Ugh, I wasn’t going to do this, but I can’t shake fiatjaf’s comments out of my mind.
Regarding UX, “dumbing things down” and all of that…
Listen, people have various levels of comfort with tech. Also, depending on what type of product you build, you’re going to attract different types of users. Tools for developers will have developer-level experience with similar products. Tools for accountants will have account-level knowledge users.
Nostr is primarily (at least right now) a social tool. That means it can appeal to anyone. Yes, the bitcoiners in the space may have more technical and cryptographic familiarity. We don’t need to dumb anything down for them / us. But it is also easy to forget that many of us had many questions ourselves. I for one asked questions day in day out after first joining. I have seen many others do the same, and we are not what I would consider as “normies”.
I think it is easy to forget that we have already learned the ropes and to us this stuff looks obvious. New users on the other hand have mixed experiences. Some, (again, bitcoiners) have no issues, and others have a ton of questions. This is after the fact that many clients have improved significantly since most of us joined. Yet, people have questions.
“Dumbing down” to a “common denominator” is absolutely necessary for the general audience who does not have the same level of patience as most of us. I mean, we are the types of freaks who will hodl for a decade without blinking an eye! We are the most patient bastards there are 😂. For everyone else there is a spectrum of patience and I don’t need to describe it, we get it.
If you don’t believe anything I say, take your non-technical mom, cousin or whoever and ask them to sign up for nostr. See how many questions they ask you in the process. Let’s get a nice sample going.
The great thing about what fiatjaf sparked is that we can have clients that don’t dumb down anything and can look as cryptographically complicated as they want to. We can also have clients that “just work” without all that other stuff.
I don’t know much about Obsidian’s growth story or why they grew to a million estimated users. All I remember is trying the product for myself and deciding it was not worth learning for me. (At the time I was using Notion and that product was very intuitive with minimal learning curve for basic functions). I was also neck-deep in the startup community and everyone who used Obsidian around me was a developer / founder of an indie startup. We are talking experienced developers who previously worked at Facebook, Microsoft.. yada yada. Not your average newb. I am not saying Obsidian doesn’t have normie users, but If I had to bed, I would say a large number of those people are what we would term as techies in one way or another. Either full blown devs, or have been using markdown for a while already. I will admit that even my story doesn’t really mean anything - ultimately fiatjaf and I are both guessing as to why they succeeded, but there’s no correlation between - oh this markdown stuff is not that hard” and they grew despite that. None. Who is to say a million developers are not using Obsidian? Your guess against mine.
In fiatjaf’s defense, I will say that maybe he is partially right - since Nostr clients are mostly notes (not that much other stuff out there yet), it is not incredibly difficult to click a freaking write button and write something. We all did it. It is also not incredibly difficult to say that people can learn about relays and keys. Mastodon grew despite their learning curve.
I guess my point is that there’s a spectrum of technical knowledge and some people will be comfortable and others will look away right away. It all depends on how motivated they are to stick around. Those who need the tech badly or are just very curious will put up with far more than casual explorers. If we are totally cool with just attracting people who don’t mind wading through cryptographic gobbledygook, then by all means let it all hang out 😂. Personally, I want to look out for everyone, whether they need it or not. I want the experience of joining and using nostr as simple as it can be, while retaining all of the characteristics that make it superior to other social. Please take it easy on people who are trying to make this space friendly to all.
