bostonwine on Nostr: It repeatedly blows my mind, just how fundamentally decent the majority of people ...
It repeatedly blows my mind, just how fundamentally decent the majority of people here are.
My hope/theory is that it’s not actually “just like this on Nostr”. While it’s true that a number of us have overlapping interests or worldviews, there is also a natural diversity: people from all around the world, with different cultures, languages, philosophies, and experiences, all show up here to say GM.
It’s more of a cultural bell curve, where the majority of people are pretty chill, decent human beings, who generally like each other and respect one another’s differences.
My radical proposition is that this actually reflects the real world, and that the current cultural narrative of unrelenting division - while it has some truth to it, for sure — is drastically overblown, both on a personal level and by the media. On the edges of the bell curve are the very niche, very loud, and very “divided” subcultures. These groups have been given the loudest microphones.
Individually, if we only interact with the toxic, rage-bait algorithms that have come to define modern social/media (because it’s in journalism too), we experience the world through this clouded lens. We’re fed a continuous diet of disagreement, outrage, war, etc., because we click on it and thus the people making the content decisions get paid.
Remove the algorithms, and you remove the illusion of irreconcilable division. Nostr is a perfect case study of this, and so far it’s going beautifully.
I’m cautiously optimistic that this trend will continue when the user base grows 10x, 100x, because my view is that humanity is primarily good. Time will tell, and incentives will matter. But I’m hopeful that on a value-for-value, proof-of-work standard, our better instincts will prevail.
My hope/theory is that it’s not actually “just like this on Nostr”. While it’s true that a number of us have overlapping interests or worldviews, there is also a natural diversity: people from all around the world, with different cultures, languages, philosophies, and experiences, all show up here to say GM.
It’s more of a cultural bell curve, where the majority of people are pretty chill, decent human beings, who generally like each other and respect one another’s differences.
My radical proposition is that this actually reflects the real world, and that the current cultural narrative of unrelenting division - while it has some truth to it, for sure — is drastically overblown, both on a personal level and by the media. On the edges of the bell curve are the very niche, very loud, and very “divided” subcultures. These groups have been given the loudest microphones.
Individually, if we only interact with the toxic, rage-bait algorithms that have come to define modern social/media (because it’s in journalism too), we experience the world through this clouded lens. We’re fed a continuous diet of disagreement, outrage, war, etc., because we click on it and thus the people making the content decisions get paid.
Remove the algorithms, and you remove the illusion of irreconcilable division. Nostr is a perfect case study of this, and so far it’s going beautifully.
I’m cautiously optimistic that this trend will continue when the user base grows 10x, 100x, because my view is that humanity is primarily good. Time will tell, and incentives will matter. But I’m hopeful that on a value-for-value, proof-of-work standard, our better instincts will prevail.