I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with reactions or tallies of reactions. I think they can be meaningful and useful in many contexts. They just are not meaningful or useful (or truthful / accurate) in this particular context.
I think - and am pretty sure - the world would be a better place if people stopped believing in lies - including the lies that make them feel good. As I've argued here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/159#issuecomment-1407384311 in a meaningfully decentralized system like nostr, there is no practical way for either clients or relays to actually count actual reactions. So that means that the tally next to the icon is necessarily fake news. And what is the reaction itself without the tally? 100% meaningless. It's a lie.
Of course people are going to do whatever they want and nostr is what it is exactly because people can do whatever they want with it. It's just too bad that what so many people want to do with it is to directly ape - without any discrimination - everything that legacy social media platforms do. Because a lot of what they do is bad. It would be better if nostr filtered out the bad stuff. It would be better if instead of re-creating legacy social media platforms, nostr created something entirely new that replaced legacy SM because it's better, not because it's the same.
In that issues thread that I linked to above @gkbrk made a comment about a way to make reactions useful in the context we're discussing. If there were a performant and practical way for me to see that PEOPLE I FOLLOW had a reaction to a given event, that would be really useful. This would be the job of a smart client (definitely not a relay thing and that’s a good thing - clients should be smart and relays should be dumb).
pjv
npub1pjv…0h42
2023-04-11 13:06:28
in reply to nevent1q…uet9
Author Public Key
npub1pjvcwasj9ydasx9nmkf09pftsg640vm5fs7tzprssew8544yj2ds6e0h42Published at
2023-04-11 13:06:28Event JSON
{
"id": "71c38fbd1883e5ee65f18466b1c8e3be1996751e1e0840b2b9f1d01e55d77945",
"pubkey": "0c99877612291bd818b3dd92f2852b823557b3744c3cb10470865c7a56a4929b",
"created_at": 1681211188,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
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],
[
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[
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[
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],
"content": "I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with reactions or tallies of reactions. I think they can be meaningful and useful in many contexts. They just are not meaningful or useful (or truthful / accurate) in this particular context.\n\nI think - and am pretty sure - the world would be a better place if people stopped believing in lies - including the lies that make them feel good. As I've argued here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/159#issuecomment-1407384311 in a meaningfully decentralized system like nostr, there is no practical way for either clients or relays to actually count actual reactions. So that means that the tally next to the icon is necessarily fake news. And what is the reaction itself without the tally? 100% meaningless. It's a lie.\n\nOf course people are going to do whatever they want and nostr is what it is exactly because people can do whatever they want with it. It's just too bad that what so many people want to do with it is to directly ape - without any discrimination - everything that legacy social media platforms do. Because a lot of what they do is bad. It would be better if nostr filtered out the bad stuff. It would be better if instead of re-creating legacy social media platforms, nostr created something entirely new that replaced legacy SM because it's better, not because it's the same.\n\nIn that issues thread that I linked to above @gkbrk made a comment about a way to make reactions useful in the context we're discussing. If there were a performant and practical way for me to see that PEOPLE I FOLLOW had a reaction to a given event, that would be really useful. This would be the job of a smart client (definitely not a relay thing and that’s a good thing - clients should be smart and relays should be dumb).\n\n",
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}