcz8e4lamwtxq7men6jprf49l7asfac9lnv2gda0lqdknhmz is working on Pagerank, via DVM.
Other clients, like Gossip, have other antispam strategies (NIP-05 check, first-seen check, etc).
I use many clients with my WoT relay (https://github.com/dtonon/chronicle) and I barely see any spam.
A famous profile that want to start with Nostr should have (minimal) resources to set up a good enviroment.
The only issue I have with some many of the current methods of combating bots and spam is that there isn't any way to differentiate a brand new user from a bot, so it adversely affects new users, too.
It's not terribly difficult to break through this. You just have to know someone who is on Nostr already and ask them to follow you via some other means of communicating with them. But if you don't know that you need to do this in order to bootstrap into not being considered a bot by everyone's WoT relays and Pagerang filters, then you'll just be shouting into the void and wondering why no one ever sees it.
WoT is a first effective tool but, being potentially too restrictive, is not the final, perfect measure.
Even if you are introduced by someone this doesn't help if you want interact to with another group with whom you share no contacts.
Ideally you should pair WoT with other checks, like PoW, NIP+05 verification, content analysis, the account creation date (via OTS), and use them to increase a "real user" score value.
In addition clients should think the visualization as a spectrum, for example totally hiding events from abusive npubs (high post frequency, duplicated messages, etc), but merely compacting uncertain ones, so that the user can easily check and eventually whitelist them.
#nostrdesign
I believe the simplest and most effective single solution beyond WoT is proof of membership in a trusted community.
Yup, #communikeys integrate best with this.
They can ask for payment (to write) most easily (alleviating the need to filter with social graphs).
They can follow / label the npubs they interact with (as a high signal profile in the social graph).
But mostly, they are king over their own community and their whole value-add = moderation (filtering for high signal content, profiles, ...).
Entering via a community you "trust" is immediately having a reference base. F.e. Anyone with the same name, image etc as someone in the communities you're in → can be labeled as a potential scammer. Etc...
It's an interesting option.
But, also communities can be built in an entirely synthetic way, so if you want to use them as a proxy to prove that a user is real, you should also verify that they are legitimate. And so we go back to WoT.
Yup, we're building on community / private group invites as the main entry point. For that and many other reasons.
yes exactly, but the community already exists in the social graph. 99% of people will be invited to communities, won't be their founders. Founders will need to acquire reputation themselves, but these are the type of people that aren't afraid of doing the work.
Make sense, the founder improves his own WoT, the community mirror it and so the members benefit from it.
But the community have to be closed with strong gates, like invitation-only, payment, or very heavy PoW.
And it's not easy to verify these conditions in a programmatic way.
Let's see how things evolve.
I see this evolve towards #communikeys labeling their active members in an open way. So that the apps they use can easily pull that data.
There are a million strategies relays can use to suppress spam and real celebrities can just use the relays that provide better spam protection while the bots flood the free and open relays with their trash that no one will read.
Those all sound like reasons nostr is awesome as is.
nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m is here and seems to enjoy it?