Oddbean new post about login | logout If we have advertisers, then we have already failed.
What other options do you see to keep clients developing and relays at least operating?
People will have to pay for things they want. It’s strange to me how bitcoiners talk about incentives so often, but rarely do you hear people really drill down on what it would mean to incentivize sovereign software.
I only see hopium that everything will just work because good enthusiasts would implement best client software once for free that doesn’t require operational costs and design the network in the way that it only requires couple of thousands of very cheap relays (5-100$ a month) to operate relays which were already implanted. And in this way relay operational costs would be cover by the same enthusiasts running tor relays or lightning nodes I don’t think its viable and I can’t imagine any system in social network (in terms of what a regular user expects from the term “social network” today) that doesn’t mostly exist off of ads Do you expect every regular non technical user to pay some fee for using a social network? Like twitter is trying to achieve and fails?
I don’t expect it, no. That’s exactly the problem though. I think back to Robin Williams line in Aladdin, “Haven’t you ever heard of the Golden Rule boy? He who has the gold makes the rules.” Whoever ends up dumping money into Nostr, owns it.
So whats your expectations then? Doesn’t sound too positive, does it?
It’s not. But let’s be real for a minute. Nostr is a technological innovation. It’s a pretty decent one. I like it. The problem isn’t technological though. It’s social. People got themselves where they are now. People will have to change. Giving a man trying to hammer in a screw a better hammer doesn’t solve his underlying issue.
Totally agree that nostr is a 90% a social challenge rather than technical. And one way to solve it is for people to change their views and expectations on social networks However, I personally think their is another solution - keep things as close as possible to what they are right now in order to avoid having to change people minds and just do what we have now but slightly better and a bit differently I think changing people minds is impossible but making nostr look more like a standard social network is not a popular opinion here :)
We'll have them eventually. Thinking that zero clients will be ad supported is naive.
Oh I’m beyond positive they’ll exist. I would go as far as calling it a nearly immutable law at this point that people will *not* sustainably fund social good projects short of coercion, which I’m not willing to do. I guess I’m calling out that we have the experience we deserve. If ads are a necessity, then we deserve every bit of corporate incentives and censorship we get.
Right. In the grand scheme of things, if many clients resort to ad models, we've failed.