Reddit EOL 2023 View quoted note →

Diversity in people and content drive Nostr’s victory. View quoted note →

I’m not particularly for or against Trump, yet this whole thing is really just a dog and pony show. These governments are not fit to run anything outside of a self-enrichment Ponzi scheme. Do they use a MIB mindwipe device post holding a presidential office to ‘protect’ secrets? No. Hundreds of thousands of individuals have had, and still have, access to ‘secret’ information - they have brains with a thing called memory. Trump really should have pardoned Snowden. Protecting a broken government that ultimately turns on you wasn’t a great plan. View quoted note →

#earthquake #Bulgaria

This could become the hardest working bot on Nostr. View quoted note →

Companies like Reddit and twitter (and former similar companies like digg) forget that they outsource most of their innovation to external developers who try new things, and some concepts really take off. Their future competition were literally working for them - until they cut them out with paywalls and bad terms. Normally once big enough, they just buy these innovative companies. They also forget the value often isn’t their network site, it’s the networks that branch off from those networks that hold the real value. It isn’t a subreddit itself, it’s the custom bots they make, the discord or telegram channel meetings and chats, the people who meet up in real life, the external discovery of content, etc. Walled gardens, forcing official apps, expensive APIs, excessive moderation/censorship, etc are last ditch failed attempts to add or create value from a fleeting flock. Put simply, the above puts your company into a survival death spiral - where you hope you can capitalise enough and quickly - or pivot, before a majority of future paying users churn, and you’re left with some fancy trademark and collapsed revenue. A ghost town. Given the above, it’s easier to see how Nostr solves these issues. Devs can’t be locked out. Users can’t be banned. Devs actually work collaboratively to grow Nostr across diverse products and use cases, communities can easily splinter and co-exist on specific or a diverse relay set. Discovery will improve and enable greater personalisation. Types of communication will expand and become more seamless.

An employment system to make all humans maintain full-time work, after an initial education (read: indoctrination) period, surrender half of a decreasing compensation (read: food, shelter, and lollipop), and continue until they are in their final years of productive life. Lucky that universe isn’t this one.

What’s that song again about the roof being on fire..? View quoted note →

#Firesale

The filtering/blocking approach used by Amethyst today has a few main faults - the primary one being lack of visibility of app wide filtering. People find out by accident, or at all - which is obviously a sign of a broken approach. I don’t quite see it as censorship, yet more as a poorly functioning content ‘value’ scoring system. The inability to opt-in and customise your filters is really the lacking feature here. I’m actually surprised just how badly the WoT - trusting 5 nth degree following spam reports = shadow ban content - has performed. It shows that close/greater connected individuals (group clusters) regularly have different preferences and desires to self-curate what they see - instead of having it done on their behalf somehow (I.e. WoT signals). People also report or mute for many reasons - from bad content to “I just don’t care about this type of content”. Breaking News: Humans value different things. Enabling users to self curate more easily and see how far that gets us is the best approach. We can even add filtering for NIP05 domains, or perhaps relays to avoid connecting to. Even content warning, profanity masking, nudity detection, etc. all done locally on devices without major performance impacts. Damus POC I mocked up. Damus has active development in this area. View quoted note →

I’m less concerned with AI itself, and more concerned with the humans, corporations, and governments that wield it for their gain. It’s worth pointing out that ML has been used maliciously for a while now. Defined as using it against another human for personal gain, at the expensive of that person.

The other reason why Twitter and Reddit went paywall is because of machine learning training feeds. ML is looking to decreased the lag between training and human interaction. It’s said much of the digital information available has already been consumed by the advanced ML engines today - reaching the next cliff to climb in optimising outcomes with the same data - meaning smaller incremental improvement over the recent rapid improvements. While your data may not be as valuable for advertising, it’s the future feed into these ML learning flows. In a sense, ML businesses are pricing out the rest of the market for things like API access. It’s important to understand this is coming and consider consequences - like the crazy low APi limits to price ratio. If non-corporate and non-government controlled AI systems have a chance, people need to exodus these closed platforms for their data to even the playing field.

It’s great seeing the advertising business models slowly topple… Twitter, Reddit… unsustainable businesses without an expensive walled garden approach. Funny part is I don’t even think it’s caused by Nostr.. it’s caused by market saturation, and inability to create new value for continued growth. They are slowly dying by capitalism’s “the weak starve” property. Less advertising doesn’t directly mean less privacy invasive data collection and spying.. but certainly takes away some of its capture value.