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@ Zach
2023-07-28 10:19:02
I find myself spending more and more time on nostr, a decentralized social networking protocol. Here’s why.
The problem (as if you didn't already know)
I’ve long been frustrated with social media platforms. They have the same incentives - increase time on site - primarily because of the ad model for revenue.
This model incentivizes them to collect as much data as possible about their users.
It incentivizes them to develop algorithms that drive “engagement,” which just means clicks and attention.
It incentivizes tribalism.
It incentivizes binary thinking (us/them, black/white, with us or against us, etc.).
To increase followers and reach, users are incentivized to play into the algorithm, creating a positive feedback loop - outrageous posts amplified by the algo incentivizes similar posts.
Social media companies can use the algorithm to promote perspectives they support and down rank perspectives they disagree with.
Governments and intelligence agencies are increasingly pressuring social media companies to do their bidding.
CEOs of these companies have an incredible amount of power to control speech, as we’re seeing with Elon.
I could go on. My point is that we need something different. Something that is built around different incentives. Something that makes it difficult to censor speech and users simply because they have an unpopular viewpoint. Something that a government or CEO can't simply turn off.
Enter nostr
Nostr appears to fix many of these things at the protocol level. (To understand this, consider email. Email is built on a protocol. Countless “clients” can leverage this protocol. I can use Gmail, you can use Yahoo mail, and we can still communicate with each other. The same is true for Nostr, except not only can we still communicate using different clients, we can use our username with any client. It would be like getting sick of Gmail and switching to Yahoo mail, but all of your emails come with you.)
Nostr also allows for a “value for value” incentive model, thanks to the bitcoin lightning network integration. Instead of users trying to optimize their posts to suit the algorithm, they can be rewarded directly for quality content.
Imagine a Twitter or Facebook experience in which you can send micropayments directly to a user for a quality post.
They generate value for you, so you directly compensate them accordingly. Value for value, cutting out the need for the advertising model.
Maybe you only send a few pennies, but maybe that's all the user would get from an ad being seen. But this process fundamentally changes the revenue model, cutting out the advertising in the middle.
Maybe nostr won’t work. Maybe it won’t be able to scale. Maybe value for value won't turn out to be a powerful enough incentive model. Maybe we won’t be able o break the network effects of the current platforms. I can think of numerous ways in which Nostr could potentially fail.
But I’m tired of being stuck in perverse incentive hell.
Confronted by the uncertainty of the future and the clearly negative direction so many things are trending, I am going to do what I can to participate in and build the world I want to inhabit. The world I want my kids to live in.
This is why I Bitcoin. This is why I Moral Courage. This is why poured my guts into designing an elective called Critical Thinking. And now, this is why I Nostr.
I want social media. The world needs social media. But I can’t in good conscience continue to participate on these platforms when there may (finally) be an alternative that fixes the incentives.
I’m not deleting my accounts (yet). But I’ll be spending less time on them.
I’ve been on Nostr since early January. If you want help trying it out, let me know. There’s great info about getting started on Nostr here.
The client I use on iOS is Damus.
On the web I use Primal.
Follow me: z_cress@nostrverified.com or npub1n6g4js374378t90rrh4jyeqaqf537ce0qygu79u4r5mgf7qn8hkqk3watk
This post originally appeared on blogstack.io, a nostr client similar to Medium.