I talked to a journalist yesterday who said they were going to Substack bc it was easy. When I mentioned Ghost they said it required too much technical knowledge to figure out. I haven’t played with Ghost so I’m not sure. They also perceive that Substack will help them gain an audience. It will help with unpaid subscribers but I’m not sure it will help with paid. Based on the other’s experience the paid usually come through shares from other subscribers or the writer’s own social media efforts elsewhere
Substack’s getting more traction and moving beyond text and newsletters.
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/06/2024/substack-wants-to-do-more-than-just-newsletters
What’s most interesting is why people are moving to or sticking with substack. It’s traffic generation. They’re taking a 10% cut of revenue but they are able to use the platform and network to drive 50% of new subscribers and 30% of new paid subscribers to each substack creator. Sure, creators also need to build traffic, but the power is in the network which grows an audience.
If we are going to see Nostr as a protocol for creators who run a business, we need to make it easier for them to build an audience. That can be algorithims, but it could also be making it easier to recommend good content, share lists, etc…
The other issue we face with creators is that subscriptions are much more valuable to a creator than one off payments. With NWC and wallets we CAN do subscriptions, but we haven’t made it easy and nostr connected the way zaps are.
What I do think they do well is making it simple to set up a newsletter and subscribe. Those are things to learn from.
Substack’s getting more traction and moving beyond text and newsletters.
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/06/2024/substack-wants-to-do-more-than-just-newsletters
What’s most interesting is why people are moving to or sticking with substack. It’s traffic generation. They’re taking a 10% cut of revenue but they are able to use the platform and network to drive 50% of new subscribers and 30% of new paid subscribers to each substack creator. Sure, creators also need to build traffic, but the power is in the network which grows an audience.
If we are going to see Nostr as a protocol for creators who run a business, we need to make it easier for them to build an audience. That can be algorithims, but it could also be making it easier to recommend good content, share lists, etc…
The other issue we face with creators is that subscriptions are much more valuable to a creator than one off payments. With NWC and wallets we CAN do subscriptions, but we haven’t made it easy and nostr connected the way zaps are.
For writers with no audience, Substack may work. But several folks left after the Nazi business and did an analysis of their new platform vs the old platform and they found that Substack’s discoverability features didn’t generate enough paying subscribers to make the 10% fee worth it. I think both Garbage Day and Platformer had this experience.
My point being I’m not sure they have figured out the model or the UI to counter the pattern of everything on the internet is free.
I don’t think it will disappear. Both insurance and FEMA were responsive in the Tampa Bay Area. The challenge will be sorting through damage from the different storms because some folks will get hit twice.
I can’t speak for Big Bend area and further north of Tampa though. They might be getting lost in all the chaos.
I cleaned out my mom’s house and it took me 5 full days to get it ready for the contractors to rip out the drywall to dry it out. It’s a huge amount of work on individuals and families. Then there’s the reconstruction and refurnishing plus finding a temporary place to live… if cars were destroyed that’s another issue to deal with. People need time off work to deal with everything. That I sense is harder to come by.
I think the focus has shifted to Milton. My mom was hit with flooding in Florida and there was coverage down there until Saturday when it switched to gtfo now.
It’s also not clear what out and what safe will be given that there may be inland tornadoes and definitely flooding from rain, plus 100+ mph winds. A lot of the newer housing is shoddy stick built so if the winds sustain inland it will be a huge mess.
Because of disinformation and the fact that the region has not been hit in a lifetime the national news is trying to encourage families to get their relatives out of harms way.
Most of the fundraising / disaster relief I’m seeing is focused on NC region. And rightly so.
It’s disappointing that Nostr is completely void of any mention of what has happened and what’s coming. Likely bc those impacted have been in recovery mode for the past week like myself, but I’ve also heard from journalists on the network that they receive little to no engagement from this community on any posts.
Huge shoutout to nostr:npub138he9w0tumwpun4rnrmywlez06259938kz3nmjymvs8px7e9d0js8lrdr2 who spent a fair amount of time deleting reply guy spam from our relays last week and setting up filters to prevent similar future attacks. Here’s to keeping search up and running!
Testing out the editor on the mac to see if we fixed the auto correct issue! And it’s fixed! Thanks Bryan Montz!
I used this when I lived in Vermont. It was lovely compared to the dumpster fire of rage that both Nextdoor and local FB groups are.
I’ve owned an Apple Watch for almost a year now and I have to say that I am deeply unimpressed. It knows weird creepy things about me like when I get in my car and then tells me how many miles to home, but then fails to capture certain physical exertion activities.
For the past 2 days I’ve been cleaning out my mom’s house that was flooded by Helene, lifting super heavy waterlogged things and it tells me I’ve done no exercise. My quads and biceps are so sore and Apple is like nope physical labor isn’t bourgeois exercise.
I think the difference is that no one on Twitter screamed “Quit fucking hating” back in the day. There was as a dialogue
All of the social UI is designed to increase time in app to sell more ads. In order to sell more ads the UI has been gamified a bit - all the counts, the algorithm in turn being driven by counts… Then there’s the infinite scroll and the fact that people can’t see the content they want to see.
Theoretically Nostr solves this but not by adopting the same corporate UI.
I think integration with the wider web is cool but I would personally want to change the motivations through a different UI before heading to the wider web with Nostr. There are some exceptions- whoever was building electronic health records on Nostr assuming they could figure out the encryption part is spot on. But that’s not social per se.
I started Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and it was hitting a bit to close to reality so I set it down. If you don’t work in tech, I think it would be a great read! I have not heard of Wayward. Will definitely check it out!
I think that’s all social media… sadly. The UI is all popularity contest UI.
lol! This is so spot on.
Hehe yep, I get why you'd do that.
Follow lists are a mess though, I like the proposal to instead start using individual events for it: nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzplfq3m5v3u5r0q9f255fdeyz8nyac6lagssx8zy4wugxjs8ajf7pqyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcpr3mhxue69uhhg6r9vd5hgctyv4kzumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcqyqjwewmrj4yz58jnu87p5fevr4f8lwulavks4jkmwegyrfjnherqq6v33px
Yeah nostr:npub1wmr34t36fy03m8hvgl96zl3znndyzyaqhwmwdtshwmtkg03fetaqhjg240 has another proposal somewhere as well on this topic.
You can experiment with this now by adding Bitcoin and other keywords to a mute keyword list in certain apps. I know Damus offers this and I believe as a reference app Amethyst likely has an option.
I would be curious to hear about your or anyone else’s experience trying this out.
Does it solve the problem? If not what else is missing, needed etc. feel free to dm me with the results.
We have been talking about adding this tag only to follow list updates on a temporary basis to try to track down the lost lists problem. We don’t believe it is a Nos problem bc we’re only seeing partial lost lists.
In general I don’t think it’s a good idea to add these tags w/o user permission but the Nostr ecosystem also needs to stop losing user follow lists. If all the clients added the tag temporarily we could likely pinpoint the issue and stop frustrating users and also wasting dev time trying to figure out if it’s our respective app.
Or the kids relearned how to talk to one another face to face and realized they don’t need their phones as much.