Oddbean new post about login | logout people care a lot about privacy. more than censorship resistance. but for the mass, it’s not a reason to switch. they would have already. in time they will. but immediate value needs to be there first
sure, extreme measures like real-name requirements will make people leave but besides that, i would say privacy can't be a main selling point for social media, as using social media at all is slightly exhibitionist people super concerned with their privacy aren't going to use it at all, or will at least be very infrequent users, not the main audience
“they would have already.” Not necessarily… 🙏 Most haven’t heard of Nostr, or had a bad experience due to Nostr lacking algorithms and speed (tons of missing posts/client glitches/etc). It’s nowhere near as advanced as Twitter yet. Once it is, then the price for censorship resistance might not require such a steep cost. Right now the switching costs are too high: you lose your network and lose many features of Twitter. Reverse-chronological feed with missing notes is primitive compared to X and what comes next. Once Nostr has all the features normal Twitter has, including consistent speed and feed algorithms, then the true test begins…
I like the idea of experimenting with agentic AI on an open network. You do drop thoughts ahead of time and trigger all kinds of reaction which is what we need as a society (re protocol a few yrs back). With agentic AI, it seems like we can gauge the temperature of uncensored, unmonitored conversations and compare to an algo-ridden world. We become the placebo. Enabling agency for people to explore their social horizon would also be another interesting opportunity. On privacy, it is needed for censorship resistant to be optimised, so that users don’t self censor out of fear or we create breeding ground for gov’ts IP geolocation tracking to capture dissent. We don't have any privacy now. Yes gov't cannot block you here but they can capture you and put you in prison and that sucks even more. The privacy options we have here are not much diff from existing centralised system out there right now, except for that one extra step of single point of failure. If we want to make privacy work and normalise it, I don't think it can be the same thing wrapped in a diff outfit. It has to be diff and simple to encourage adoption. You are right, debates between free speech vs fake speech is a distraction while free will and free thoughts are in jeopardy
I came to nostr because Snowden recommended it. I highly believe in privacy. (Most of the public do not care nearly enough). I am still on X because of the hundreds of millions of people (therefore real world news). However on my X account I gave a fake email account, and that is the extent of my kyc there. No blue check marks or ability to use Grol 2 their AI software.