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@ Shaughnessy
2025-05-09 23:09:25
I’ve dedicated the last 4 years of my life studying the dynamics of social media & human connection all with health in mind.
Inner connection to God, connection to nature, and connection to others in real life is the ultimate way.
But, in this digital world, NOSTR is the best path forward that I have seen.
“People follow incentives not advice.”
~ James Clear
The incentive of current social media platforms is to increase shareholder value.
To do this they must increase revenue (or potential revenue).
Their revenue models are ads (and now AI).
To sell more ads and generate more data for AI, they need more of your attention.
So they designed the platforms to get you HOOKED.
They’d rather you scrolling than at the dinner table with your family.
They have trickled these incentives down the lane to the super users of the platforms: the creators.
Creators are algorithmically rewarded to also get you HOOKED.
Every good creator knows the first three seconds/line of the post is the most important.
It’s called THE HOOK, fishing for our attention.
Our attention is an unconscious thing.
The most successful hooks tend to be negative even though we don’t consciously desire negative things.
But negative media draws us in for some reason.
We see this through history books (mostly talk about wartime when most of actual history is peacetime), main stream news media, click bait articles, and now social media hooks & comments.
Because these hooks work the best at grabbing your attention, more negative media is fed your way creating a vicious cycle of negative consumption incentivizing more negative creation and the vicious cycle continues.
NOSTR changes these incentive structures and with it the incentives structures trickle down the lane to the creators.
Nostr is a protocol not a company so increasing shareholder value is not the incentive.
With this, your attention is not the primary incentive either.
Because anyone can build on top of the Nostr protocol, the platforms incentives shift too.
They become more competitive with each other.
They must focus on value creation versus revenue creation (often mistaken as the same thing) otherwise the users will move to the other platforms (effortlessly) as the content & followers lives on everywhere through the Nostr protocol.
This value creation incentive is trickled down the lane to the super users: the creators.
We see this through Zaps (the act of sending Sats which are micro payments of Bitcoin).
Creators want the Zaps (money) not just your attention.
So users don’t reward creators with their attention but rather with the Zaps (money) they send them.
Users are much more CONSCIOUS of who they send their Sats (money) too because it’s public and actual money.
On the other hand, they are way less conscious of where their attention goes because it is private and can be tricked unconsciously into negative things via HOOKS.
Even if users attention goes to negative things, users are way less likely to send their money to those negative things.
So rather than creators just trying to HOOK you in for the algorithmic rewards, they must give you VALUE which is returned back to them via ZAPS (micro payments of Bitcoin) determined directly by the user receiving the value.
Nostr apps like Primal can then reward algorithmic discovery based off of zaps rather than pure attention.
So rather than platforms like Primal algorithmically pushing content that was most successful at HOOKING people, it pushes content that was consciously deemed most valuable.
This creates a more CONSCIOUS cycle of consuming leading to more POSITIVE consumption further incentivizing more VALUE based positive creation.
In nostr:nprofile1qqsgqke57uygxl0m8elstq26c4mq2erz3dvdtgxwswwvhdh0xcs04scpzdmhxue69uhhqatjwpkx2urpvuhx2ue0qyv8wumn8ghj7urjv4kkjatd9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9ws7rg8rz article on social media he mentions Elons tweet saying “X is like the collective consciousness of Earth.”
Elon understands more than most that X is also becoming the collective consciousness of AI as it is trained on its data.
Considering X’s and other social media model incentivizing negative media, and the understanding that this negative media in away becomes the collective consciousness of Earth and AI, is this not something we should be concerned with?
I’d much rather the collective consciousness of Earth and AI be filled with more positive media.
NOSTR, although not perfect, at least incentivizes more of that.
If Elon is truly concerned with AI safety, I hope he considers moving X’s entire infrastructure to Nostr when Nostr is ready for it.
P.S.
Collective Consciousness is truly found within not on X if you look for it so inner connection to God, nature, and others in real life is still the ultimate way.
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