Spam are comments almost everyone wouldn't like. Lets take this discussion as an example. Spam would be something along the lines of : Try the latest bitcoin wallet at totallyalegitwallet.com it allows for 10 times faster transactions and lower fees! Which of course has nothing to do with the discussion. Or some of the worse examples on Nostr where its spam about illegal content. Meanwhile a comment I dislike could be you merely suggesting our ability to hide comments we don't like. Maybe other people are in favor of this and have good arguments. But if I simply delete them all if its my post where the discussion happens then I win. For a platform so good at open speech I don't think its a good idea. There have to be better ways of doing it. Personally I have suggested adblock style filter lists so that people you trust can clean up the platform for you and you can report offending posts there. It would give you this ability if it was your own one, but it would be opt in so then it only hits oeople who agree with your blocks.

Replies (2)

Constant's avatar
Constant 5 days ago
You are missing the point. Sidestepping the whole spam thing for a moment, Nostr does not change with what fiatjaf is proposing here. Censorship resistance in Nostr means freedom of association. I can throw everything an the kitchen sink blocking and removing your posts from my perspective because i don't want to engage with you, or want you in my feed ect. and at the same time you can have all the parallel conversations with others about my posts you want, simply using different relays. You don't get to force yourself into my world, i can't banish you from others. As to whether you think blocking voices, or for what reason or whatever is 'bad' or whatever does not matter, that is for everone for themselves to decide what, when and how they prefer things.
M Rad's avatar
M Rad 3 days ago
I would point out that, historically, these trade-offs have been well-trod, going back to 1990's usenet and email, & IRC. Email spamblock developed in layers: legal action against the most ergregious spam cannons, server-side filtering with realtime blackhole lists, and client side with beyesian and deterministic rules. POW, of course, was first proposed for email but never caught on, but we do have it for NOSTR. Usenet had the concept of "bozo filters" for client-side filtering. IRC, in its early days, had the "eris" server that refused on principle to filter anything, but eventually everyone else stopped federating and EFNet (Eris-free) is now the oldest extant IRC network. As a general rule, server-side filtering creates a hook for authoritarian censorship, which defeats the whole point of NOSTR, so that is a last resort only to be considered when a client-side is truly impossible. NOSTR support for POW gives us, in my view, the magic bullet to avoid email's fate. Though email is still quite nice if you take a half hour every month or so to tweak your client's filtering rules, that is not a grandma-level skill. I predict that, as NOSTR's popularity rises, spam will get worse, and eventually everyone will start setting POW thresholds. When grandma gets crapflooded, you just can tell her to bump up her minumum POW and life will go merrily along.