Oddbean

Muting is a super power. It allows toxic people to continue on with their vitriol. It also allows the recipient to gain control of their feed and social experiences, seeing only the content that they want to see. Both parties win here. The toxic people can have their corner of doom and gloom on Nostr. The vast majority of us will be here spreading 🫂 with 💜 and lots of 🤙🏻 Zaps also help here. More positive people exist in the world than negative ones. Zaps incentivize positive behavior. You can only get Zapped by so many negative people. Kind and loving people and their Zaps far out shine the other group's contributions to the world. Zaps will reflect this too.

I have mixed feelings on this. I think this will help in the future when we have more users and spammers are running rampant. This type of feature helps to easily mute them. However, I fear that mute lists can be abused and could be used to effectively shadow ban people. I don't want to go down that route.

There will always be those who abuse any function... but it is voluntary, you should be able to subscribe and unsubscribe, if you have people like gods and you only subscribe to their lists because of who they are, it is very likely that what you say will happen... power corrupts

Any user or bot can come and start filling your post with responses, spam and harassment and affect the experience of others and even yours, this goes beyond taking care of your list of followers and/or friends

You can already do this on Primal. Go to any user profile and select "Follow user's mute list" from the profile context menu. Note that we only support this from our web app. Coming to Primal mobile apps soon.

Basically. We have to know how something could break to be able to know how to prevent it from happening or at least attempt it from happening. Nothing and no one is perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for the best.

You almost have it here, Derek, but not quite. In order to mute something, I am first forced to see it, internalize it, and then react to it. While muting is a powerful tool, and should definitely be used, other tools also need to be available for those who choose to use them. I want to use a tool so I don’t have to be exposed to the bottom-feeders of Nostr AT ALL. Not because I’m “weak”, or “love censorship” or any other inane label people would want to put on me. But because I want to control my experience on Nostr and that means not being exposed to the worst of the worst, even before I’m aware that it exists. This is why I truly appreciate the work @rabble is doing on @Reportinator . Will it be perfect? Of course not! It’s the first of its kind. But it will get better and (this is the important bit) there will be others. If I don’t like how @Reportinator is working, I can turn it off or choose another one. Nostr is censorship-resistant not because there are no algorithms. But rather because there will eventually be SO MANY algorithms it will be impossible to game them all.