We talked to about a hundred current and former users of Nostr. There were many themes that emeged. One was that people who didn’t know about bitcoin kind of liked being able to do zaps. Another was that they wanted to see content not talking about bitcoin, using it was cool, but constantly talking about it wasn’t their jam. Many users felt like the branding of Nostr as being anti-censorship and radically pro-free speech would draw a crowd they weren’t interested in being part of, that was a perception issue. Many users, and in particular women, had been repeatedly harassed and stalked. They were fine with people saying the most offensive stuff but they didn’t want to see it in their notifications, dm’s, on a global feed, in trending posts, or as replies to their posts. 

The content labeling and report functionality that people are complaining about are ways for  Nostr users to control their own experience. We created content warnings and client filtering options because it solved a problem that was driving people away from Nostr. Now one important thing, Nos and most Nostr apps only display and use reports from people you follow. To use and display all reports and labels from any relay and any npub is a bad idea. It opens you up to anyone who wants to spam you. The only folks who should see or care about @Reportinator are the people who follow it. Just like the dm’s are divided up between people you follow and randos. 

Nostr is about you having the sovereignty over what you publish and what your relays host. You choose which client you want to use, that decides what data you see and which algorithms are used to sort the posts. You do not get a say over what other people publish or what they host in their relays. Some people want content labeling and reporting. Some people want to use a bot which does AI labeling. Is it perfect, far from it, but it is part of the design of Nostr that there isn’t some centralized system of control. That means if other people want a bot that labels content, all you can do is choose not to use that content. You can not censor the bot off of the network.