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Daily discussion thread 2025-01-29
7d • timdaub.eth •

gm, feeling quite dopamine depleted today again, throwback to 2025-01-23 (which was last Thursday) [1]. I primarily credit the hard mental work yesterday for it. I forced myself to get through some of the email feature stuff because I wanted it to be done. The issue is that now I feel quite without appetite or desire to do things, even though there's still more of the email epic left to do. For example, we'll have to integrate email subscriptions into the onboarding flow. Anyways, that kinda got me thinking that if I have such bad depletion, I'd still love to have a tool to replenish it. I don't think abstinence always fixes this actually. It is useful for sure, but, for example, there are things I still enjoy doing in this state, like listening to a good and intellectually stimulating podcast. Listening to articles on Kiwi is good too, often. That said, I still think we don't have enough good content and I also think that the site doesn't really help you in getting good dopamine hits. Just compare it to X or FC where you can pursue your desire instantly. We're not even close. Hence, I'm looking for models that work for other apps similar to Kiwi. Yesterday, for example, we've implemented pretty much the exact same model for email notifications that GitHub has, because GitHub is, in a way, very similar to Kiwi in how complex a user's comments are. So if we'd implement a X-style notification system, I think many people would find it very hard to stay on top as X's notifications are designed around 140 characters. Kiwi's comments are obviously much longer on average. But so how do other apps, which are similar in textual complexity, serve their users dopamine? E.g. the issue at the moment with relying mostly on the notifications tab (and emails) is that it'll only work when there's activity. But often there isn't activity on the site. E.g., for most of the European night the site is dead. So I almost feel like we'll have to somehow prioritize "singleplayer mode" on the site and give users enough of a hit playing single player as to subsidize activity for multiplayer. Or what else could we do? Are there dopamine loops that are not entirely reliant on other people being online? We could also allow submitting just text stories (without a link), so people could more easily grab the attention of others. But that seems rather complex Suggestions and ideas welcome! - 1: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories?index=0x6791f32d9dd1a360ef931ea3f5656995914e8088d0dfedffa955d0f7c1b440456a0ced1b#0x6791f3c93c00aad36a98be7e5a6e12b23dc79850bbeaad4a4fb480d40859b1545d3226eb
> Hence, I'm looking for models that work for other apps similar to Kiwi. I lately looked at a few apps and here are my thoughts: 1) Substack went down a full social media path. They have a feed where people post Twitter-like stuff, they have groupchats for each publication, they even added videos. I guess that's why Musk decided to ban their links. 2) Paragraph bet on a feed with essays, and actively recommends some authors. They also don't seem to have enough content to fully satisfy my curiosity, but a good thing is that some of the essays are very short. So I can read post that has length of 5-7 tweets and get some dopamine hit pretty fast (example: https://brandondonnelly.com/we-all-walk-too-fast). Plus I can discover some new content by looking at recommended authors. 3) Reddit is a mixed bag because they have both longer posts and just memes. But as an r/ethereum lurker I found that they also don't have enough content. So when I open the app, there are maybe 2-3 posts per day that I find interesting. What makes me come back to Reddit is the fact that I follow other subreddits, so there's always something interesting in my feed, most of the time it's non-crypto. *** My takeaways from these observations: a) Having sufficient content volume is critical. No new content, no dopamine. I don't think we are ready to start sharing content that's totally unrelated to crypto. But maybe we could encourage users to share more content that's adjacent to Ethereum, in line with our guidelines. I think for some people it's not clear yet that they can post non-crypto content here. b) Having varied content length is useful. Sometimes I want to read a 20-min read deep dive, and sometimes I just want to get a quick insight by reading a tweet-length post. Maybe we could find a way to filter links based on length? 3) Active content recommendation is an interesting path. I just checked our Analytics and the "Top" feed has been opened by 3.5% of the website users. Ofc Analytics data is very imprecise, but maybe we might find better ways to promote quality content that's already out of the "Hot" feed. PS: Ofc non of these solutions apart from adding content volume would satisfy a user who checks the app 10 times a day like me and you :)
Thanks for the detailed response. > I don't think we are ready to start sharing content that's totally unrelated to crypto. But maybe we could encourage users to share more content that's adjacent to Ethereum, in line with our guidelines. > I think for some people it's not clear yet that they can post non-crypto content here. Not only that, I'm also noticing that only text content does well here. When I usually post YouTube videos they almost never receive upvotes, which is bad because they are often much higher quality than blog posts. I think we have to make it clear that Kiwi is about building a fair and open source distribution algorithm for a community. The Go-to-market is building a decentralized Hacker News. > Sometimes I want to read a 20-min read deep dive, and sometimes I just want to get a quick insight by reading a tweet-length post. I feel like this is going to get difficult as submitting short content can feel like a waste of time considering how long it takes to submit. Potentially this is also a chance to, for example, change the rules of submitting, such that e.g. YouTube videos and tweets don't need titles anymore, but submit themselves simply through adding the link. Imagine having a submission page that you just need to briefly visit to add a link, but then the actual curation of labeling the link with an appealing title is left to an AI or other curators. > I just checked our Analytics and the "Top" feed has been opened by 3.5% of the website users. Ofc Analytics data is very imprecise, but maybe we might find better ways to promote quality content that's already out of the "Hot" feed. No, I think the content on New and Hot, that is submitted here, is still bad. E.g. I have a full YouTube list of podcasts that could be submitted here and that I'd consider Hacker content, but nobody is submitting them and nobody is upvoting them either. Instead we get this boring slop of what people have clicked through on Warpcast and Telegram. Probably because it's easier to sift through and submit to serve a duty.
> When I usually post YouTube videos they almost never receive upvotes, which is bad because they are often much higher quality than blog posts. Re: YouTube videos, the reason I personally don't watch them often is because it's a bigger investment than reading. With text, I can skim through in 30 seconds and determine if there's potential that it's interesting. Can't easily do it with video, and even transcript is not that useful as the formatting is not user friendly plus a lot of context is missing. But my case might be isolated because I barely watch YouTube at all.