At this point you have to start asking — who the hell are Primal’s investors? Who is really calling the shots? Who is on its board?
Max Webster of Hivemind Ventures, for example, comes basically out of nowhere. He had an international solar energy (potentially a literal glownigger) company funded by Max Levchin, which just inches very closely to the surveillance economy and Peter Thiel’s Palantir. Then he was at Version One, a VC firm which was run by an a16z board member.
I’m not trying to personalize this, but I’ve never seen anything so ridiculously shilled on Nostr as this “Primal is decentralized” narrative. It makes no sense that it is pushed so aggressively and defended so hard. Do so many random small accounts have that much brand loyalty to one of many Nostr clients? Why wouldn’t they want it to be more, not less decentralized? Why would they be demanding that Primal be able to censor people. It makes way more sense that this is a paid PR strategy.
Replies (7)
What client do you recommend ?
If Primal offers a good video upload rail, then you can continue to use it for that. As long as you read your feed and view your notifications on another client, you aren’t having your experience curated by Primal’s caching server.
Yeah I don’t have zaps setup. I have a moral objection to the idea of the attention economy revolving around the exchange of money, and don’t wish to participate in such a practice. It creates perverse incentives of its own, and I do not think content should be boosted in so many clients just because a few people spend money to do so.
If you want to reward me financially, I have a Monero (XMR) address in my profile.
I mean, two in this instance, sure. But It is better than having your experience curated. And frankly, most people already use two different services for, say, blogging and video uploads, so it isn’t really a strange experience for anyone who might have posted something on YouTube and then linked to it on Facebook.
Isn’t the cleanest option in the attn economy direct donations from fans? Otherwise influencers are forced to do backroom campaigns or shill junk to get paid?
Maybe you just hate the idea of the attn economy in general?
There aren’t enough people on Nostr to really make a difference at the moment, but zaps equaling more eyeballs in some clients really means their users are consuming paid advertising. I don’t think tying financialization and social reach is a good thing.
This reminds me of a piece I saw a few days ago about
Dorsey interested in and actively funding universal basic income projects; this is something Sam Altman and Dorsey could talk about over beers while peering into Altman’s orb
