Oddbean new post about login | logout Nobody will care… I removed all the music I had uploaded to wavlake. I am not comfortable with a platform which allows users to game their billboard and solely uses zaps to gauge engagement. nostr:note1myu7vm8e374g706glyr9uh9sm3jpw0ylykqt4x9dyzpta8smpuws3sy9lf paid promotion needs to be labeled as such. How did I know users were gaming the billboard? Their zap tally kept growing, but the amount of supporters remained the same. The same sats we’re used multiple times (losing a bit on fees each time). The manipulation by this so called member of the community was relentless, and when I started competing with him replicating the approach it went absolutely overboard. After the short exchange with WL quoted above, the supporters count suddenly went buggy and stopped displaying data. After pointing this to WL, they claimed a bug and then proceeded to remove it totally from their UI. Last but not least, when looking at where WL gets its financial support from I noticed that Hivemind Ventures also funds Primal, a Nostr client with a gameable “leaderboard”. Have fun, without me.
I understand @semisol a lil more each day
Wav lake was 🗑 from the start i told that to yakihonne ! Who listened to podcast ? About other stuff Kind 0
Did not listen to the podcast, couldn’t find it back then. (It was around when you wrote the article on NC, right?)
zap leaderboards only make sense in a web of trust setting unfortunately, since untrusted zappers can fake zaps.
They can fake zaps, they can self zap… in the end there are many other metrics that can be used to gauge engagement.
This is nothing new in the media world. New York Bestsellers and their publishers all mass buy their own books to stuff their numbers. The major music and film industry companies also do this with their own library to fix the Billboard, etc charts. It’s totally ridiculous, but the world is rigged like this.
Exactly, it’s FIAT ethos. I just don’t want to be a part of it. I seriously did not expect that my « hey, I’m gaming your leaderboard » would be met by a « yeah, it’s fine we’ll take the sats »
Don’t get me started on Nielsen Ratings. I work closely with a TV producer and what I’ve learned about how is crazy. It’s a closely guarded secret how they create their ratings. Which more or less means they are bogus and make up their numbers.
Same as twitter polls right?
So who be doing this. The People need names!!
Nah…. But there aren’t that many users who repeatedly grab top spots, and sometimes all the top spots.
Gotcha 🤙
My beef is with the whole concept, more than a couple of actors. They always been around, they’ll always be around.
Jeeze, give em a chance. Why did you remove your music? Your choice obviously, its your music, I just dont see how thats helping. Apprecaite ypur openess about the issue you're seeing regardless, its a fair point. Personally the thrill for me with any kind of music discovey is in the virtual "crate digging". I will continue to mostly ignore the leaderboards so if people want to zap themeselves thats fine 🤣. Its finding the gems while listenting to a radio type feature, or someone recommending a track in my feed. Bring back music blogs on nostr 😍
Sad to see you go @exspiravit We’re just trying stuff out.. It’s all so early. Hope things align better for you down the road and we see you come back ✌️
There are other great uses for Wavlake. They make it super easy for podcasters like me to reference music and have V4V flow to the artist. Sorry you felt the need to pull your music from the platform. I like what they’re offering and hope they will fix the leaderboard gaming.
With music published on wavlake / podcastindex anyone can make their own leaderboard of the tunes with their own math. The leaderboard is tertiary to the service IMO.
The leaderboard is always going to be a problem, if it is universal. If it is there, ppl will look at it. If a service has a leaderboard they are responsible to make it as fair as possible. “We know it’s gamable and are fine with it” is not proof of making a leaderboard fair, on the contrary. As a Bitcoiner I expect companies in this space to respect the values they signal. In current state, WL leaderboard is sooooo FIAT and so is their reaction to my comments.
It’s game-able, but not scam-able (I can’t ask wavlake to move my song to the top as a favor, I must take the time to send the sats in). Wavlake’s leaderboard also only includes songs on Wavlake, excluding the wider array of self hosted music in the podcast index (lnbeats.com, etc)
I agree with you the metric we rank by is less than ideal. The challenge is with standard lightning invoices and zaps, anyone can be the payer -- and in some cases that could be the same person many times. Believe me, we have thought through so many different ways we could handle this, all with differing pros and cons, and in the end we always land back on the simplest measure: sat count. If people want to exploit that to gain visibility, so be it. For now. When there is a clearer path to make rankings more objective, we will take it. In the meantime we are working on some creative ways for people to curate their own charts using our data, because I believe there should be more than one way to define trends and recommend content. Anyway, I'm sorry to hear you've left. You’re welcome back anytime.
Don’t mind me. I am just an autist with strong reactions to fakery. Fakery was being celebrated, I reacted. Non-universal, user dependent, discovery charts are indeed the way to go. Universal charts only lead to concentration and “centralization” around the top 10. My opinion is this: if the leaderboard is broken and gamed, just remove it. But as I am typing this the leaderboard is still standing yet the one metric I used to understand it was being gamed is gone (supporters count). My autistic brain does not like that.
