Oddbean

Ugh, I wasn’t going to do this, but I can’t shake fiatjaf’s comments out of my mind. Regarding UX, “dumbing things down” and all of that… Listen, people have various levels of comfort with tech. Also, depending on what type of product you build, you’re going to attract different types of users. Tools for developers will have developer-level experience with similar products. Tools for accountants will have account-level knowledge users. Nostr is primarily (at least right now) a social tool. That means it can appeal to anyone. Yes, the bitcoiners in the space may have more technical and cryptographic familiarity. We don’t need to dumb anything down for them / us. But it is also easy to forget that many of us had many questions ourselves. I for one asked questions day in day out after first joining. I have seen many others do the same, and we are not what I would consider as “normies”. I think it is easy to forget that we have already learned the ropes and to us this stuff looks obvious. New users on the other hand have mixed experiences. Some, (again, bitcoiners) have no issues, and others have a ton of questions. This is after the fact that many clients have improved significantly since most of us joined. Yet, people have questions. “Dumbing down” to a “common denominator” is absolutely necessary for the general audience who does not have the same level of patience as most of us. I mean, we are the types of freaks who will hodl for a decade without blinking an eye! We are the most patient bastards there are 😂. For everyone else there is a spectrum of patience and I don’t need to describe it, we get it. If you don’t believe anything I say, take your non-technical mom, cousin or whoever and ask them to sign up for nostr. See how many questions they ask you in the process. Let’s get a nice sample going. The great thing about what fiatjaf sparked is that we can have clients that don’t dumb down anything and can look as cryptographically complicated as they want to. We can also have clients that “just work” without all that other stuff. I don’t know much about Obsidian’s growth story or why they grew to a million estimated users. All I remember is trying the product for myself and deciding it was not worth learning for me. (At the time I was using Notion and that product was very intuitive with minimal learning curve for basic functions). I was also neck-deep in the startup community and everyone who used Obsidian around me was a developer / founder of an indie startup. We are talking experienced developers who previously worked at Facebook, Microsoft.. yada yada. Not your average newb. I am not saying Obsidian doesn’t have normie users, but If I had to bed, I would say a large number of those people are what we would term as techies in one way or another. Either full blown devs, or have been using markdown for a while already. I will admit that even my story doesn’t really mean anything - ultimately fiatjaf and I are both guessing as to why they succeeded, but there’s no correlation between - oh this markdown stuff is not that hard” and they grew despite that. None. Who is to say a million developers are not using Obsidian? Your guess against mine. In fiatjaf’s defense, I will say that maybe he is partially right - since Nostr clients are mostly notes (not that much other stuff out there yet), it is not incredibly difficult to click a freaking write button and write something. We all did it. It is also not incredibly difficult to say that people can learn about relays and keys. Mastodon grew despite their learning curve. I guess my point is that there’s a spectrum of technical knowledge and some people will be comfortable and others will look away right away. It all depends on how motivated they are to stick around. Those who need the tech badly or are just very curious will put up with far more than casual explorers. If we are totally cool with just attracting people who don’t mind wading through cryptographic gobbledygook, then by all means let it all hang out 😂. Personally, I want to look out for everyone, whether they need it or not. I want the experience of joining and using nostr as simple as it can be, while retaining all of the characteristics that make it superior to other social. Please take it easy on people who are trying to make this space friendly to all.

I agree with you. And when fiatjaf wrote the first part of the post, I thought he was talking about interop, and absense of global and focus on WOT, etc. Then the second part ruined it. Embracing nostr is definitely not about screaming npubs and relays. I might be wrong about what it is, but it's definitely not that.

I onboarded two completely different users to Nostr - one of them is just a passive lurker now - that being @dedanan - and the other came here to a tumutous start - that being @91284865 - because of a troll sliding into me trying to introduce them. Fun stuff! But during both of those processes, I noticed a few things that stuck out to me. The most common question between the two was: Who do I follow? Can I change my password? Which relays should I use? Dedanan is somewhat tech-savy. He uses #Amethyst and mainly scrolls there. I doubt he ever used Snort or Primal on the desktop, let alone install nos2x, AKA Profile or let alone Alby. Meanwhile, my other friend, ran into every problem imaginable: - nos2x for Firefox is now nos2x-fox and it's UI is bad. Like, it took us - me included - a good while to figure out that in order to add an nsec, you had to first click "New Profile". We were stumbed that the text field was blank and the generate button was all that worked - and it was just all over the place... - They use Waterfox and neither Snort nor Primal wanted to work with it and when they saw NoStrudel saying "it's half-baked", they shied away from it - which I totally understand, why use beta software if you are just new to the whole thing? - Croacle completely hit the bucket when it tried to find a kind:0 of the profile on 30+ relays. But since this was a completely new key, it found none, and thus got stuck in a loop forever. 100% unusable. Many people here on Nostr seem to have a good level of understanding for tech in general - but this helps them, and not the people we are trying to onboard. Nobody wants to babysit someone for half a day just for a social media thing - and then, when something "breaks", we are also the ones they will turn to first - which can be a good or a bad thing. To me, "dumbing down" means "simplifying" and streamlining the experience. For instance, imagine if Snort were to point out, during registration, that you should install a browser installation - or if Primal had some text on it's page to actually tell users that they need an extension to even log in. By default, it tells you... Nothing. For the longest time, I thought Primal was read-only. xD This is stupid, in it's own way. If I could steer Nostr devs into a direction to harness the buidl power into a certain way, I would put it there: Stabilize the apps, make onboarding easier for both the person recommending it and the other person actually doing it. Don't be shy to support older browsers too - not everyone lives on the bleeding edge. Make Nostr extensions that are awesome. For instance, this: https://www.getflamingo.org This was the first extension I used, but it doesn't support DMs and is, in fact, archived. But it does exactly what it needs to in a nice, sleek UI. Put your key in, and done! I am trying to learn about browser extension development because this is one of the pain areas of Nostr right now; We need an "actually good" extension. Alby does too much, and nos2x too little. Flamingo was neatly inbetween but is missing APIs, so it's "broken", kind of. But this doesn't even help with things like "Which relays should I use?" Both of my friends use my relay because I was syncing it to nos.lol for a while - and the gossip/outbox model is not supported in most clients right now. So this question also needs an answer. Generally, I totally agree with you. "We" can work with the gibberish and weirdness. If we see "naddr", we know what it is - others don't, and maybe ever won't. This is why I would love to see more development in the "making Nostr accessible to new people" spectrum. There is another problem but... that one is much, much more difficult: The Bitcoin stigma. I tried to talk about Nostr on some Lemmy instances, but I was /immediately/ met with "oh, its just cryptobros there" and the likes. Yikes! But this shouldn't go here, that's a different problem.

