Oddbean

Would it be possible to only see notes from within a web of trust? For example follows +1 (meaning people I follow and people they follow) or follows +2 This seems like it would knock out the bots because nobody I follow follows bot accounts.

In order to shield yourself from bots, you have to wall yourself off from brand new accounts. There’s no getting around that, since bot runners can spin up as many new accounts as they want. The best way for new human users to bootstrap is probably to assimilate into the web-of-trust of someone they know. And if you’re a real human joining Nostr, it’s almost certainly because you already know someone who’s on it. Just ask them to follow you and that’s reasonable proof to others that you’re not a bot.

I was thinking about turning my replies only from people I follow button on. Not a fan of that, but the bots are overwhelming. Even your solution, while better, I would say is not ideal. Shuts a lot of newcomers out.

Yes but the trade-off is that it then becomes even harder for folks to be discovered on Nostr. Replying to people & zapping is a way for a new user to be discovered & build some trust. Using a WoT to filter replies builds in a kind of invitation system to your social network. I'm not saying that it's not the best approach but that there are tradeoffs. This is especially true if most clients implement this functionality.

Same here. When I think about the bots it's mainly about possible future issues. At the moment it would be a very inexpensive and simple way to attack nostr. In fact I think that's a large part of why we are not ready for any serious adoption.

Maybe the #wot collaborative filtering could be more curating a blacklist instead of only white listing. New accounts would get a chance as long as as they are not muted by more than three trusted npubs.

if proof of work was practical show me the still growing market of proof of work shitcoins you can't... they are dropping off the internet one by one, because of people finding efficiencies that regular users can't access and finish for regular usage the same thing will happen to proof of work... even if people set up cloud miners to do the work for a fee, might as well just skip the work

Proof of Work is working nicely for Cloudflare, they're taking over the blasted internet with it. They're right, too. If you're posting one note, burning a few clock cycles is nothing, If you're spamming a million, its crippling, and uneconomic unless your spam has a supernaturally high CTR

so, a proof of work done with the slowest execution engine in the universe that could be sped up very easily to generate the same data... i'm not sure that is gonna help nostr because their whole thing depends on DNS hash grinding with the same hash used by bitcoin, there is miner hardware that can be adapted to crunch other than 80 byte long headers, and even if there isn't that many, they are not expensive and if the spammers have them all then the normal users don't get a word in edgewise the game theory of proof of work is a big part of why there can only be one bitcoin, and why all the rest are ngmi doesn't matter what you think when the game theory is against you, the spammers will win that game the game they can't win is the one they aren't playing, a game of trust and transparency it is extremely simple to mitigate the bootstrapping issue as well, every user starts with a nonzero follower count that is a well known relay that they start on, and the longer they behave themselves the more visible the clients make their replies it can all be completely distributed and trustless, and it doesn't require proof of work, but it will work better if you can get people to sign up for paid relays the better experience on paid relays with WoT filtering is evident to everyone who is using them, less bandwidth as well, i 've seen some nasty usage rates shown by some users for their damus and amethyst client, so we solve many problems with small simple solutions proof of work is never going to work, but carry on

Users under 40 expect instant cult "love-bombing". Nostr NGMI if they have to work their way in like an undercover officer. And the venn diagram of people who reprogram ASICs and people who flood-spam Nostr resembles the infinity sign. Far better return on Raymon's LLM approach plus swimsuit pics and you know it... We need WoT, we need paywall, and we need PoW. But the same relay needn't use all of them.

your observation about the cult-like nature of social networks is quite on point literally exactly what most of the social networks are now covertly being used for by intelligence agencies, for color revolutions, for creating political spectacles, farming them to find suitable patsies to launch false flags