Nostr Web Client

It's just a cheap meaningless interaction made for machines and for keeping people addicted.

That’s an interesting take. To me they are cheap but not meaningless. They are the lightest weight signal that something has value. Given that 90% of people don’t write and just read on social media, it’s a good type of interaction to have imo.

Now if you have all the posts in the world in one database and one algorithm that pushes the most liked posts on everyone that’s a different story. If you get addicted to the dopamine hit of people liking your posts that’s also an issue. But the reason we get a dopamine hit is because your peers sending you social signals that your words are valuable is an incredibly important part of being human.

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e790f8c8... 2y ago

I found the last part enlightening. I think getting small amount of Sats for posts will be even more addicting than a like though.

fiatjaf 2y ago

You made good points, but I think being human is seeing the reactions of your peers directly in their faces as you say something. Likes are an approximation of that, but I don't know if it gets close enough to be worth all the drawbacks.

But to be honest the nastier part is probably the notifications stuff always calling you to see that some random person you don't even know or value has clicked a button.

Another issue is that a like from someone that only likes things they actually do like should be worth more than a like from these crazies that just keep liking everything they see, but there is no real way to measure this -- while in the real life we can often tell fake likes from real likes.

Doug Brown 2y ago

To me, the like on Nostr is more of a nod to a passing stranger or a slight hand wave from the steering wheel to a driver being Courteous. It’s just a “hey that’s a good comment/thought/picture” but not worth a full conversation. I could careless about the notification though. I guess it’s a good quick signal that folks are listening and either like or don’t like the content in a minimalist sense. Zaps are a much more appreciation of the content and replies are interactions that want to take it to a conversational human level.

Isaac 2y ago

Agree in terms if organic use, but its thr exception imo. FB ingrained the behavior for likes way before bird app. The pattern that doesn't seem to go away is engagement farming across all subsequent modeled services. Insta collapsed under this weight, and bird app has too. Reddit remained steadfast for up/down votes, but that gets abused also.

As soon as there is a metric, people start gaming it to pamp their profile/post/advert, and then gaming signals end up outweighing organic use. This is true also for follower/following metrics. Filtering the tribal affirmation likes economy from discussion is an unsolved problem.

Maya 2y ago

Almost every popular social media platform limits a post’s reach based on how often the user checks their notifications. On TikTok, posts reach to more ppl if a user turns their notifications off and close the app for few hours after posting - which is a known method amidst influencers. Notifications r there to call users to open the app and spend more time on it and if they don’t they try to generate more likes/notifications. So yes those features were created to make platforms more addictive.

Matt Lorentz 2y ago

Wow I didn’t know they were doing this. That’s crazy but it makes sense.

I don’t think these features weren’t added to make the platforms more addictive originally though. They were added because they encoded valuable social signals that weren’t being surfaced before. They only became a lever in the addiction slot machine after algorithmic timelines.

It’s a fine line but it’s an important one I think. Because in social networks the line between adding value for users and being addictive is verrrry thin. In a way all humans are addicted to relationships.

Maya 2y ago

It’s a fine line indeed. And yes it’s a common tip Tiktokers share on how to take videos viral. I watched a guy who said he created 10 videos, saved them as drafts then posted all at once n didn’t open the app for over a week. He got his first 1M views. Of course he already had an active account with followers.

Ross 2y ago

The challenge with social platforms is that everything is asynchronous, it’s not like a conversation in real life where the feedback loop is in real time. We’re trying to facilitate dialog over a broadcast medium.

DZC 2y ago

What about limiting likes notifications to just your contacts/follows?

Tetsu Tamasi 2y ago

Matt Lorentz 2y ago

This is what https://iris.to already does and we are going to do it in Nos as well. It results in seeing fewer reactions/replies to your messages but it does solve a lot of other problems too.

pjv 2y ago

I like this post (how hard was that?). Instead of sending large integers across the interwebs, I'll pay tribute by adding this:

In addition to all these good points, there's also the fact that unless nostr turns into something that is not nostr (i.e. not meaningfully decentralized) or someone invents magic, there is no way to get accurate aggregate real-time counts of anything (not likes, not followers, not anything). And what are "likes" without counts of likes?

There are many ways that decentralized social media is going to diverge from what people are used to on centralized platforms. As I think you wrote somewhere, part of nostr is embracing the chaos.

Matt Lorentz 2y ago

> I think being human is seeing the reactions of your peers directly in their faces as you say something.

100% agree. Most of our digital interactions are a poor model of the real thing. But I think a lot of the issues you are bringing up are mostly issues because they have been used on platforms for global discourse. Our brains weren’t made for global discourse and I think that’s where a lot of the psychological issues with social media come in.

Relationships need trust and conversations need context. Platforms like Twitter have low trust and context. Contrast this with a Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp group of your closest friends or family - high trust and high context. I think the middle is the sweet spot for healthier social media. Likes from people you trust and have context with are meaningful and useful.

This is why we’ll probably have likes in Nos, but we’ll also be restricting your view in most places to people you follow and people they follow (like secure scuttlebutt, and https://iris.to). This creates a medium trust/context space. This view restriction isn’t perfect, but it’s a start, and I hope we see lots of experiments in this area on Nostr.

N 2y ago

good point！speaker and listener are not only two messaging terminal！