Yeah, probably:
No doubt the productivity part has a lot to do with the reduction in blue-light radiation from those damn screens, but most important of all, it’s because my mind is not being flooded with or distracted by nonsense I have no power over.
This was in part why I formulated my news year's resolution the way I did (#1401093); deleted a bunch of soul-crunching apps; and mostly got into habit of more consistent breathwork/daily meditation and calm (#1383936).
I'm still struggling with
a) being online for work-ish purposes (...and shitposting on SN)
b) listening to podcasts, which is this wonderful mindless behavior I tend to have while doing household chores -- and they keep referring to current events. (For instance, today there was some mention about something in Minnesota, and plenty of convos about Greenland; I knew fuck all what about, except for, you know, good reads discussing it: #1417322)
Once spring (or "spring-winter" as we call it over here) comes around, I intend to get into the habit of going straight outside -- breathing, watching nature, chilling. Alas, for now too stormy and snowy (and dark!)
Of course, Mr. Svetski turns this into chaos:
Is time online really spent anywhere else? Is time spent anywhere else?
It reminds me of a once nice American city that is now basically a Target, Walmart, Costco - maybe a Wholefoods - and a whole lot of 3rd world biomass or homeless people on the streets.
He also thinks Nostr is dead, a "valiant attempt" that failed:
*Nostr was a valiant attempt at trying to change the dynamics here but it’s fizzled out, partly because its success depends on capturing attention (which it cannot do, because it’s competing with engines far better at that) and more importantly, because the paradigm it is operating in (and the products built on it - in their current form) are fundamentally about more of the same (content for consumption).
Not only is the internet is becoming simultaneously full and empty (which is basically the definition of noise), but it’s also becoming low-class and cringe.
KIND OF experience that too. It's just a different place for memes and upset people, though leaning itself to way less doomscrolling.
How's this for an idyllic little dream?
Thing is, I don't think platforms like Facebook had really dialed in their ability to grab attention and keep it when they first started. Yet, they grew fast. Faster than nostr (or SN).
Maybe they just had something people wanted and that they couldn't get anywhere else. I mean, when Facebook launched, what was it competing against? Myspace? AIM?
Same story for a lot of these rapid growth things (uber, airbnb, bitcoin?). If nostr has fizzled out, it's because it failed to offer something new. It really only had two things: decentralization and zaps. And maybe composability. Three things. It had three things...
Anyhow, it seems that nostr isn't offering those things in a way that people find compelling, or people don't want those things.
If zaps could connect easily and smoothly to a normie's bank account, I think it's possible that we would have seen the crazy kind of growth that seems to be the only sign of life for social networks.
There seems to be an odd assumption, mostly implicit, that people would be using nostr as intensively as the main platforms if nostr were succeeding.
Isn’t the amount of time spent on social media a problem that nostr could be remedying though?
I do make that assumption. It is hard to measure success by how much less a tool is used than some other.
At the least, wouldn't we want to see more new users coming to nostr? They may not be doomscrolling all day like on Twitter or Instagram, but it seems like there should be more if it was succeeding.
Yes, success should mean more people getting a larger share of their value from nostr than they’ve been getting from its alternatives.
That just doesn’t imply that they are using it more.
There’s a more extreme possibility too. It may be that nostr is analogous to nicotine gum/patches. In which case, the value is found mostly in reducing a bad habit.
The thing about that idyllic little dream, which I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, is that the accumulated amount of resources needed to set that up and to maintain it are beyond your personal capability, so you'd need to somehow generate enough valuable resources that other people want so that you can trade it with them to get them to build and maintain this lifestyle for you.
100%.
Division of labor is a thing for very sensible economic reasons. And very few of us live like that precisely because we can't get slaves or lowly paid servants to maintain it for us
imho nostr's biggest problem is that its marketing is so aspirational that it's a lie, a lie that nostr's (too many) promoters forget they make, a lie that astute insiders like Svetski are especially vulnerable to. if you put the admirable aspirations aside, what you're left with is a worse version of existing things.
a worse version of existing things is a perfectly fine intermediate state, but if you sell bitcoiners the moon and give them a pebble, what do you expect to happen?
yes we all use one company's servers and KY-fucking-C like every other place on the internet, but it's so different this time. and yes, these podcaster-VCs keep calling it the future yet only invested in one nostr company, but that's probably an oversight. that'll change any day now. if you believe a little harder, you might qualify for a grant. have no fear, dorsey's money is here.