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@ சாரு-秋陽
2023-04-30 09:00:44In the dawn of this new year, Nostr Global was not for the light-hearted. What Nostr was meant for - speech, at least that from actual people - got drowned in a flood of spam. Then, gradually but suddenly, one fine day you could see posts & photos & memes from all over the world! With auto-translate, the notes only got more interesting. And thus it began. I was bing-browsing notes on global for hours daily getting truly addicted to global ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I thought I had seen it all - shilling spambots, bitcoin memes, angry rants, slurs, shit-talk, pet pics, food pics, even shower girl. But seeing a couple of things about a few weeks back gave me pause...
What do you do when a stranger posts that they wish to die? Yes - that's what I saw. When I was trawling global, someone had posted that they wished they were no more & they were putting this message up as a record. As I read this, I was shocked and conflicted... Should I DM them, asking if I could help in anyway? How would I help? I didn't have any context - what should I say? Will it make this worse for them if I tried to talk? I did not know what to do. So, I just closed the app, blanked out for a few minutes & tried to put it out of my mind as I went through my day. But I couldn't. Everyday I wonder if that person is well (I really really hope they are) and whether I could have/ should have done something. Even now, I don't know :( If instead of me, who seems to need a How-to-be-a-human(e)-being guide for dummies even on ordinary days, someone else more capable had seen the post & done something/anything to help them.
Then, a couple of day after, searching about NIP-28 for public chats on Garnet & browsing through channels one-by-one, got to a channel Goodbye with a single note -- a farewell note :( A final call into the void. I numbed myself wondering why I'd stumbled on these notes & whether others had too and if the authors of the notes were okay or not.
But the question remains - What do you do when a stranger posts they wish to die? If it weren't online, I'd hug them, hug them tight, to make up for all the times they may have needed a hug but never got one. And listen, if they wanted to talk, but I'm not sure even in real life I would find right words to say. After weeks, I've made peace telling myself this is similar to when we say a silent prayer on seeing an ambulance, but deep down I know it's really not and find it hard to shake off the feeling that my (in)action made any difference. After a period, I think I'll search for resources/training to better deal with situations like this; I want to learn. (Any advice welcome)
The other thing is that online - especially one like Nostr where sometimes there's not even a username & just an npub, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between a real person, a bot or an impersonator! And how to react to bots that use our tendency to anthropomorphize to wantonly or inadvertently take advantage of our emotional vulnerability? We seem to be in a more-subtle version of Ghost In the Shell, where the answers to "What does it mean to be human?", "What's so special about a human?" are going to be stress-tested repeatedly. Were those posts explicitly/most likely/somewhat probably from AI, would they have elicited the same reaction? I have more questions than answers.
Whatever connection we have online is tenuous, even with the best intentions and how to best respond to any post is a constantly changing paradigm. Nostr till now, has been a very welcoming place but as more people join in and communities become wider, more such questions will surely pop-up. Bracing for ambiguity & chaos... 🦋