Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Yes, everything that has a social aspect can be gamed, because social signals are shortcuts. Algos take this to the extreme, but human psychology tries to manipulate what it can. Well designed clients can probably keep that in check.

My beef with zaps (in their current iteration) is that they go against the ethos of LN, on multiple levels. It encourages centralization of nodes (DoS risk for receivers), loss of privacy (why document what you send and receive?), just to name a few.

In principle, zaps are very useful. They're are a great vector to drive nostr adoption and innovation.

However the implementation was rushed, thoughtful feedback was ignored, which left weaknesses open. The unintentional cost falls on LN newbies, nostr newbies, and LN decentralization in general, which is why I'm not a big fan of zaps.

Medium/long term though, I'm optimistic. It will soon be possible to have a LN wallet and a nostr client within the same app. This will let the app have direct access to the invoice preimage (e.g. undeniable proof of payment). When that comes, zaps and invoices can be more closely linked and a lot of the current implementation compromises that make zaps a bad design now IMO, will not be ncessary anymore.