You are asking me how advertising a product (zaps) pushes a product? I'm not against Bitcoin but denying that nostr clients are trying to market bitcoin through zaps is silly. As for the second part of the question: How many twitter users do you think understand bitcoins AND lightening never mind be persuaded to use them or set up a lightening node? Its really hard to onboard people with bitcoins. I've tried persuading dozens of people. And lightening is even harder as thats a next step beyond. When nostr clients advertise bitcoin via an ever present zaps button, it makes one question if nostr is a) mostly for people who understand bitcoin or/and b) its an app primarily interested in promoting bitcoin. And the answer to both of these questions is MOSTLY (not wholly) answered with 'yes'. Also You said yourself 'Crypto is a turnoff' so I'm not sure why you are disagreeing.

How are they pushing bitcoin? How many people have you spoken to and how many expressed hate for bitcoin?

I know. But the zap symbol appears everywhere which makes it seem like zaps are a major part of the Nostr ecosystem. That will put average people not interested in Bitcoin off because it makes Nostr seem exclusive to bitcoin nerds. The zap symbol becomes an ad for Bitcoin almost straight away. Its a turn off. The majority of the public are not going to understand let alone use lightening/zaps so it looks weird to have the symbol there visible in every post/interaction on Nostr. There isn't a paypal or visa symbol there. If there was that would also put people off. It should not be so integral to Nostr as to be equivalent button to likes. Unless you don't want non-bitcoin enthusiasts to use Nostr.

Zaps are not on by default. Nobody has to use it.

Having collected some feedback, combined with some personal ideas, here are what seem to be the areas for most improvement in Nostr / clients:

Discovery is an issue, people don’t know who to follow. Since the are not that many diverse profiles that are easy to discover, it might be easier to recommend topics (hashtags).

We could also add profile descriptions on other clients (I think Damus already has this).

Spammy global is a turn off.

Could be solved by recommending Hash tags to follow. What if we create a list of common hash tags (kind of like subreddits) and show those to people? To help populate them, we could (if technically possible) create a client-side list that can be autosuggested as you type in a hashtag. For example, if I typed #p - it could suggest Photography, Plants, Parenting, Philosophy, Programming, etc… This way people who are using hashtags to tag would have an easier time picking something that already exists instead of making totally random ones that nobody is going to discover unless they see it in a note.

Grownostr (IMO) is not a useful hashtag as it is too generic and mixes too many subjects into one. If it were up to me, I’d ditch this one and use auto-recommended ones if/when implemente.d

Crypto talk is a turn off. Can’t stop people from talking about what they are passionate about, so I think the best strategy is to find topics to follow.

Global could become a list of topics you follow instead of actual global notes. Once you follow a few topics, it would become much more useful.

Some (nobody?) understands NIP5 without reading into it. Personally I think this is a terrible name to begin with. Either rename it, or get rid of verification entirely. Since impersonation is likely to affect a smaller number of accounts, we could add paid verification for people who only exceed a certain number of followers. Not sure how you’d enforce this across clients though.. ideas welcome.

People are very confused about keys. nsec, npub, what to enter into a website, what not to… totally understandable. I propose we add small explainers and use old terminology within labels to help people understand these concepts. For example, an input field could be Username (npub) Password (nsec). Of course, I can already hear people shouting at me “But this is not what they are!” Rightfully so. Perhaps, then have tiny explainers, visual, video or just text to plainly explain the concepts right within signup.

Relays - hard to understand. No onboarding process talks about relays now. Idea I have here is to automatically connect people to top X relays while showing this screen in onboarding AND giving a quick explanation of what’s a really. Use fun, engaging copywriting combined with an image or a video to increase the odds of people reading / watching it.

People have a very hard time in profile setup. I think Damus is leading the way on this. Personally, I would stop immediately all development of other features and focus 100% on profile UX. This is a critical step IMO and needs to be absolutely nailed. We can’t expect people to use 3rd party image services to add a profile picture. It needs to be as easy as every other social platform.

People don’t know what zaps are, or how to find a wallet. Steep learning curve. Ideas here: Add old school terminology along side in labels. For example: Zaps (payments). 

For wallets, create a section within the client that explains wallets and recommends a few options (are there a few options, perhaps WoW, Alby).

Overall people are not familiar with many of the concepts of Nostr. Solution here would be to create an educational area in a client that covers terminology / concepts and has fun ways to explain what things are. Perhaps even a game or an interactive quiz. I know… a lot of work! 

One idea floated was having no signup process at all and generating a key on Post. I am not sure if this would be a good UX given people might get confused why there’s no way to signup or may not take their key seriously and misplace / ignore it. But, it would be cool to test this idea with some client.

Dude you ever think about water. Like how we’re made of 90% of it, and we love to spray it all overselves in the morning. We built entire cities around it.

Wrong. Bittorrent. Its so good the anti-piracy goons have made zero progress in over two decades in topping it being used prolifically by the public, for free, everywhere. Voluntary non-monetized decentralized networks work. Bitcoin is not required. And #[4] even mentioned recently about how his bitcoin plugin for bittorent was a non-starter because people just didn't need or want it.

Bitcoin is not right or left.

It’s anarchic and voluntary.

People who pursue freedom and are draw it.

Ppl can even be a commie bitcoiner, they just can’t force other Bitcoiners to be commies :)

I don’t believe any **decentralized** social/comms protocol was ever going to be possible without bitcoin.

Because without freedom money you can’t fund anything decentraly and you end up with companies taking over the protocol and it’s design decisions.

Finally watching Avatar 2

Idea: "encrypted" public note with associated sat amount. when you zap, the decryption key is encrypted to the pubkey who bought it. Clients then decrypt the post to view.

exactly.. it starts with tipping.. but only expand to other use cases...!

OnlyFans vibes 🫡

Idea: "encrypted" public note with associated sat amount. when you zap, the decryption key is encrypted to the pubkey who bought it. Clients then decrypt the post to view.

So one problem I see with nostr is that often I don’t know what relays a person is using. So people follow a bunch, in the hopes of getting some overylap. Has anybody explored using a DHT to register what relays an identity is using? It would be optional, but each nostr key pair could write to a section of the DHT, with messages signed by them, saying what their current relays are. Then when you go to look up an identity, you could get the relay address from there rather than asking all of your relays.

Lots of decentralized projects from BitTorrent to IPFS use DHTs. Although there’s no incentive structure for running them, that doesn’t seem to be a problem given the value / cost that we see in real life situations.

Has this been discussed already? I’d like to know before I dig in to making code and a proposal. Or is there a strong reason why lots of people hate the idea?

Nostr is elegant in its simplicity. It lacks many anti-features, such as:

* Paid advertisements that fill your feed with noise.

* The Algorithm, which distorts the reach of accounts and messes with your curation in unknown ways.

* Arbitrary limits on the length and type of content you post.

* Unpredictable rules around how embedded media gets rendered.

* Nanny warnings about posting negative language.

* Unencrypted DMs that can be read by admins.

* An ever-looming axe over your head that if you violate the increasingly complex and ever-changing terms of service, your account will be censored.

Nostr is freedom.