I could go for a really good Reddit experience on Nostr. I love Reddit as a concept (even though it's shit in some ways - the karma and mod system especially)
Leo Wandersleb's avatar Leo Wandersleb
Nostr is better than Xitter, but it still favors narcissism over merit. V4V doesn't reward the best builders, it rewards the best salesmen. There is no centralized algorithm pushing a narrative from a continuum of a billion options, but neither is there a defense against constructed consent. The protocol can't stop the manufacturing of "hero figures" because we are biologically wired to seek leaders and follow them. I liked Reddit because it was about ideas, not people. You followed a topic and the design almost hid the author. This gave a sense of "Message, not messenger". Nostr is the opposite. It is entirely messenger-centric. This is evidenced by the flood of "GM" and "GN" posts, which would be completely void of value if it wasn't about who was posting them. How could we nudge Nostr away from this? Some clients allow you to hide authors, but that is just self-constraint. I think we need a protocol layer that constrains participants to focus on ideas but without getting drowned by AI slop. How would a "late reveal" of authorship work? Authors could prove group membership - being one of my follows and only after a week or so reveal their identity. Fundamentally I wonder if people want to be heard for who they are, or for what they say? Do I want to be famous, or do I want my ideas to be recognized? I think the latter comes first. We want to be recognized as authors of great ideas.
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The mod system made it controversial though. r/bitcoin got so much heat over censorship. What I want in a nostr client is that mechanism that shows top posts not chronologically but by some up-votes divided by time since post. This of course would give huge important to who can up-vote and I would not trust any up-vote outside my WoT. Give full weight to my direct follows and their follows should have their votes scaled by the number of those votes. So if my follows voted 12 times last hour and their follows 24 times, give their votes only 50% weight etc.
the axiom's avatar
the axiom 2 weeks ago
you can't just take nostr posts and display them in a reddit interface, not even if you figure a way to rank them people write and behave completely differently in different settings posting to nostr is like posting to twitter, you are writing to the whole world posting on a specific subreddit is different, there is a shared context, topic, sometimes you know more or less who is going to read you, there is a shared history
Brigading was an issue and so was suppression of divergent opinions. I think by filtering and ranking things based on my WoT I fix both: If crypto-bros invade my bitcoin sub with whatever spam, my client will sort them all the way down because my follows are not crypto-bros. I would still see them but I could also filter them based on my WoT's down-votes. If I post on a personal finance sub about bitcoin, my follows will see it and so will those inclined to explore beyond their own follows.
Still, open subredits had pretty much a public audience and while I agree that Twitter-like clients shouldn't be mixed with Reddit-like clients, using a different kind might be all it takes. TIL about kind-11 clients and I'm bullish on those even though I drew hate from two of its proponents 🤷‍♂️
the axiom's avatar
the axiom 2 weeks ago
that's a non-solution all it takes is one line of code for amethyst to start displaying the new kind in its twitter-style feed
Yeah, nothing will ever stop a client developer from doing something like that if they want to. A standard can exist even if someone decides not to follow it. That doesnt mean it isn't a solution. There could be a better one, of cours3.