Thread

Web of Trust scores on profile photos in Amethyst are just the beginning. These signals will become foundational tools for helping users assess credibility, reduce spam, and navigate their social graph with more confidence. This is all part of creating your own algorithm. And it's only going to improve from here.

Replies (109)

↩ replying to Chris
Yes. Most people are outraged because they don't understand it. It's hilarious that people jump to the negative without understanding. But I get that, if I didn't, I wouldn't have the job that I do, educating, onboarding, and growing Nostr. That said, I didn't like this two and a half years ago when I first saw a presentation on this. Then over the last year, as I began to understand it, and realize how open it is user choice, user configuration, and client choice and client configuration, I realized there was nothing to dislike. If I can choose the weights and how they're applied, then there's one person to dislike and that would be me. It's how communities can be in control of their community. It's how they can handle access. Imagine having a community that moderates itself because each user applies their own moderation in whatever way they want, however they want. This includes not using it too. @david @Avi Burra what a good link for people to read more about GrapeRank?
↩ replying to Derek Ross
These two are good ones to start with:
GrapeRank
This is a high level overview of the GrapeRank algorithm for personalized trust metrics. The baseline GrapeRank metric functions as a method of nos...
Separation of Trust and Client
Web of Trust systems in nostr need to generate trust metrics that are contextual, personalized to the end user, and portable throughout the ecosyst...
↩ replying to Kayne
I think that, In Nostr, Web of Trust (WoT) is great for discovering interesting people to follow and building organic social networks, but it is NOT the right tool against spam and bots. In an ecosystem where creating bots is cheap and fast, sybils can easily infiltrate graphs. PoW helps, but it doesn't scale well in small networks – computational cost doesn't deter dedicated bot farms. The ideal solution? Implement NIP-42 (authentication) EVEN on free relays, with periodic challenge rotation to force reconnections and re-authentications. This adds real operational overhead for bots without blocking humans. Security doesn't come without cost: open relays need minimal barriers. #Nostr #WoT #NIP42
↩ replying to The Beave
It's gamable if there is a single algorithm mandated by an authority - a single moving target can be gamed. But when you (eventually) have thousands of overlapping moving targets (different algorithms different settings per user) it makes gaming it futile. So the "best" way to game the system is just to do what you normally do - interact. Over time, you'll grow an organic reputation across all those target. The number is a proxy, just like colors on animals and plants are proxies for their threat level. Human trust always beats computer trust, but the proxy helps in digital spaces when you want to decide who you care to interact with, or even more important - let into your community.
↩ replying to The Daniel πŸ––
Some people think bitcoin is evil because β€œmoney is the root of all evil.” But to them, money means fiat. They don’t realize that the evils of fiat should not be assumed to apply to decentralized money. Same thing with reputation. Centralized scoring systems are very Black Mirror. But decentralized scoring systems, where scores are personalized rather than global, belong in a different category.
↩ replying to npub14pyl...xf5k
I think it is really important to find a way, to check the introductions and asknostr tag from time to time. And when someone sees new users reference them in a note or to quote their notes. I also would not expect from new users to set a pow. So I really think that the proposal vrom @Vitor Pamplona is one of the best balance. To only filter users, that got reported more often by you and your follows than whatever treshhold one sets.
We do not care about automated trust. We do not care about spam. We do not care about centralized filtering system. People are different, have different rules and aspects. When standardization kicks in, there is nothing interesting to see anymore.
Not only is it ranking everyone at zero. I also can't see most of the comments on amethyst. Yakihonne and primal are both showing comments that are hidden on amethyst. So it's a shadowban? Because people I follow have some of the other commenters muted and now I can't see those other comments? So like, to use amethyst I have to unfollow everyone or it just hides content from me? I'm ok just not using amethyst, I really don't care about the whole ranking situation, but the shadow bans being used against people who are not spammers or scammers is stupid. It's just forcing people into Echo chambers image
I can only see half the comments on this note when using amethyst. Also, all the people I can see are ranked at 0 Lol Amethyst bringing in client side censorship this early is going to kill their brand before it gets anywhere. Imagine you're a new user on amethyst, you've followed 15 people and now you can't see 3/4 of nostr because between those 15 people you got 5 mutes on ΒΎ on nostr. Depends who you follow, maybe you follow 50 before half of nostr disappears It's just going to force people into echo chambers and prevent nostr growing when new users feel like nostr is just an empty void. People are going to think nostr has 150 active daily users instead of 15k lol At least nobody actually uses amethyst as their first client. But if primal done something like this it would kill nostr, there's be absolutely no new user retention View quoted note β†’
Apart from censorship making nostr more boring when we can't see half the comments. I can see ways for this to be misused with bots. Anyone can set up a bunch of reply bots that reply to new users and get followered by those new users. That's literally how I found people to follow on here in the beginning, I was following the nostr CEO bot and checking it's replies to find new people. It doesn't actually matter because it's only amethyst, but if a popular client for new comers did this, someone could really mess with people by exploiting it