Casinos don't have clocks. The floor is laid out so the exits are hard to find, and the machines pay at random, because an unpredictable reward holds a person far longer than a reliable one.

The large platforms were designed on the same principle, and they learned early that fear holds attention better than anything else. A threat demands a response in a way good news never does. Facebook at one point weighted an angry reaction at five times the value of a like, and political parties in Europe told the company they had shifted toward negative messaging because measured, reasonable posts no longer reached anyone. The emotional climate of public conversation was being set by a ranking system whose only goal was keeping people on the app.

Nostr removes the party that profits from that arrangement. With no one selling your attention, there is no reason to keep you alarmed, and fear has to earn its place like any other idea. The harder adjustment is personal. Most of us arrived carrying the habits those platforms trained into us, and a protocol can change the incentives around a person long before it changes the person. What you read here is largely what you chose to read, which makes the quality of your feed a fairly honest measure of your own attention.

Man, I’m grateful for Nostr.