Oddbean new post about login | logout Nowadays? Free. We have to go back.
How would you convince people? Seems a tough job. I guess one way is, we start doing it to support the tools we like. Then other people see it, and it might catch on. But sounds hard to compete with "free", when they have huge infrastructure behind them. So basically they have a first movers advantage.
I mean if we all would start now, free services could become easily unsustainable. But they have a way to be sustainable and even profitable now. So this is not the case.
It's definitely a large uphill battle and people don't have a lot of extra money, so they're going to gravitate towards free services where they are the product. I don't know of an easy solution, beyond hoping it catches on, because those services being offered are unique or better.
I guess there is a big question what can these services offer, that is unique, hard to copy, or even big tech does not want to copy.
What’s wrong with being the product AND having choice? People WANT their data bought and sold. It’s like internet poop, that they leave for all the internet machinery to scoop up and make use of. As long as it’s freely available, unrestricted for all “machines” to access and use… so what? So why NOT sell targeted ads on Nostr clients?
Most people don't like advertising as today's ads are incredibly overbearing and intrusive. That said, I'd still like to see how an ad supported client would function on Nostr. Would the market reject it? How would it be perceived? I may not use it, but I'm just one Nostrich in a flock of birds. nostr:nevent1qqsp48hrh7ya2ehuptfcjgf7v5lfs4afvamkw6kfvdqj6t05yls5rqspzemhxue69uhhqatjwpkx2un9d3shjtnrdakj7q3qmanlnflyzyjhgh970t8mmngrdytcp3jrmaa66u846ggg7t20cgqqxpqqqqqqzngld2s
I think most people would welcome Zapvertising ⚡️😁
I'd rather pay for a service than see an ad.
Would be an interesting Nostrich poll: Vote: 🤙: I would rather see an ad for free services. 🫂: I would rather pay for a service, than to see ads.
nostr:nevent1qqsgqe7cqhp73hnhvqr0aldtjscgq9pc45wflzfxf0turmn7x3m642gppamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5pzqxfgac643a2wx9jds8fxcd0py0p9fwhp9q656ash6l7cvttsmx3tqvzqqqqqqy4u370v #asknostr #nostr #grownostr
Ads to donate to devs
Devs don’t want donations. We need salaries.
Salaries suck. You need business revenue.
Though being able to at least pay your salary is a nice starting goal. Revenue can come later after you're paid.
And if neither work, you can always become a stripper!
I have been known to use a pole in the past.
Can you explain the paper plate hatred?
Don’t do this. https://image.nostr.build/ab84a12e23429404699146367df7d5731d19534f55bfeb2295aa1a87c439521b.jpg
I’m just curious. That’s all. But fine.
One might say I loved the paper plates 🥹
I think the ad model is about to get shot in face by local llms prechewing the web. Many of us already use an llm as starting point instead of google. Microsoft and the other big techs are forcing the issue as attack vector on google since google has most of ad revenue. Even more ominous for ad based model is the use of agentic ai. I almost never see an ad already and it was by accident.
I don't know if this coming to an end but it's going to drastically change. What's stopping companies from inserting ads in their LLMs? Nothing.
Nothing to stop and everything to gain. If it’s not already the case… AI output can and will be bought and sold.
Personalai is freedom tech
Nostr will open this market. That will be good.
And the non google big techs are weakening google for us.
I use 90% local llm with personal vector cache stored locally on encrypted drive. Llms are moving to edge. Check out dolphin for uncensored models.
That's awesome and I'd love to do this too, but we're not the masses that fuel advertising models.
Mozilla model?
Plus as I said. All the non google bigs are tryna fug up google cashflow. While they fight freedom folk are building. Lotta ppl starting their web journeys on llm. Especially the littles
You could have it with a start9 kind of easily if I am not mistaken.
Fair point. Self hosting platforms can help here, but even then these aren't for the masses just yet. We're getting close though!
I just installed a start9 the other day, and it was fairly easy. Click, next, next, done.
Also quite cool, how this field is developing. As many others. I think we have many opportunities to be bullish! 🔥🔥🔥
It is starting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvLTlDy9G8c
Wait until they start sneaking ads into LLM responses in ways you don't even know you're internalizing.
Personal ai bro. That's the new freedom tech. Run local.
Tell me about it. Except "local" need not (solely) mean "only on my local machine": https://vaporware.network
For me it does. I don't trust other ppls gear
That's cool. You can be as local or not as fits your preference. My point is that "logical machine" need not necessarily be 1:1 with "physical machine". Our goal is to make that distinction as fungible as the user wants (including not at all)
cool i guess. But local means on my machine. cloud is someone elses. just not a fit for this use case imho but hey itll be a popular transitional til abused by whoever sits at data choke point. til then. let le bon temps roule as the cajun say
To be clear, personally I would only use cloud services for encrypted-at-rest redundancy. In case my local machine explodes I could restore.
