Chris Liss on Nostr: Most of my work has been on Twitter and substack the last couple years. Substack ...
Most of my work has been on Twitter and substack the last couple years. Substack because I have readers and emails and Twitter because I have some (modest) reach.
Both are highly flawed. I often want to make short posts, not full length essays, but you can’t email people 10x per day. Email only works if it’s occasional.
Twitter is flawed for 100 reasons. The algo sucks. It’s really dog shit. It’s the dystopian AI future where it’s not personal that you can’t reach the people who chose to follow you, just what the machine decided, and you have no recourse. Fighting it is futile. The algo is a dead end in its basic design.
Plus, you don’t own your work. I am a member of a minority class of people, those with something to say. I don’t simply lurk, I have shit to say, and I say it, for better or worse. In other words, I am of the class of people who create the network effect that gives Twitter its value.
And I am paying $16/month and getting paid zero. I am getting paid zero in part because the algo punishes me for building a following of credulous fantasy sports players (laptop class) and then deciding instead to post about what was happening in the real world. As a result, many prominent, verified accounts that followed me muted me, and the algo does not like that apparently.
So I can’t reach the people who want to read my thoughts on Twitter, and I can’t bombard people with short emails on Substack. Neither one works.
Nostr you can post like Twitter, and anyone who wants to see your post will see it.Plus they can zap you. But content discovery is still shit. You can use any client, but you have no way of reaching an audience besides people happening to see what you posted if they happen to be scrolling around the time you posted it. There are good long form tools like Highlighter (npub1w0r…cu4x) and YakiHonne (npub1yzv…rf8q), but hardly anyone reads essays here. (Same on Twitter, btw, no one reads them. People actually read my substack essays (or so it seems.)
So they are all imperfect, but at least with nostr you don’t feel like you’re getting a raw deal. That is has the potential to work.
One idea I had was a service wherein you hire ~20 people to follow the ~10K non-bot accounts who post the most. Each person has a job of reading every post and re-posting, commenting on the best ones. These people would have to have good taste, like a quality DJ that knows what music to play. They’d be discovering and boosting quality content, no matter how small the following. Users would quickly learn to follow the Master Curator account. As it got zapped and followed, others would emerge, and people could choose which station to tune into (or tune into multiple.)
This could get captured eventually too, but it would be a major service and incentivize those with small followings to post.
Anyway, this is too long already. Made a new year’s resolution to post more here. It’s real social media at least.
Both are highly flawed. I often want to make short posts, not full length essays, but you can’t email people 10x per day. Email only works if it’s occasional.
Twitter is flawed for 100 reasons. The algo sucks. It’s really dog shit. It’s the dystopian AI future where it’s not personal that you can’t reach the people who chose to follow you, just what the machine decided, and you have no recourse. Fighting it is futile. The algo is a dead end in its basic design.
Plus, you don’t own your work. I am a member of a minority class of people, those with something to say. I don’t simply lurk, I have shit to say, and I say it, for better or worse. In other words, I am of the class of people who create the network effect that gives Twitter its value.
And I am paying $16/month and getting paid zero. I am getting paid zero in part because the algo punishes me for building a following of credulous fantasy sports players (laptop class) and then deciding instead to post about what was happening in the real world. As a result, many prominent, verified accounts that followed me muted me, and the algo does not like that apparently.
So I can’t reach the people who want to read my thoughts on Twitter, and I can’t bombard people with short emails on Substack. Neither one works.
Nostr you can post like Twitter, and anyone who wants to see your post will see it.Plus they can zap you. But content discovery is still shit. You can use any client, but you have no way of reaching an audience besides people happening to see what you posted if they happen to be scrolling around the time you posted it. There are good long form tools like Highlighter (npub1w0r…cu4x) and YakiHonne (npub1yzv…rf8q), but hardly anyone reads essays here. (Same on Twitter, btw, no one reads them. People actually read my substack essays (or so it seems.)
So they are all imperfect, but at least with nostr you don’t feel like you’re getting a raw deal. That is has the potential to work.
One idea I had was a service wherein you hire ~20 people to follow the ~10K non-bot accounts who post the most. Each person has a job of reading every post and re-posting, commenting on the best ones. These people would have to have good taste, like a quality DJ that knows what music to play. They’d be discovering and boosting quality content, no matter how small the following. Users would quickly learn to follow the Master Curator account. As it got zapped and followed, others would emerge, and people could choose which station to tune into (or tune into multiple.)
This could get captured eventually too, but it would be a major service and incentivize those with small followings to post.
Anyway, this is too long already. Made a new year’s resolution to post more here. It’s real social media at least.