straycat on Nostr: I’ve been thinking about ways to make the Influence Score useful in the short term. ...

I’ve been thinking about ways to make the Influence Score useful in the short term.

How about this: Assist with the onboarding of new users to nostr by giving them the option of generating their feed not from their follows lists, but from the Influence List.

Imagine you made your first nostr account 5 minutes ago at the recommendation of a friend. You follow your friend but don’t know anyone else on nostr and don’t know who to follow. Your feed is looking pretty sparse, and you’re wondering whether this was a good idea. You’re told that the next step is to comb through follow lists, look at feeds, and grow your follow list one at a time. This is a laborious task. And what’s more, you’re deciding whether to follow users based on whatever they have posted LATELY. This obviously works, but it doesn’t work well enough.

So you see a banner at the top of whatever client you’re on that says (for any user with less than some cutoff number of follows, maybe 5 or 10): Having trouble growing your follows list? Switch your feed to the Influence List!” (Or something to that effect. Might need a better name. Like the Recommended List or something like that.)

You click a button. Your client signs a note which signs you up for a DVM service which calculates a list of pubkeys based on the Influence Score. Set a cutoff score, and you have your Influence List. So, here’s the thing to know about the Influence List: if Alice follows Bob and no one else, she effectively inherits his entire Influence List. If she follows 2 users, her Influence List is effectively a superposition of the Influence Lists of those two people. And so on. That’s just how the math works.

So you switch your feed from your Follow list (the default) to your Influence List. You see a high quality feed, assuming your one friend on nostr has a high quality follow list. You start following more users yourself, tailored to your individual interests. Eventually, your follow list gets big enough that you can switch from your Influence List back to using your follow list for your default nostr feed, if you wish to do so.

The client accesses your Influence List through an API to the DVM service. The DVM business model would be that it’s free to sign up and get the generic Influence Score calculations done, but there are different levels of service that perhaps charge a fee. If you want contextual Influence Scores, for example, that would be a higher level of service.

Thoughts?

#WoT