Oddbean new post about login | logout If users just want a high quality lurking experience, they only need to identify one high quality account they are interested in “follow the person” and could bootstrap off of that first person’s web of trust. And I suspect there will always be well known curated lists of popular nostriches. Pick any group of npubs from that list and now you have a social feed to watch.
🎯 Here’s the question: what does the feed look like when the new user’s follow list goes from 1 npub to 2, 3, 5, 10, 100, etc? Do you change a setting so your feed switches from your follows’ webs of trust to your web of trust? Ideally the transition would be smooth, without the need for the new user to change any settings. It just so happens that the Grapevine WoT Score does exactly that: it solves the problem that you describe for the brand new user + it provides a smooth transition with no need for any confusing setting changes.
Thought-experiment: You are tasked with making nostr easy for new users of a nostr client. You are specifically tasked with writing a brief set-up guide for new users. What would your guide look like? Here’s my attempt: Hi there! To help you get started on nostr we’d like to set you up with a good number of users to follow and relays to connect to. We’ll connect you to free relays and users we trust. You can always change this later in Settings. To get started just click on the topics, preferences and mute options below: Topics: Breaking news Sports Music Technology Politics Preferences: Filter out NSFW content Don’t autoplay videos and audio Mute: cryptocurrency Bitcoin carnivore vegan Click here to get set up!
I’d like users to have tools that enable choices like the ones you describe. One thing I’d add: I want users to get into the habit of thinking about WHO implements the above preferences. The fiat world trained us hard not to do that. We’re going to have to learn a new habit, which is selecting WHO makes decisions and in what context. Of course, it must not be overburdensome just to get started. If a new user wants to select just one trusted npub to oversee curation in all contexts, that should be an easy, one-click way to get started using nostr. Effectively, the new user would “inherit” all preferences from that one selected user. After that, our tools should enable users to make incremental improvements. Want more (or less) of content A, with its curation overseen by npub A’? Done. Customization, one step at a time.
Yep. Have a list of npubs that you (the client developer) believe to be high quality and suggest those to the user to follow. For any topics you’re going to have listed, do the same. Maybe there are oracles who maintain lists and you can pay them for their current list at the time a new user shows up.
Use follows and mutes to maintain the list of NotSpam. Use some other data source (badges? reactions?), filtered and weighted using the list of NotSpam npubs, to maintain a list of the oracles that you are talking about. Those oracles maintain lists — NIP-51 perhaps. Eventually, we incentivize them to maintain these lists bc we pay them in sats. The only question is what source(s) of data we want to use for each of the above steps. Badges? Labels? NIP-51? Something else? … does the data we need already exist? If not, let’s make it. https://i.nostr.build/c8IQY6tHGA2aSsTG.png
There's many feed algorithms to consider. What I’m suggesting is just a binary true/false on whether a note could show up.
