Oddbean

The way to make the internet fun again is to forget optimizing for time on platform and focus on rich and fulfilling experience instead. Luckily, nostr fixed that! Corporatization of the web was the start of the end. If Nostr can avoid making the same mistakes, it’ll do well.

Nostr’s shared user base and unique clients open up opportunities for niche experiences - something the early internet was full of. I think as long as a client optimized for a unique experience for 1000-10,000 users, it’s not likely to fall into the trap of optimizing for a million+ users. If we figure out how to make it work without ads, we’ve got a huge advantage over corporate socials. Changing the trained and abused mindset is likely the biggest challenge here. We have to focus on person to person interactions vs person to void. So, any feature that encourages closer bonds and the breaking of the need to shout to everyone is probably a plus. Things like not showing follower counts is a good example - or not having any type of metric (including a wot score) that incentivizes the wrong kind of behavior is also a plus. We can probably design in a way that enhances stronger connections instead of many connections. I don’t have all the answers to what that looks like in practice but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

these are cool ideas. has anyone tried showing the ratio of replies to original posts metrics? might indicate something about participation and p2p strength? or a score of the number of people any given user has replied to (and received a like or zap from the original poster)?