Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Last time I tried navigating the Nostr ecosystem I found their Twitter-equivalent platform and it was full of people posting about cryptocurrencies and other topics that weren't of particular interest to me.

Are there any major figures of interest primarily participating on any Nostr platform? Or is there any kind of uniquely interesting content that is being primarily produced and shared on Nostr?

View on HN

Same here. I like the idea, have tried the social-network side a couple of times, but my kind of content is missing or I can't find it.

https://bitchat.free now uses nostr for non-mesh contacts somehow, but I see no-one there either.

It's inherently a chicken and egg problem. If HackerNews didn't exist and the Nostr community created it - it'd be filled with the same content.

Network effects are everything. The tech can be good but the product may not be - solely because of the network effect. Still - pretty good tech!

Two months ago I visited Primal by accident (which appears to be some Nostr instance) and the first impression I've got it's a platform for promoting crypto because streams were just about bitcoins all around

Last year one of users on mastodon I was casually talking to decided to move to Nostr - he claimed in his last posts that some features like pools and voting are locked behind payments there. Can someone shed some light on that? I couldn't find any info if that platform does contain paid features.

Nostr doesn't have an "algorithm" that tries to find posts that you engage with. You should follow your own list of people, and then you will see their content. There are some clients trying to be more smart, though.

The "algorithm" in any social media is a blessing and a curse. Nostr shifts the responsibility of what to show to the clients.

Right, and I'm asking if there any interesting figures primarily using this platform to share interesting content because I don't know of any, and I didn't find any niches that were best served by this platform.

In the past, the way that I would typically get to know people online was either through niche topic-specific forums or IRC channels. Then eventually if we got to know each other well enough, we would connect on other platforms. The modern version of this seems to be Discord. These platforms are all topic focused, rather than being user-first.

Discoverability is important! And one of the limitations of search or tag based discoverability is that you're limited to finding things which you already know about. But it doesn't help you find new things that you don't know about! This doesn't mean that algorithmic discoverability is the only option, for example: you could find some way to map the user's interest spaces and search for unexplored or undiscovered nodes.

Discoverability is a huge challenge in any decentralized social protocol.

We've been talking a lot about this problem in nostr which can't be summarised in a quick HN comment but gathered some threads if you're really interested

https://asknostr.site/question/note1es989rjaccw82gpp705u462y... https://asknostr.site/question/note12dp9ewpngxejq8w9s6699k5z... https://asknostr.site/question/note1cp5cw366g7q9c2txvtrws0h7... https://asknostr.site/question/note1zqjk556quu6rvyetzvhdv7p3... https://asknostr.site/question/note1ss842g38wafwcfexd78gx0sc...

Nostr supports #hashtags just as twitter.

Network effects are difficult to replicate. You need lots of users to get a few solid consistent "content" creators. You need even more users to get the content that YOU like. So, it just amounts to having more users. Some might say it's impossible to replicate some existing social platform like X, and that may be true - but at the end of the day, you can vote with your attention and can contribute in ways you would like your space to be, so if you like say... log cabin content, then you can create it yourself and start amassing a log cabin enthusiast audience who will then start sharing their passion for log cabins.

As a 1 year nostr user i can relate to this sentiment. Most conversations today are either about crypto or about (building) nostr.

My guess is that the better the network becomes the more that specific content will take a backseat

Same experience here. An overwhelming amount of the content is Bitcoin evangelism, AI slop art, and self-congratulating nostr meta-discussion. All with a heavy-handed libertarian / anarcho-capitalism leaning.

Even the #art is 95% Bitcoin and nostr fan art.

It's still pretty niche. Built mostly for and by bitcoiners, but has potential as a new way of doing social media that isn't reliant on major tech companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com