This Nostrich will take all steps necessary to not see any advertisements while using Nostr. The very idea of targeted ads showing up in my feed is repulsive, regardless of who would benefit. I don't think I'm an outlier here.
I could be incorrect here but I feel that most people feel this way, me included.
But isn't this because people generally joining #nostr has fed up with the current social media and system status quo? Maybe the majority of people that would go to the other group has no problem with this, therefore they are happy using other places. I mean only other places.
You say this … and yet you expose all of your “public data” on Nostr, freely available for any machine to scrape and make use of. So nostriches wd RATHER handcuff the client devs ”thou shalt NOT use the public data to enhance your business model” … cutting off their access to a major revenue stream … ONLY because, “that’s what they do in the walled gardens”.
Just because one leaves a trail of breadcrumbs does not mean they are hungry. Just because the data is there does not mean it has to be used to manipulate the origin of that data. The ad services are free to scoop up this info and do with it as they please. They could be doing it now. That (some) data is there is completely moot to the question of whether the community is better served by handing over permission to be manipulated. Thankfully, nostr inherently gives users the absolute ability to never lose control over their experience. The larger question isn’t whether ad-driven clients should be created, imo. It seems it should be “how can nostr protect users from the inevitable onslaught of noise (dms, comments, etc) that will come from amoral actors. A question that has been here the whole time. I would like to see more brainstorming on this notion, first. Muting isn’t going to be sufficient. Imagine ddos levels of noise being generated. All I can think of is super strict modes of “only people I follow and that they follow”, web-of-trust style. But that breaks down when money gets involved (influencers).
Yes. Mute and follow only go so far. An explicit “is trusted” marker will be needed to implement Web of Trust over Nostr. Making “is trusted” markers private will help keep influencers and money out, but these and bots will always be the challenge of better WoT tools. The pioneering of WoT for social media is Nostr’s game to loose. Along with “crowd recommendation” of content and follows (and “other stuff” users want) “trusted” advertisers and products will also thrive on the Nostr network. nostr:note1ta9gzmtewn7jnslhjd8ew9322qp3rnyc56e9a0rj9f0x2ftndxhqcy7dwt
I'd be curious too. Marketing that focuses on small, local, interest based over brand recognition is pretty critical to small business success & is less prone to manipulation. The biggest problem I've had with it, both as a buyer & seller, is the inability to be preemptive, which seems solvable now. In the short term, a client that did lean into ad revenue would definitely get rejected by users & have a very hard time finding advertisers, but long term something that diversified its own revenue between things like feature widgets, subscriptions and ads could avoid having too much advertising dependence & provide meaningful advertising to users in less overbearing numbers, i think, would do well. Right now, we'd rather pay sellers that we like to advertise to us than vice versa because it's all still so small & new😅 but eventually, its be nice to discover useful things in a way that isn't just a constant barrage of your past search history. In a utopian version, the user could even be compensated for their consent. I don't know, maybe its a pipe dream. More organic, word of-mouth type is great but ultimately slow on generating meaningful income for the seller. Zapvertising is pretty clever but it still lacks on matching seller with buyer. It's a whole, mostly unexplored, territory & I've been excited since my nostr beginnings to see what eventually comes of it. 😊
Zapvertisements. Expose a setting to the user to accept more or fewer, which are split between the user and the dev team with some decent split, like 60-40 (user/dev). If the ads are too much, dial down to minimum (which may be zero) and only get content from subs, or get ads to fund your zapping habit.
(The dev can choose to accept dollars for ads and pay the user in zaps proportionally, which could be really great arbitrage! Get big tech to fund the bitcoin exit!)
I still think Zapvertising works if it's executed properly. This is an interesting addition to just blind Zapping. I'm a fan.
I think on the client is the best way to do advertising on Nostr. You'd need to be transparent that it's an ad or promotional note. A portion of the ad revenue should be paid to the user's lightning address. A user should be able to pay a fee to have ad free use of the client.
Ads also have potential for disruption with Nostr; they don’t necessarily have to stay “evil” and shadowy. Users can be compensated directly for opting in to have their data aggregated and sold. Companies can have much more effective targeted advertisements with the ability to directly buy existing customer data whenever needed and by streaming sats to those who view and show interest in an ad. In my view, a P2P ad market over Nostr will become incredibly powerful for monetization in due time.
I’m not sure there will be value in selling “user data” that is freely available to anyone… but maybe companies could “process” nostr data in useful ways to be of value … but I doubt that end users would be compensated in these cases?
