Bias is real. People have set up shop on Nostr and don't want to think their time has been wasted. However, data is a metric, and this is the most accurate data available. I've been tracking these stats monthly, and my (and others) personal experience at 3 years in, concurs. I would be happy to be proven wrong. We all want Nostr to succeed. But denial is not the way of growth.
Ava's avatar Ava
This makes no sense. Saying people who track metrics "don't want nostr to win" is like saying doctors checking vital signs want their patients to die. Or engineers stress-testing bridges want them to collapse. Or Bitcoiners who watch the market and post prices want it to fail. If someone just posts the negative and not also the positive, then yeah... maybe they are trying to direct a narrative. But periodically keeping track of Nostr's vital signs is important. We can't get to where we're going if we deny where we're starting from. Twitter grew because they watched what users actually did and fixed what wasn't working. Reddit built communities by studying engagement data. Every platform that succeeded did it by measuring reality, not by pretending problems don't exist. You're not being optimistic. You're being willfully blind. Positive thinking only gets you so far when you're ignoring reality. If your gas gauge is flashing empty and you cover it with a smiley face sticker and start chanting "plenty of gas, plenty of gas," you're still going to run out of gas. Tony Robbins nailed this: "I don't believe you should go to your garden and chant, 'There's no weeds, there's no weeds, there's no weeds,' and think that's going to solve something. I'm a believer in find the weed and rip it out." That's what metrics do. They show areas of growth and what's working. They show pain points. They find the weeds. If Nostr's going to make it, we need people willing to see what's actually happening and fix it, not just a bunch of Nostriches with their heads in the sand chanting, "there's no weeds." And muting anyone who dares to point them out.
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Data is either accurate or its not there is no "most accurate". Chasing false data leads to innaccuracies of very high proportions. We want nostr to succeed, denial is not the way to go. Chasing false metrics isn't the way to go either, It's sad your anecdote matches this, maybe work on your engagement? Maybe its you in denial and finding comfort in false data? My anecdotes have not been the same same. One thing that helped was nuking my contact list and engaging with new people.
Old accounts, follower counts means nothing for engagement. People with millions of followers on x receive less engagement than an account with few thousand follower accounts in nostr, these are just bullshit anecdotes.
Also the "trusted account metric" on the site would leave out solid profiles like @Floppy PNG whose been amazing to engage with in the last few days because they Dont have zaps enabled.
Yours is a public account on a public network. I can just verify your engagement by looking at your profile, and ill have to say im not suprised. I have far "fewer" followers than new, but much more engagement.
Okay. I'm not going to dispute you on subjective engagement. I could also chat to my favorite 20 friends over and over every day and claim that I had better engagement.
It's likely most followers are dead accounts and bots anyway. Anyone who is a default follow in primal also has inflated numbers. Once you remove the bots and dead accounts, the numbers look more realistic for the theoretical number of users on Nostr. @npub176p7...vgup has been doing great work to make actually usable stats at npub.world, removing bots and accounts that never interact. For instance, I show around 5k follows on nostr.band, and around 3.6k on npub.world. Ava is about 33k/6.6k. Yours is very close at 1.8k/1.5k. These numbers only matter to inflooooencers anyways. Bragging about your follower count is degenerate behavior, best to ignore those kinds of people.
@Ray Buni might also be able to give some good info. He runs profilestr.com, but I'm not sure how he is collecting the stats, what relays he uses, or if he is removing bots like npub.world.
You have not gotten under my skin, my friend. Though I disagree, I respect your opinion. We both want to see Nostr succeed.