🚨 Developer Community 🚨

If you want any online social space at all to achieve widespread adoption, you must target teenagers. This is an unfortunate fact of life.

Very few people past 30 ever change their purchasing habits or their lifestyle habits in a meaningful way. This is why people still use Facebook, sometimes people break habits but it’s very rare. People are literally locked in by their endocrinology.

Brand loyalty and learned patterns of behaviour are very real things. There are tangible biochemical reasons for it.

There is a reason the entire advertising industry has learnt from experience to target first time users.

If we want nostr to succeed then developers should really be targeting products and services for teenagers or people in their early 20’s. If you want to build a niche, you are of course free to do so, but if you want societal adoption you must surf demography.

All successful social platforms have surfed a cohort. To succeed at scale we really need to stop focusing on displacing Twitter and start focusing on post TikTok.

All the work to date on nostr apps has been extremely valuable, people have demonstrated ferocious pace of progress and speaking personally… I am blown away by a lot of the talent here.

A number of people have been able to self identify as incredible talent and many have observed this.

I see some of those same people now running out of road in terms of Ramen money. Collaborate, go further together.

The post TikTok window is now opening.

Target it with this open source technology!

There are so many new frameworks and protocols available now. So many excellent devs here are making great products but are targeting long saturated markets.

It’s also a noble mission, get the propaganda Dues Ex Machina’s tentacles off our kids.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

You’re right Stu, all of the social apps have been displaced by the next generation of teenagers so focus does need to go there.

However all of the social apps were just that - apps.

Nostr being a protocol isn’t necessarily going to follow the same trajectory. Maybe the social component does need teenagers but the overall ecosystem could grow and succeed along other usecases which is really exciting!

I agree with everything you have said, but the first nostr client to target traction with teenagers is going to immediately dwarf everything else and if/when it happens that client will likely persist as a 900lb gorilla for a long time.

Also, teenagers like to escape parental oversight of their social life.

Also also… The on ramp for whatever comes post TikTok is probably YouTube.

Nostr should have a natural advantage, because when a client stops being cool as it's users age, a new client can spin up but everyone is still on the same protocol.

100% agree.

It’s reaching critical mass that is always the biggest challenge though. All userbases decay until you achieve critical mass and network effects take over.

The only way any social media platform has successfully achieved critical mass and escaped user decay is through demographics, by targeting new users only, AKA teenagers.

You literally have to target a future fashion era maybe 2 years out, and build in preparation for that.

Few things in the world are more difficult to execute.

Teenagers rarely use Facebook, but they still do use Twitter (source - my daughter, she’s 15).