SilberWitch on Nostr: Follows * Follows is pure influencer, even if you try to fight it. Basing algos ...
Follows
* Follows is pure influencer, even if you try to fight it. Basing algos exclusively on follows just doubles-down on that effect, which is probably why it keeps getting worse and worse. It's a follow-funnel effect. As does recommending newbies "just follow the people I follow".
* Primal made this so much worse, than it used to be, by adding a trending list at the landing page and pre-loading follows (with the people the knew and worked for). Discovery used to be more organic. Each new person arriving was a new discovery mechanism, uncovering new, interesting people. Now, it's just: follow the top ten in trending and move on with your life.
* Too many people come over here, following someone popular-elsewhere into the main feed of the biggest open relays. They completely overwhelm that feed and would be better moved to a community. Generally, open relays should be where curators fish for new additions to their communities. More like an onboarding and discovery mechanism, then storage. We need outbox model working everywhere, smoothly, for that to be something we can request.
Algos
* We actually need more complex and diverse algos because the algos are our internal search mechanism, and they're currently terrible at finding anything; especially anything from people we don't know (which is arguably what we want to find most, as we know about the people we already know about).
* All the anti-algo rhetoric left a discovery vacuum that follows filled (follow counts are _also_ an algorithm, after all), which turned out to be a bad idea.
Community relays
These are great at intermediating the follow-effect by creating curated pools of notes without a hierarchy, that can change independent of one user, while the user can use algos to curate what those relays feed them. These actually make "follows" signal, again, as you can then reduce your follow list down to a handful of people that are like "people on my project team" or "all-time favorites" or "frens from the conference". Then your follow list has real meaning for you, and carries a signal worth including in an algo, and isn't just a way to make sure you can see what someone wrote.
The big difference, is that adding a large npub to a community relay doesn't reduce the visibility or discoverability of someone with a small npub. They don't have to compete on visibility. Everyone is visible, like in a Telegram group.
They add a control, inbetween all-notes-everywhere and follows, called "community global", where people can look straight at feeds and have the pleasure of finding new people without all the gross/spammy stuff. And this creates an incentive, to the community mods, to go out and find *more stuff* and *more people* to keep the global feed interesting.
As we can see, with the personal relays we already have, people go out and recruit other people to their relay, or simply add them (like I do). They hunt down signal and bring it home. Lots of people can hunt down the same signal. Newbies are a chance at improving/expanding the content available to your community, so you have an inbuilt "profit" motive (even if you don't charge), to go find newbies, rather than telling newbies to go find other people. They're new content. They're the prize. We should be going to them, not the other way around.
* Follows is pure influencer, even if you try to fight it. Basing algos exclusively on follows just doubles-down on that effect, which is probably why it keeps getting worse and worse. It's a follow-funnel effect. As does recommending newbies "just follow the people I follow".
* Primal made this so much worse, than it used to be, by adding a trending list at the landing page and pre-loading follows (with the people the knew and worked for). Discovery used to be more organic. Each new person arriving was a new discovery mechanism, uncovering new, interesting people. Now, it's just: follow the top ten in trending and move on with your life.
* Too many people come over here, following someone popular-elsewhere into the main feed of the biggest open relays. They completely overwhelm that feed and would be better moved to a community. Generally, open relays should be where curators fish for new additions to their communities. More like an onboarding and discovery mechanism, then storage. We need outbox model working everywhere, smoothly, for that to be something we can request.
Algos
* We actually need more complex and diverse algos because the algos are our internal search mechanism, and they're currently terrible at finding anything; especially anything from people we don't know (which is arguably what we want to find most, as we know about the people we already know about).
* All the anti-algo rhetoric left a discovery vacuum that follows filled (follow counts are _also_ an algorithm, after all), which turned out to be a bad idea.
Community relays
These are great at intermediating the follow-effect by creating curated pools of notes without a hierarchy, that can change independent of one user, while the user can use algos to curate what those relays feed them. These actually make "follows" signal, again, as you can then reduce your follow list down to a handful of people that are like "people on my project team" or "all-time favorites" or "frens from the conference". Then your follow list has real meaning for you, and carries a signal worth including in an algo, and isn't just a way to make sure you can see what someone wrote.
The big difference, is that adding a large npub to a community relay doesn't reduce the visibility or discoverability of someone with a small npub. They don't have to compete on visibility. Everyone is visible, like in a Telegram group.
They add a control, inbetween all-notes-everywhere and follows, called "community global", where people can look straight at feeds and have the pleasure of finding new people without all the gross/spammy stuff. And this creates an incentive, to the community mods, to go out and find *more stuff* and *more people* to keep the global feed interesting.
As we can see, with the personal relays we already have, people go out and recruit other people to their relay, or simply add them (like I do). They hunt down signal and bring it home. Lots of people can hunt down the same signal. Newbies are a chance at improving/expanding the content available to your community, so you have an inbuilt "profit" motive (even if you don't charge), to go find newbies, rather than telling newbies to go find other people. They're new content. They're the prize. We should be going to them, not the other way around.