and yet, it's the one that has worked for all the spam attacks in nostr up to now. People try to complicate simple things. i have 3 URLS in my mute list and haven't seen a single spam since it started!
Discussion
It works for you, problem solved for everyone!
Everyone smart enough to do the same, instead of keep crying that it doesn't scale.
Why don't you share your blocking list?
Because it's so obvious I don't need to. I just described it a few posts ago...
Just as I thought, won't share because your lying.
Or maybe I won’t share because you’re a petty troll who throws tantrums when challenged. You choose!
hey! You learned! You've got a little smarter after all!
now that' i'm blocked, i can quote the original post, for those who missed it, where i tell which words to block:
the problem is that anyone can create a different spam scheme and that forces every single nostr user (imagine if we had millions) to download all the spam and see it enough times and then go manually to their settings and try to come up with some clever banword
then the next day the spammer changes their text and so on
The good news is: this kind of attack hasn't happened yet, and simple word filters remain the most effective way to block spam on Nostr. Maybe spammers will get smarter someday—but if they do, we'll adapt accordingly. For now, they’re embarrassingly unsophisticated. A basic word filter is more than enough, and regular users don’t need to waste time on complex solutions.
If you're interested in building smarter defenses, go ahead. But claiming that “simple filters don’t work because spammers *might* get clever eventually” is nonsense. They *do* work, and they’re the easiest method available for users to eliminate spam. If spammers were truly smart, they wouldn’t be wasting their time and money just to mildly annoy strangers while gaining absolutely nothing from it.
nostr has 40k users and is incredibly useless and boring today so there is no point in doing adhoc "solutions" for the current users
once nostr gets to 80k users (still small and useless) we'll probably be getting much more spam
now imagine 800k
or maybe you're incapable of imagining future possibilities
by the way, the old reply guy and girls from last year, and the spammer that used tons of emojis, those were all impossible to counter with word filters, they have only stopped because they decided to, they were not countered
actually, they were both easy to counter with word filters: they had the same urls for images in their profiles, so just filtered by those urls. clients that filtered by word were all safe from them.
it was a different URL every time for reply girl, hosted on a public blossom server with a random hash
the recent spammer could do the same by just changing one byte of its media randomly every time before publishing
And yet, developers of many clients simply told their users: “Add this string to your mute list.” Users complied—and the spam disappeared. Even though the spam used different URLs hosted on public Blossom servers with random hashes, the mute word still worked.
Mute words remain an extremely effective anti-spam tool on Nostr. In fact, they’re the only method that has consistently worked against every spam wave we've encountered.
the spam has only disappeared because the spammer decided to stop
he even came public and said so
he said he only wanted to help test nostr's anti-spam
Oh no, that was long before the spammer decided to stop. But you've already made up your mind against word muting. You don’t need to take my word for it—just check the posts from that time.
If you want to keep pursuing sophisticated anti-spam strategies, go ahead. Just remember: sometimes simple solutions are the most effective. And don’t chase theoretical “optimal” solutions that end up useless because they’re too complex for the average user to apply.
Occam’s razor still applies. Look at what works in practice.