Oddbean

You can tell who the popular npubs are because every damn thing they post has like 50 reactions and 20 zaps. Even if they just accidentally typed two letters and pressed send. 😅 Almost all other notes have no interactions. Complete bifurcation. I suspect that most people hardly see anything at all, in their feed. Because they only follow the very top accounts and never look at global, their feeds are note deserts.

The problem is, the developers are now obsessed with "only see your follows", so that model is prominent in the OtherStuff. We're going to try to counteract it, on Alexandria, by having the global from high-quality relays set as the default, and using better searching and labeling. We're only going to include follows as one factor in how prominent something is, on the front page. Otherwise, a couple of "bookpert npubs" could completely capture the market, by getting people to follow them and then everyone would only look at their recommendations.

Following hashtags really helps me discover people without sifting through global. I plan to turn off my big relays in my list but not until crawler and blastr are done. Then maybe wheat can be one of very few relays in my list.

Yeah, hashtags are nice. I sometime search for them. Or I click on them, when someone uses them, and scroll through the results. Just realized that changing clients all the time cause me to drop wheat from my list. Added it back in.

That's actually completely counter-productive, as the smaller npubs lose all name-recognition and the bigger ones are identifiable by the way they write and the outsized enthusiasm their notes receive. On the selection of relays I'm looking at, most notes display zero reactions (can only see replies on Nostrudel, when I open the note). But some get a reactions on basically nothing-notes because people are just excited to see them post anything, at all. Can you tell who these people are? https://m.primal.net/LCUS.png https://m.primal.net/LCUW.png https://m.primal.net/LCUa.png

This is why the well-known people who come here (or those who get boosted by someone big, right away), love how they get lots and lots of interaction really fast, whereas normal people just languish for days or weeks and then leave again. And it's not because they aren't replying to other people. They reply, they get a response, then it's over. Their replies don't lead to being followed-back, and everyone looks only at follows, so it's like trying to break a glass ceiling. This onboarding experience is actually much WORSE than when I first got here, and lots of people were surfing global, so just posting notes into the void got you new followers. That ended because the big relays turned into nothing but porn and spam, after the eGirls showed up, so we all switched to OnlyFollows. The better solution is to use smaller relays, that don't have a bunch of porn and spam, but the outbox model hadn't been popularized, yet. I feel like this better solution is languishing because of feed-inertia, but I'm hoping personal relays will end that.

Big relays and small relays will all be needed in the future. Big relays have a lot of signal, a lot of noise and a low signal/noise ratio. Small relays (specially community relays) have the potential of being the opposite. The idea that there will be a "centralized super relay" in the future is pretty vague and I will explain why. If there is a relay with a lot of signal and little noise which is also somewhat centralized, that relay would still compete against the biggest amplifier of signal in the entire world (Bitcoin blocks) and it would lose catastrophically because the Bitcoin system is just too solid The paths to big relays and small specialized relays are out there. I don't see a problem in people taking different routes in this aspect and competing

Big relays are a solution in search of a problem, IMO. Since relays can pull in notes from other relays, our own personal feeds can be 100% signal and diverse. The Big Relay Model assumes you have to go to that relay to see someone's notes because notes are something scarce, like on legacy media. There is no scarcity in notes because they are signed, so you can create n copies of them. The only thing that has any scarcity, at all, on here, are npubs identified as being run by interesting humans or helpful bots, so that's what you should collect. People have been collecting them in their follows, but collecting them in relays is both more effective and more discrete. WoT algos are better than nothing, but they're dependent upon your feed being public data. 😬 All of the AI work we've been doing has me thinking more about which things I want to make explicit to the public, like labeling notes by topic or an attestation for some specific npub, and which ones I should make harder to discover, like what I'm personally looking at.