Oddbean

I mean nostr isn't social media right, and i don't think users have the right to 'require' anything, I'm just trying to say it's common sense to have discovery on social media. I don't think it being 'done the right way' is a relevant Q, let people have a choice on how to do it.

My entire post was questioning that "common sense" that to me was never common. Maybe I'm retarded or blind but I would appreciate some pointers about how "discovery" happens in these other social platforms. My experience on Twitter was always that I would find people by seeing them engaging with other people I had been following already. And there was a sidebar with annoying endless suggestions of people to follow that would only show people who were already very famous with thousands of followers and whom I already knew and had already decided to not follow. What else do they do?

when i sign up for such a platform, i might want to find info/news about the things that interest me. say my hobby is chess. i can (and should!) use some kind of hashtag system to find chess related content, and then i can choose to follow based on that. as for an algorithm, if i've followed 10 people to find more discussions about (x, y, z) then an algorithm might be able to find 10 more people that talk about similar things. i only vaguely remember, as it was about 8 years ago when i started using twitter, but i think it succeeded in recommending me bitcoin/dev related accounts that i wasn't aware of, quite a few times. if you already know who you want to interact with, sure. but in a case like that there were probably at least 50 accounts of people i "knew" from irc, reddit, mailing lists, conferences w/e that i had no idea were on twitter, let alone their user names. Isn't that obvious? while i admit, it is *not* obvious, how to do such a recommendation algo "right".