Luck is when opportunity meets preparation my friend
Onboarded roughly 700 new users to nostr since launching a UX experiment. Pretty promising results since onboarding either nostr is so good when competing against algorithm attention cycles.
Nostr doesn’t need to compete with TikTok or Reels. Nostr needs to double & triple down on culture, engineering and UX. We can build bridges off the centralized networks the way Bitcoin can build bridges off the constraints of fiat.
My hopes is that nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m leverages his resources to accomplish this.
Nostr does what it does extremely well. It rebuilds the railroads of internet in the right direction and unlocks or liberates the network.
Reels and TikTok is a corporate dead-end designed for advertisers and corporate interests. Nostr is designed for people. We
A heartbreaking amount of time, money and energy lost, but I guess that’s the cost of entrepreneurship and learning. I’m pretty proud of the engineering at least and I’m grateful to have discovered nostr as a consequence of it.
Oh yeah these days it actually seems like an AI farm. Other than what I mentioned, it’s all suspiciously question based content. I just opened up the app and this is what I saw.
The engineering is at least decent. They have some fediverse implementation and there’s at least some cross-platform work between IG & Threads.
But IG itself has the same oroblems TikTok does. X has potential but right now it’s too governed by political drama.
https://www.reddit.com/r/InstagramMarketing/s/9nnQcHdwCD
Despite being able to drive some traffic to nostr using my education technology and UX strategy, I’ve more or less abandoned an account with 130,000 followers.
The reason for this is because I actually cared about those folks but most algorithm platforms treat following as a signal for algorithm curation rather than to generate a community or network of people.
It’s better to start over and to market to people I “care less about” in the sense that I don’t have any identity-based reasons to connect other then to focus on distribution, that is, the distribution of education and the decentralization of identity.
It’s a tough choice to make, but one that is more operationally sustainable. I genuinely hate the feeling of identity consumption.
It’s pretty interesting how Threads is a lot of burned out content creators and social media managers burned out by algorithmic driven media.
These algorithms have created a problem that people want a solution to and nostr has a lot of those solutions.
Creators want organic network effects and commerce with business, but consumers the equivalent of public access TV.
It’s an interesting conflict - communities vs. markets.
Most people just seek reinforcement that what they believe is correct. Nostr experiences this to a degree despite generally being more organic in its network effect, and maybe this points to a constant of the human condition.
The issue that I take is that it often creates a simulation of support rather than genuine support.
A mentor once told me that disagreements tend to better approximate success. Eventually one person will be incorrect, but you’ll cover more ground that way when it comes to seeking or realizing truth.
Accepting challenge is a great way to hedge against failure.
2/2
The subject of imperialism obviously demands genuine level of merit and intellectual integrity, but the reality is most of this material is too sophisticated for the beaten attention spans of digital communities.
It's simply easier to call people colonizers and consume a cheap version of the nature of one's culture.
In most cases, you are a consumer before you are whatever you believe you are.
1/2
One of the obvious consequences of algorithm-driven media in hindsight is how predictable everything is. Most things are driven by signals that flatten cultures with conversations and communities as artificial as the intelligence that drives the platform.
One such example is the use of the phrase “Colonizer Language”, largely promoted by awfully stupid provocateurs and their equally stupid engagers.
I feel confident in my choice to step away this time, which hasn’t been true before. I’m better off in other spaces. Thanks for the support folks and I’ll see you later.
So I’m going to take a break and stepping away. I don’t mind doing this work even if no one is watching, but it’s particularly painful when I feel like I’m being cheated on my cultural and social values.
It makes me irreconcilably upset and I simply can’t get past that. By all measures I believe my efforts on TikTok have failed and I need to move on to protect my own well-being.
We simply do not value the work. And that’s fine. In the industry, we call that not having product-market fit.
The reality is that we have a cultural problem and the conservative criticism of DEI does hold some truth. Latinos don’t care about the tech sector unless it’s branded a certain way.
I love teaching and I love education. I don’t love business and sales. I don’t love promising you quick fixes to your social economic problems. The reality is most things require commitment and that does not exist in our space.
The numbers aren’t adding up, I’m losing between $60-$80 per day trying to finance this business with my own money while also seeking to create scholarships with the revenue generated by your commitment to learn skills that don’t exist in our community.
I’ve talked about my business for 500+ days but most of us don’t give the platform longer than 2-3 seconds when we do so.
1. A hard pill to swallow is that the Latino community online is largely centered around reinforcing our identity in a pretty combative way based on our experiences in the US, but we are unwilling to work together or refuse to participate in more meaningful community.
Our revealed & perceived preferences are not aligned and I’m not confident that it will change.
It's hard growing an edtech business when the average attention span is 1-3 seconds on mostly social media platforms. Despite that challenge, you're effectively selling people work, and you're only option beyond that is to sell dreams and promises because of the American-centric perspective that treats education like a contract for employment.
It feels bad to do. I love education and I love education technology, but I hate education business.
Feeling that disoriented emotional unwellness of being a content creator on other platforms. There are some thoughts I'd like to express but I simply don't feel safe to do so.
Some things simply make me feel subhuman, and being the subject of people' unconscious behaviors is a regular reminder of that. I'm just a person that wants to work on something I find important, nothing more and nothing less.
I'm not a hero, a best friend, a leader, a representative, I'm not anything. I'm just a guy that works on stuff I find important to work. That's all.
I think Trump is a stupid nimrod but I don’t really feel compelled to vote against him because of the narrative that I’ll prevent evil forces from embedding itself in the US.
Obviously the most important election of my lifetime was Obama in 2008. I don’t see how anything compares to that, at least not for a long time. Voting against Trump in 2020/2024 is relatively minor in comparison.