Here’s an observation about shitty Twitter algorithms.

I’ve actually never blocked or muted anyone on Twitter. Never felt the need. 690k followers, countless comments, no filters.

If someone is an ass, I tend to just ignore them or akido them and move on.

I just went over to Twitter and checked my notifications. Some guy posted in an unusually negative way in one of my threads. For a brief moment, I was provoked. But then I looked: he has 8,700 posts and 6 followers. Briefly skimming his profile, it is pure negativity. Imagine this. Like actually take a moment to think about what that process feels like for him, let alone how he impacts others.

Posting eight thousand and seven hundred times, mostly negatively, and after well more than a thousand of those posts, someone elects to follow him.

The algorithm trains us to see this and get angry. When he shows up in our feed, he seems like a normal person who disagrees with us. But he’s not normal. Someone like that is literally and sadly more in the mentally ill camp, even as the algorithm presented him to us like any other normal person, saying we suck.

Imagine if we had more programmable filters and algorithms. Like, mute people with over a thousand posts but with less than one follower per five hundred posts. That filters him out, similarly to how we would visually filter out and thus physically avoid a man holding his own shit in his hand in public on a street, who needs help but not public attention and proximity.

The centralized algorithms we have normalized, are not real life.

We give people virtual access that we would not do publicly, partially because we can program our real-life algorithms with various behavior rules that we can’t do on most virtual platforms.

Hi there! I'm exploring Nostr as a platform to share my thoughts while maintaining peace of mind. While Twitter has its merits, issues like spam accounts and excessive adult content can be problematic. I'm hopeful that the Nostr protocol will provide a better experience.

I currently work for Coinbase, but my posts here reflect my personal views and not those of my employer.

#introductions

Load up the zap blasters

Pew pew

I’m gonna give X a break for the next month and focus my social media intake only on nostr.

I feel like I already know it’s going to be a healthier choice, but I really want to compare what it’s like, as I’m pretty sure X and all the other SM companies are harvesting our data to elicit emotions that are designed to make us feel unfulfilled and craving more doomscrolling.

Sometimes I run into a tech guy on Twitter, who talks about how cypherpunk he is.

I’m just a financial analyst and investor, so that’s cool to hear. The more cypherpunks, the better. I like to fund cypherpunks.

But then I look around, and he’s not active on Nostr for over a year. He’s only active on centralized social media.

So then I am confused at how supposedly cypherpunk he is. Is he really that reliant on centralized media? Often, it turns out yes. If not, what other cryptographic proof does he have for his work?

As Nostr increasingly gains network adoption, it becomes weirder when I analyze why someone who is techie is highly active on Twitter but not at all on Nostr.

I'd avoid religious government countries.

Thailand was my choice too, but warning - Thailand has become much more authoritarian over the last few years. Bank accounts are almost impossible to open, capital controls are limiting (so hold BTC!). There are other changes recently. For example english on labelling for food and pharmaceuticals has disappeared ...

Still, in Asia, I couldn't come up with a better recommendation.

I regret not exploring south america more now.

Yeah Thailand seems like interesting as well. Definitely not Bangkok but the other areas I’m looking as well

Anyone from Bali on #nostr? I keep hearing that it's the best place to settle and enjoy the life.

My wife is a yacht broker in Europe. Every large payment from a buyer in EU to a seller in US is a nightmare recently. Correspondent banks just freeze the amounts ($0.5m or more) "to check for AML/sanctions evasion". I believe they just patch their balance sheets and earn interest, not even responding back to the sender until investigated. It takes weeks to get the necessary information to them via the sender's bank, because the whole system is crazily inefficient. They hire the dumbest employees in payments departments. I hope the rich guys will get fed up with this bullshit soon and start using Bitcoin.

Powerful Nietzsche Quote (on running from the inner voice):

“All of us know in individual moments how the most extensive arrangements of our own lives are made only in order to flee from our true task; how we like to hide our heads somewhere, as though our hundred-eyed conscience would not find us there; how we hasten to sell our soul to the state, to money-making, to social life, or to scholarship just so that we will no longer possess it; how even in our daily work we slave away without reflection and more ardently than is necessary to make a living because it seems to us necessary not to stop and reflect.

Haste is universal because everyone is fleeing from himself; universal, too, is the timid concealment of this haste, because we want to appear satisfied and deceive the most perceptive observers about our wretchedness; universal, as well, the need for new sounding word bells with which life can be adorned and lent an air of noisy festivity.

Everyone is familiar with the peculiar state in which unpleasant memories suddenly force themselves upon us and we make an effort to drive them out our heads by means of violent gestures and sounds; but the gestures and sounds of common life indicate that all of us always find ourselves in such a fear of memory and of turning inward.

What is it that assails us so often, what mosquito is this that refuses to let us sleep? Ghostly things are occurring ground us, every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear this ghostly voice.

When we are quiet and alone we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear, and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.”

I’m really struggling with the idea of nuking my twitter but I’m 50% more likely to do it this month than I was last month.

The more breaks I take from Twitter, the more I realize was a toxic cesspool of mind poison it is.

It is a source of unhappiness.