Good thing anyone can build dumbed down interface while others build more exposed ones. I agree there is space for both. People can always start with the dumbed down version and migrate to more intricate versions when they become Pros.

This has always been my thought. It all depends on who we want to join the Nostr community and the odds of the app being their first experience. My family members don’t need to see what or where JSON or NIPs are before finding and providing value in Nostr. I will say though that while I believe there is a place for apps that do not expose keys to the user, this should be the thing that is made most likely to be learned by users on signup and shown to users throughout. There are so many Nostr apps that do not adequately explain the importance of the private key and the need to securely back it up.

And I guess, you can have a simple view and advanced view if you want to support both. You can make the user start with the simple view, and grow into the advanced one later. Could be even a better experience, then having 2 seperate either really basic and really advanced client. You might be able to bridge the gap easier.

“Dumbing down” to a “common denominator” is absolutely necessary for the general audience who does not have the same level of patience as most of us. I mean, we are the types of freaks who will hodl for a decade without blinking an eye! We are the most patient bastards there are 😂. For everyone else there is a spectrum of patience and I don’t need to describe it, we get it. 😄 😂

weeks beofore did by nostr:nprofile1qqsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqppamhxue69uhkztnwdaejumr0dsq36amnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3dwp6kytnhv4kxcmmjv3jhytnwv46q5ywzuz I think you are in that thread doing some discussion too

I think this is mostly right. I'm also on the record as saying that having to manage your own keys is a major hurdle for the average person: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3236382/decentralised-social-media-super-app-elon-musks-dreams-already-exists-growing-interest-china My point was more that having the code accessible is not necessarily a problem. It may be unsightly, but I don't think it's too confusing for people to understand. Many Nostr apps are visually fine. People who do not understand or care about the technical stuff can ignore it. But best design practice is to have all the technical stuff hidden until or unless it is intentionally shown. Regarding Obsidian, the user base might be more diverse than you think. I suspect you're right that technically proficient users make up at least a plurality. But it does have a big following among writers. I see a lot of Obsidian-related content from academics, journalists and fiction writers, especially those involved in world-building. Pastors, too, seem to love the program for some reason, as do D&D players. I don't know what the exact demographic make-up is (and neither does the Obsidian team, apparently), but it does seem to bring together all types.

Well said, It looks like from every comment it’s a particular community they attracts people to nostr and it’s that honey pot that gets them to overcome the obstacles to use it. Even if nostr is the easiest thing to use it doesn’t mean anyone will use it, there still needs to be a motivation. The first community to be attracted was of course the bitcoin community. If you’re favorite bitcoiners are here then you come and you learn what you need too because you want the prize of being part of the community. The second community I would argue are the X exes, or de platformed community. They needed a place to meet so they started to learn in order to join their group. The third I think is gaming and @clairevp and @andre and the ZBD team have done wonders to bringing that community to nostr. There are many more communities that will join, art, music, photography, modeling, and we should do everything we can to make that experience as easy as possible, but when purple pilling individuals I don’t focus on any of the tech. I simply find what they are interested in and direct them to that community on nostr.

Absolutely. But we want to "dumb down" the interface without dumbing down the *culture*. Since nostr is basically just Usenet+crypto, let's learn some lessons from Eternal September and keep this wonderful tool from being co-opted by the Facebooks of the world. New users *do* need to understand the principles behind the tech even if they don't understand the details. There's no shortcut to freedom!

I agree with this. From the perspective of a teacher, we can’t expect people to be able to do everything from the get go. Many people will be approaching nostr from a variety of positions. I think about my bitcoin journey. KYC custodial exchange—> cold wallet —> node running, non kyc btc—> coinjoining robosats—> lightning. If someone were teaching me and would have gone straight to the last step I would have been overwhelmed. I think it really comes down to choice and having a multitude of clients that one can choose from and making the transition from each “level” as seemless as possible, with the caveat that keys should be the first thing that everyone understands and the tradeoffs they are making, just like buying btc from a custodial exchange or etf.

I agree completely. Still, there is a good and bad UX, regardless of a product's complexity. Because something is simple, it doesn't mean it's dumb. Similarly, if something is complex and hackable, it doesn't mean it's brilliant. Obsidian isn't the best app to draw a parallel with. One million users(and I'm one of them) might be excellent for what Obsidian is, but it's nothing for what we all hope Nostr to become. And since we are talking about writing applications, I suggest we look at Bear. It destroys Obsidian in writing, editing, and reading experience. It uses plain markdown, yet if you don't know what the heck markdown is, you don't have to; you will still have the same stellar experience. "Simple to learn, hard to master" is a "perfect" product design paradigm.