Ok

looking at the subs, tech and jobs mostly

Ok my new mission is to find someone who doesn't care about bitcoin and recruit them to join SN.

To be clear, my point was that the affordances of the site, and the dynamics that fall out from them, have nothing to do w/ btc-as-discussion-topic, although they are enabled by btc/lightning. The site as it currently exists probably doesn't work for a person who doesn't care about btc at all.

However, given things that btc touches (basically everything) it's not hard to imagine making a place where you can talk about some of those other topics too, similar to how now you can talk about nostr -- big macro things loose in the world. You can hardly talk about this on the wider internet bc the business models almost never work -- monetizing outrage via advertising, etc. SN doesn't have that business model, although I guess the current one could fall into a similar sinkhole as a failure mode: rich assholes could pay directly to signal-boost rich-asshole-friendly topics. But that would be a level of directness from specific and identifiable nyms that would still be an improvement over the existing state of affairs, imo.

Honestly, the very tiny friction in having to connect btc rails to participate is probably enough to eliminate 90% of bad actors. The remaining ten percent can only ever be dealt with by actual community forces -- if most of the people don't like others being aggressive jerks, then aggressive jerks will tend to not take root; if the reverse is true, they will. That's not a technical problem, but I think SN is building the tool set to addresses it as well as it technically can be.

I also think links-only is annoying as a general construct, but have made my peace with it as probably a "revealed preference" thing -- some people just don't have anything much to say, and if you tried to force them to say something, it would be garbage. This way at least you don't incentivize garbage. They could still surface things I might like to find.

It would be interesting if there was some sense of "localized reputation" -- I understand that SN has a global status / reputation score (forget what it's called) but if there was also a local one (e.g., per user), it would be helpful in some cases. For instance, I tend to like things that the majority of readers probably don't (e.g., contrary / critical takes about some btc sacred cows), so submissions that might be just my jam would never be seen.

Solving this well would be a research problem. It would also introduce tradeoffs that they might not want to make.