The problem of leaving SN is that the system of cowboy credits. If you receive cowboy credits from a tip SN must add system of earned cowboy credits either you move to cowboy credits or you redeem for bitcoin LN (2 cowboy credits= 1 satoshi). You receive every day tips in CC while you earn in daily rewards once a while. The problem of leaving nostr you can't send directly BTC LN need to generate invoice which seems a little complicated system.
sorry reading this thread i'm realizing i'm one of those fiat cucks that just loaded up on more CCs because it's dirt simple to reload via cashapp QR code and I'm too lazy to figure out how to attach a lightning wallet. :'(
Oh huh, that doesn't load in SN for me. The link https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqs083hwcxwx6jtrlh8fxt5rz7ua47tm8m4nems95mql2n8xnsajntqvkuvwr does load in my browser...
There are a lot of keynesian-like grand theories to say about complicated situations like this. (njump is down for me so I couldn't load it to read but I'm guessing this overshoots what's wrong.)
The correct answer is probably simple, vague, and unsatisfying: high costs and low value - perceived or real.
For us at least, our UX is bad (ie costs are high). We've focused on making non-custodial work well and neglected UX, because it's hard to make things that don't work well easy to use, and now need to leverage the things that work well and make it easy to use again.
What aspects of UX do you think are bad? Not trying to flatter or anything, but I think the UX is pretty good. Very easy to use both on desktop and mobile.
Wallet stuff, of course, is complex. But I attribute that less to SN than the underlying tech.
What both SN and nostr have are churn. All products have it. You grow by adding more people than you have churn.
We churn very lowly and slowly, but we are not adding more people than we churn which I attribute to:
the sign up is hidden
after sign up, no free posts/comments (you get a free bio but you have to guess that it will be worth doing), so you need sats on lightning to even use SN
to get full value you need to attach a wallet which is at least a 10 step process - even for someone familiar with lightning ... for someone unfamiliar with lightning they will probably give up
SN is just too hard to start using - time to value is too hard/long. If we want to grow, we need to be able to get someone who is merely bitcoin curious and weakly motivated from 1 through 3 as fast as possible with as little effort as possible.
The part of this I found interesting was that there are likely far more people who think they want open intelligent dialogue than those who actually enjoy it.
Most find it unappealing and choose to go back to the comfort of just having their priors confirmed.
It's not a grand theory (I don't think), but rather someone's observations from years of watching who has stayed and who has left.
It's hard for me to comment because I don't understand why people use Twitter, much less Nostr.
I find Twitter's interface to be confusing and hard to sustain a conversation with.
The only thing it seems good for is shareability. Tweets are very shareable, I guess. Perfect for hot takes.
I much prefer SN's more traditional message board format. I must be in a minority though.
When that person said people are leaving Nostr and going back to their algorithmic echo chamber... I wonder if it's even that. Maybe people find that they can't leave Twitter because they get stuck in an endless loop of responding to hot takes.
I don't think I've ever had a good conversation on Twitter. I've certainly discovered a lot of information (either links or people or events or products) that have been useful to me. Twitter is good at discovery. But nothing like SN for conversations.
I think the other aspect is if you're genuinely trying to influence public opinion. Some Twitter users are actually at that level. Obviously, most are not. But that could be why some people just prefer the place that has the most users.
Agreed. I often wish that Dave Smith and Michael Malice were hanging out on nostr (or even better on SN), but then I remind myself that they have legitimately enormous reach that might be making some impact on normies.
By filtering out those who prioritize growth over principle, Nostr becomes exactly what it was meant to be, a signal rich environment for those who value truth over virality.
How to find people who are like this? Or how to convince them to come hang out with us? It is also possible that there are not very many people who so value you truth.
I think the interesting point was that there are many people who claim to be like this, and presumably think they are, but who find out that they really aren't.
That implies we'll be in for a long process of people sorting into trying out Stacker News and mostly drifting away, leaving just a select few behind.
What remains on Nostr are the philosophical descendants of the cypherpunks. Those who understand that protocols > platforms, sovereignty > followers, signal > noise.
This condescending speech instead of acknowledging that there might be other reasons why people leave is part of what makes nostr unappealing
The UX is so bad sometimes you’re basically only seeing people like this in your feed because everybody else left
You want to circle-jerk how great your protocol is, while my notifications aren’t loading or when they load, they aren’t consistent across clients or straight-up inconsistent within the same client, the note to which someone is replying isn’t loading, I need to click for each reply I want to read because no client can render a whole tree of replies at once, SSR isn’t possible on nostr because the client fetches the content (else it’s not a nostr client), devs are telling users they need to configure more, less or different relays? Cool, do it without me
These also aren’t just “client issues.” The protocol makes it hard to provide a good UX without Primal-style centralization (and Primal still suffers from very similar issues.)
To add some thoughts here, one way to smooth this out for SN could be automatic conversion thresholds, like letting users set a minimum cowboy credit balance that auto-redeems to sats without manual intervention. For Nostr, simplifying the zap process with built-in wallet integrations that handle invoices behind the scenes would make a big difference, turning it into a one-click send..
Also, X faces alot of issues with regards to spams so we need to Add customizable moderation tools at the user level, like letting people filter content based on personal zap histories or reputation scores, which would cut down on spam way better than X's algorithm-driven mess...
https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqs083hwcxwx6jtrlh8fxt5rz7ua47tm8m4nems95mql2n8xnsajntqvkuvwrdoes load in my browser...