Why Nostr needs writers

… and how you can be one.

Literary art deserves a suitable frame

I have repeatedly suggested that people who are inclined to truly write, in an informative or artistic (a.k.a. “high signal”) manner, switch from merely posting micro-blogging (kind 01) notes to long-form notes, wiki pages, and community notes.

These OtherStuff articles are contained within new types of events and are handled differently by potential readers and algorithms. It is true that the engagement you receive will be much lower (at least, initially), and this content may not be very popular, but:

• the articles will be more long-lasting on the relays and others will likely pay to archive them for you,

• the direct responses will tend to consider the article in its entirety, rather than merely using them to grandstand or straw-man,

• the articles are easily editable and will soon be versioned, to allow for both change and traceability,

• articles will increasingly be moved to the forefront of new types of clients, so you will be part of the pioneer subset for those clients,

• the complex structure encourages you to write more complex material,

• the notes will draw more attention from those arriving late to the conversation,

• and they will create a gallery of your “best of” and “essential me” for potential followers to peruse.

Expand the knowledge base

Nostr developers are an exhausted and harried group, that is trying to build under duress on a rather thin budget, with mile-long roadmaps and nagging users hounding them the whole way.

The last thing these devs want to do is write software documentation. But documentation is actually one of their most important forms of marketing to new users and documentation writing and maintenance often inadvertently uncovers bugs and workflows that need to be redesigned.

The simple solution is to have their most-enthusiastic users writing the documentation for them, which is now simple to do, with the wikis that are being built. Simply find your favorite apps and begin documenting things you typically do with those apps, or write an overview page showcasing your favorite features, including screenshots.

Not only is this useful for later users, it’s free advertisement for those apps and it lends the weight of your WoT (Web of Trust) to their endeavor. You are showing, through proof of work, that you care enough about this developer and their efforts that you’d spend your free-time writing about them. That is the strongest recommendation you can make.

Make Nostr more attractive to search engines

Search engines are the gatekeepers of the Internet. Applications don’t necessarily rise to popularity because of the “clout” of the people who write there. They rise because readers from outside of those applications found the content within them useful, entertaining, or informative.

Although social media drama and influencing can make for a fun read, if you like that sort of thing, it isn’t generally what someone who isn’t familiar with the actors in the argument would bother reading. It looks like squabbling, mogging, tribalism, and gamesmanship, to outsiders. Which is what it is. Most people eventually weary of it or being involved in it.

Much more useful is the a compendium of ideas pulled together by an individual npub (human or not), and forced to go head-to-head with counterarguments contained in a separate, but jointly-listed compendium. This format eschews the more emotive forms of rhetoric (pathos and ethos) and encourages someone to engage and debate on a more intellectual level (logos).

This is the idea behind the Nostr wiki, and I heartily support it. Make dialectic great again.

Escape the scourge of AI

Don’t bother telling me that AI makes human writing obsolete. It rather makes it a more-exclusive endeavor, by reducing the scope of the content to something more reflective of the person writing.

Yes, ChatGPT can write articles, but whether they are “better” is subjective. They have fewer minor flaws and cater more to general tastes, and can be produced quickly and in high numbers, at relatively low cost. The same way that robot-created art is “better” than most human-created art, or factory-produced food is “better” than most home-cooked food.

I’m only writing for the sort of person who prefers human art. Writing can be an expression of the self and a window to the soul. Read what I write because you want to know what I really thought.

I thought this.