Nostr definitely feels like the early internet, I used to remember being excited about meeting my friends from all over the globe.
Why did that stop?
The question is rhetorical . Let’s just build back that magic and not let it stop this time. 💜
Discussion
I used to have friends from Russia, Pakistan, Thailand, and now I don’t even know where they all went or what happened to them 😕
I used to have friends in real life and now i don’t even know where this real life is gone 😅
This is the truth. I hope Eternal September never comes.
Thank you for letting me know about this ser 🫡
I know you said that the question was rhetorical, but I think that heavy monetization did that! Sad, but that is what happened when big money get involved 🐶🐾🐸😞
VCs ruin everything.
💯🤙
Early internet was weird and you could express yourself in ways you cannot today. MySpace was the last holdout of the early internet vibes. Once that disappeared, everything started trending to shit. Cookie cutter interface without customization forced on everyone for the sake of brand identity. More and more limits on how you can express yourself as an individual. Then it became all about monetization and squeezing every penny out of people. Features that addicted there mind with cheap thrills. Sadly, in some ways nostr is already beginning to trend that way and I hope devs pause and give a lot of thought to the things are copying from legacy social media.
When you say, it’s trending towards legacy social media, do you mean the “addicting” things like the notification bell icon? I do agree about that, but I’m still happy that no one person is benefiting from that addiction. Atleast not for now..
We’ve made a lot of good progress already like no ago (for now at least); and no note limit - these are all things that help bring discussion forward instead of optimizing for rapid fire engagement. But like you said, there are still features and loops that bring people back for more. I’m not sure what the ideal solution looks like but we have a blank slate in front of us and should take a serious look at designing clients that make us more mentally healthy, thoughtful and less addicted. I know also that we’re very addicted atm due to newness factor and it’s tempting to recreate all the same engagement mechanisms from Twitter, tiktok etc .
I guess one thing we can keep in mind when designing and building is how to offer people options and introduce mechanisms that limit addiction.
That is the best thing I like about open source products. The configurability.
One example might be to prompt the user who is sharing a link from a known “news” site asking if they actually read the full article - and somehow indicate that in the note. It won’t be perfect but may help reduce instant reactions to clickbait articles. I see this problem on Twitter all the time - people posting clickbait stuff without reading the article and comments are all outraged - as desired
Or to show when a reshared note is old and may not be referring to any current event but linked to pretend like it does
Or to show a notice that the authors opinions may have changed on an old reshared note.
I’m just brainstorming ideas - they won’t be perfect and perhaps even not good ideas - but would be nice to think about these things together
The problem of misinformation starts getting into the censor territory, a community notes type solution is okay but still biased, maybe an open for all rating system for news journals might be a good idea and then integrating it with nostr clients
I’m not proposing any censorship, just tools that make it possible to indicate some non-obvious things like “I didn’t even read this thing” or “I’m baiting you with an old article”
Ratings are easily manipulated and will skew to whatever group makes up the larger portion of the network.
Imagine 2 people discussing some recent issue and one makes a statement supported by an old irrelevant article. We don’t need to censor anything but could say “hey this thing you’re about to spend time reading is old”.
This is just one of many ideas we could come up with - and may not even be a great one, who knows! Just having some ideas kicked around might be good
Agreed, ideas are always good and discussing on them is just the process of creating information.
Accurate information*
Maybe Nostrica or future nostr meetups can have a segment on the ethics of social media design 🤷♂️
We should have online events as well, apart from all the regular spaces and podcasts. Or maybe make the online community more integrated with events like nostrica.
Another idea: introduce a delay in how fast engagement metrics start showing - so people don’t wait around to see who likes their notes
Imagine the cumulative number of lost sleep from people sending notes at night and staying awake to see who liked their note
I typed in a message sent it but it didn’t go through 🤔.
Anyways I agree with the problem and I know it’s addictive like a, but sometimes you just like your drugs 🤷♂️. So an option to turn it off would be a nice to have.
Yea options would be great. Maybe default friendly and enable your drugs
This is exactly what would immediately lead m
e out of such a client.
Exactly at the opposite of the early internet you are speaking about IMO
I don't need to be hold by the hand to know what's relevant or not
This kind of "did you read the article you are sharing or liking" feels so distopian
The great thing about nostr is that the same content can be presented both ways in different clients. Normies like to have that kind of thing made obvious.
I agree in general and just stay away from corporate spectacles. In the late 1980'ies there was a jovial connection between BBS users and system operators and most users were just computer interested + RPG fans scheduling gaming weekends.
My impression of Myspace was that it collapsed due to bugs, I suspected sabotage at the time. I was mainly off social media for a decade until I started with bitcoin. Then when all the authoritarianism escalated it became more important to network and spread liberty ideas.
Sometimes I give new people the benefit of the doubt until they break the trust. Lists are an excellent filter that keep the feed algorithm-free. We have 100% responsibility for what we choose to have in our information flows.
Your message is resonating with a lot of people.
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