Nostr Web Client

I really don't get the people that complain that they don't get followers on Nostr because there is no algorithm.

I never got any followers in any of these platforms with algorithms (even though I used them actively for years), except when by some unexplicable hit of luck some people started using @lntxbot on Telegram and by word-of-mouth it got to Alex Bosworth and he mentioned it on tweet and then my follower count slowly grew from 50 to like 5000 over a 3-year period.

Is there a magic trick that allows you to go from 0 to 100000 by gaming the algorithm these days and then scam your followers a high-ticket course about how to get followers and become a millionaire? Or what are these people talking about? Why do they even want followers in the first place?

waxwing 1y ago

Followers are neither vitally important, nor something you can just automatically expect.

But they still matter.

I've often used this and similar microblogging just as a kind of notepad, writing down ideas and info/evidence for something I'm working on, meaning it does have some *small* value even when no-one reads it.

But even that rather unexciting way of using these platforms benefits tremendously from interaction with an audience, even a small one.

Enhancing discovery of accounts you might enjoy interacting with is pretty obviously... good?

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Discussion

Leo Wandersleb 1y ago

Reminds me of rubberducking. Tell your ideas to a rubber duck and you will get insights you won't get from trying to do the same thing in your head, only.

waxwing 1y ago

Good one.

Also the old 'spend 2 hours trying to solve a problem then go and ask a coworker, only to immediately realize the solution halfway through asking the Q' 😄

fiatjaf 1y ago

Assuming you know how to do it, yes. I don't think anyone knows. My point was that centralized platforms don't, so requiring that from Nostr is at least unfair.

waxwing 1y ago

I mean nostr isn't social media right, and i don't think users have the right to 'require' anything, I'm just trying to say it's common sense to have discovery on social media. I don't think it being 'done the right way' is a relevant Q, let people have a choice on how to do it.

fiatjaf 1y ago

My entire post was questioning that "common sense" that to me was never common. Maybe I'm retarded or blind but I would appreciate some pointers about how "discovery" happens in these other social platforms.

My experience on Twitter was always that I would find people by seeing them engaging with other people I had been following already.

And there was a sidebar with annoying endless suggestions of people to follow that would only show people who were already very famous with thousands of followers and whom I already knew and had already decided to not follow. What else do they do?

waxwing 1y ago

when i sign up for such a platform, i might want to find info/news about the things that interest me. say my hobby is chess. i can (and should!) use some kind of hashtag system to find chess related content, and then i can choose to follow based on that. as for an algorithm, if i've followed 10 people to find more discussions about (x, y, z) then an algorithm might be able to find 10 more people that talk about similar things. i only vaguely remember, as it was about 8 years ago when i started using twitter, but i think it succeeded in recommending me bitcoin/dev related accounts that i wasn't aware of, quite a few times.

if you already know who you want to interact with, sure. but in a case like that there were probably at least 50 accounts of people i "knew" from irc, reddit, mailing lists, conferences w/e that i had no idea were on twitter, let alone their user names.

Isn't that obvious? while i admit, it is *not* obvious, how to do such a recommendation algo "right".

Leo Wandersleb 1y ago

Followers are the whole point of a social network.

Only followers read most of what I write, especially once nostr gets discovered by bots and clients stop showing all replies from random accounts.

I want to achieve something in my life and only if my thoughts get amplified or questioned by others can I get leverage.

When my followers question my thoughts, I get valuable feedback which allows me to "outsource my sanity" as Jordan Peterson puts it.

When my followers copy and amplify my thoughts, my thoughts start to matter in the world.

RamenCoffee 1y ago

I agree, frankly, as a pleb-brained amoeba, I look forward to your posts. Thanks for sharing.