It’s freely available, but aggregating it could definitely be of value. Most users don’t know how to query event data across the network, let alone analyze it in a meaningful way. And sure, people might not be compensated from the get-go, but the ability to do so via micropayments is incredibly easy and could act as a draw for more use of an ad market that does support direct compensation. Small businesses all won’t have the ability to do all this themselves, and oftentimes they don’t feel great about throwing out ads on whatever platform they’re using, not knowing what’s being done with all the data or who it’s even going to reach. Paying a service to do the analytics and giving businesses the ability to purchase an ad targeted to those who are most likely to buy a specific product or service by buying data directly from them reduces ad costs for the business while also increasing conversion rates. The customer is also compensated for buying a product they actually want, and a relationship is built. Market forces and sentiment would drive adoption to ad markets that most effectively benefit both parties.
You don’t have to have “targeted” ads on #nostr. You can serve up ads related to Beef & #Bitcoin and their respective accessories and products and you hit 80% of the market.
I don’t want my data to be sold
But if you use the internet AT ALL these days, you have already consented. And you have benefitted.
Oh I know its being shared and I still dont like it and never will. Those “benefits” are too small for me to be considered a plus. To the contrary, its creepy as fuck. I search for things myself. Lose the ago following you around and your mind will be less polluted by dopamine injections. Be as random as possible, make the advertisers pay more, make them look for ghosts. If they wanna pay, pay me a salary for my data.
Also, you are not forced to use free tech giants where you are the product.
But there really isn’t a choice. Only walled gardens. … so THIS is the difference that the Nostrverse provides. Real freedom of choice AND open data for all.
As AI/LLMs make the cost of infinite content generation go to zero the public internet will get flooded with garbage — it will be incomprehensible compared to what we have today (which is already fraught). People will learn to mostly ignore the public internet. The only things worth reading will be information that has proof-of-work attached.
Then why wouldn't big tech do the following: 1️⃣ Overwhelm people with garbage content. 2️⃣ Offer paid plans to filter, not show them. 3️⃣ Still sell their data. I guess comfort could still keep the masses using these tools.
1. Big tech will build tools which will enable anyone to make garbage content. This is already happening. They will not be in control of what gets generated since there are many competing alternative “big tech” providers which offer similar products with somewhat varying techniques. 2. There is not a simple way to effectively filter this content. This will be especially challenging for big tech to filter since LLM content will be flooding in from different providers, different models, different “guardrails”, etc. Even filtering mostly-human/traditionally-automated content today can be challenging. LLMs make the problem much harder for big tech to solve. 3. It’s not clear to me what “selling data” means in this context. Are you imagining advertising systems like we have today or something else?
Under selling data I mean e.g. the information they get out of user prompts. They limit data generation to accounts, so that they can sell them as products. Then they can save your prompts under your account. I think people won't just use LLMs to generate data, but also to get to know certain answers. Also e.g.: if you are generating financial texts, most probably you are worth to advertise financial products to.
Certainly user prompts are a new type of data that could be included in a profile to target users with ads. But note, big tech companies don’t ever want to sell your data. They want to sell your attention, targeted to advertisers by using their proprietary systems on your data. They would prefer to keep the data for themselves and only charge advertisers for attention. The challengers are going to reshape the tools/interfaces to how data gets created/consumed/evaluated by users. There are more profound shifts afoot than just “more data captured by existing players”. Disruption at the interface layer is the biggest threat. Nostr plays a small role (for now) in this kind of disruption. It could play a larger role over time.
What do you mean under "interface layer"?
The web browser is an example of the “interface layer”. In the late 90s Microsoft tried to bundle Internet Explorer (their browser) into the Windows operating system, so that they could control the defaults (e.g. which “portal” or search engine most people use). Google fought this by building “search toolbars” that plugged into IE and other browsers and eventually launched the Chrome browser. It’s open source, but Google owns the “interface layer” (binary software distributed/installed on your computer which you launch). Another disruptive “interface layer” change happened years later when Apple launched iPhone/iOS and again controlled a new “interface layer” to computing. Apple uses this “interface layer” disruption to get $10s of billions of dollars from Google for the privilege to be the default search engine. A collection of open source nostr clients could become a new “interface layer” to the next wave of information and communication systems on the internet. As people seek higher quality information from more reputable sources with more control over their data, privacy, and attention there’s an opportunity to disrupt at the “interface layer” again. The largest strategic battlegrounds in business/tech occur at the “interface layer”. How do consumers choose what they do?
Good point @dk ! Data monopoly is better for them. They want your data, so they can monetize it without letting the control out! Thanks for crearing it! 🫡 Basically "infinite money" if they collect your data indefinitely, and they are the first point of contact for that data.
