Interesting critique. And instead of reacting with cult-like, knee-jerk defensive responses like most commentators there, we should actually engage with it. You know, proof of work and all that.

I generally agree with the arguments. However, they're only valid if you compare Nostr to today's professional platforms. That's where I think the reasoning falls short. I don't compare Nostr to Meta, Twitter, or LinkedIn; I compare it to the early weblog scene around the turn of the millennium.

Of course, we don't have the notable talents here yet. Those come with professional venture capital. And VC only arrives after pioneers have laid the groundwork.

What was so great about Twitter and Facebook? Where was their innovation? There wasn't any. They simply simplified and improved what the blogosphere had already created. Comments, sharing, discoverability... all of that existed already. These companies with their venture capital just moved into a ready-made nest and solved or simplified just one problem:

If you were a blogger back then, but you were, well, a bit too ordinary, you really struggled to find your audience. So they centralized everything and put an algorithm behind it. That was it.

You could find other interesting blogs on Technorati, weblogs.com, or similar services and comment on their posts with your weblog's URL. But that was too complicated for normies. You could share across weblogs, but it was called trackback and pingback. And they were just as unreliable and hardly usable as Zaps are today. Too complicated for the average person. There were trends and early influencers, but they were hard to discover in a WWW-distributed weblog system (that was real decentralization back then, by the way).

Commercial platforms took all of that and bundled it under one central interface. Similar to what Primal is trying to do today, actually. When all swimmers splash around in one lake, even the biggest idiot can find their fish.

What is Nostr doing? Nostr is also playing at social media, but trying to give decentralization and sovereignty back to the user. It's social media in the sense that we've silently accepted that without an audience → no motivation → quick abandonment of the medium. When it comes to the other aspects, sovereignty and decentralization, Nostr is back at pioneer level. Like the weblogs back then.

There were only a few scene-internally known stars back then. Movable Type tried, but lost the competition and disappeared. b/2 caffelog was forked and as WordPress now makes up more than 40% of all CMSs on the web. Many others came and went. Only Matt Mullenweg from that time is still known today.

It all took a decade until the VC-backed platforms and with them the talented developers and names arrived. We're not even 3 years old. Being a pioneer doesn't equal talent aknowledged by others. Pioneers do something whose value is only recognized later, and then only those survive who have learned from other pioneers' mistakes. 90% of pioneers sink forgotten into history, but they have also nourished the success of those few known names.

Otherwise, I agree with the other arguments. The development must become more professional if it must scale. "Vibe coding" ... best forget that term. It's only suitable for unscalable proof of concepts at best. Automated tests before deployment must become standard, as well as usability engineers and real designers. It's not acceptable that with every Yakihonne update, something breaks that worked perfectly before. It's not acceptable that we'll still be fiddling around with PubKeys and Nsecs in 10 years. The situation with simple, NWC-capable Lightning wallets is currently catastrophic. And don't get me started with the onboarding process. Professionalization efforts need to be supported just as much as vibe-coded PoCs. With Bitcoin too, if necessary.

We've already gone through a third of the 10 years that such a technology needs to become professional. And the voices demanding more quality are getting louder. It's about time we silence such criticisms.