Engagement is inventory

Extractive platforms degrade the thing they extract from. X doesn’t neutrally host discourse; its business model selects for conflict because conflict is engagement and engagement is inventory. The platform’s success and the community’s health are at odds.

Freedom tech fixes the incentives, not the features. Nostr and Bitcoin don’t promise better interactions through better moderation or smarter algorithms. They remove the middleman whose profits depend on making discourse worse. Zaps align creator compensation with audience value rather than engagement.

Sustainable digital communities require infrastructure where no intermediary profits from degrading the commons. What we have normalized—surveillance-funded platforms—is the aberration.

Nostr is a bet that we can do better now that we have tools the early internet lacked—portable identity, native payments, cryptographic verification—without repeating the capture that followed.

This extends Extraction is rational. Fiat incentivizes extracting capital; ad-funded platforms incentivize extracting attention. Both degrade what they extract from.