Oddbean

Likewise :) Really empathize with your message. I'm also not a fan of echo chambers and would really prefer a respectful debate place for everyone. That would make Nostr much much more useful for everyone. Thank you very much for reminding everyone with your very important post.

🫂🤝 I’ve found that the majority of discussion I have here is respectful — even when disagreeing with the other party, it doesn’t tend to downgrade into ad hominems and other nonsense you normally would see online. Part of it, I’m sure, is that the incentives are different. On Twitter, jerks are rewarded with engagement and reach. Here, they (usually) find themselves politely ignored, while watching the other users who engage in good faith get to enjoy thoughtful/civil discourse and zaps! As for the echo chamber, I’m starting to think that nostr isn’t actually one. Yes, there’s a lot of discussion of specific topics, but I think that’s more a result of the interests of the particular group of people who showed up early and make up a lot of the user base. But you can find plenty of other unrelated content if you look. I’d think of an echo chamber as the self-reinforcing ideological loop, often algorithmically-driven or enhanced, that suppressed or crowds out any dissenting voices. Bitcoin Twitter is an example of that, whereas “Bitcoin nostr” to me feels much more like a bunch of bitcoiners who’ve found a space to communicate and hang out so the each other, built on tech that is already aligned with many of our philosophical views, but where diverse viewpoints and discussion have as much “posting power” as the prevailing view, due to the absence of the toxic algos. I’m still chewing on this and may reformulate it, but hey - thinking “out loud” (ish). Pleasure conversing with you!

I agree about incentives, the Fediverse was similar when I hoping (2019). X and Facebook deliberately set people against each other for engagement. I disagree this isn’t an echo chamber of sorts, how many non bitcoiner folks are here, the number must be pretty small judging by the timeline. I’ll be curious to see what happens if more left leaning voices appear here. It will still fair better than X and Facebook though in my opinion. It’s a matter of record that Facebook very deliberately experimented with peoples’ emotional states showing them only negative content. That was probably the biggest reason I deleted my accounts with them. Career suicide? Maybe but I’m still alive and having fun making niche records! Hopefully there will be decent conversations about how we function as a society. I never hear Austrian economists discuss social issues, other than “the market will solve everything”. But clearly governments are also failing in that regard. I don’t know the answers, I just know I can turn your mic up and down and make you sound good!

Sounds like we’re fairly aligned in our hopes for what nostr will become On the echo chamber point, I was more looking at it from the question of “what qualifies a space as an echo chamber?” Like, is it sufficient that a large group of people are all focused on a particular topic? Do they all need to mostly agree and share a worldview? What happens when someone disagrees, or introduces unrelated content? When I think of the term “echo chamber” I’m picturing a discussion space where the vibe is somewhere between “self-reinforcing” (at best) and a “group-navel-gaze/circle jerk” at worst (pardon the crude metaphor, lol). But is a hobbyist-club/event an echo chamber, simply because the attendees share a set of views and passions? Or does it need to also have a sort of layer of exclusionary/repressive vibe towards others who disagree? In that way (again, still formulating), this doesn’t “feel” like an echo chamber, to me. In part because I’ve followed accounts and hashtags that provide me with a diversity of topics and perspectives in my feed, but also because it doesn’t feel like a place where everyone just pats each other on the back and reinforces flawed perspectives without pushback; in fact there’s a good deal of debate and (mostly respectful) disagreement within the discussions, whether about Bitcoin or otherwise. I’ve also noticed that non-Bitcoin content is asked for, encouraged, welcomed, boosted, zapped, and generally celebrated. Likely because those of us who were here early, despite being passionate about Bitcoin, also genuinely want to see nostr grow and succeed, and we know that the social layer needs diverse attractions to bring more people in. Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is that the ratio of Bitcoin content kind of matches the interest/ratio of the user base. And as more people have joined over the past year or two, bringing different perspectives and wider variety of interests, that ratio has begun to change as well. I follow hashtags like #nature #artstr #winechain #musicstr #privacy #philosophy #plantstr #foodstr #coffeechain etc., and in doing so have curated an experience here that feels rich and engaging. Oh, and #grownostr was an early focus at expanding the range of topics beyond the initial discussions of “Bitcoin and nostr”, and I still use it daily!