personally i never was interested in twitter, i think in like 2007 for about a week i had an account and got sick of all the SMS messages and the post length limitation was contrary to my verbose style anyway

i got into twitter because of its heavy presence of crypto and bitcoin chatter and then the great crashes of 2022 and then i heard all my bitcoiner follows raving about nostr and eventually i joined and shortly after went #nostronly because of Elon buying it (and i don't trust that transhumanist tax eater as far as i could kick his fat ass up a hill).

the entire business of welfare whores and shitposting for pay is something that provably cannot work without this kind of incentive and the money is coming from advertisers who are buying the data to craft their marketing campaigns... so it's a model that has no place in a post-hyperbitocinization world

what is going to happen though, inevitably, is that sooner or later they are gonna go after Substack and other similar semi-decentralised systems, i can see bluesky and farcaster also being put under the hammer of the DoJ and SEC in the future, and maybe not this cycle, but for sure next cycle, there will be such an aching need in the market for really decentralised social media and another 4 years i can see nostr becoming very mature

and a big part of that is going to be related to zaps, subscription systems, paid relays, tor integrations, specialised clients really getting solid and facilitating freemium business model and when that happens, all the laggards will come... i give it 5 years 

 Agree with most of this. 

On the welfare point, I will say the individual I know has bought Bitcoin with every payout and probably has shitposted his way to a quarter of a BTC since that program dropped. Hard to argue with that.  

 yeah, the incentives are sure there... youtube also has this stuff going on, and several other platforms, they are probably key to their retention