Incentive is to publish good content that actually gets you zaps. View count is not a great signal. I don’t know all the details of steemit but if I recall correctly they have their own coin or token which is then claimed by content creators for views. We don’t have such things and probably never will in that exact form. That doesn’t stop people from creating a pool of sorts that can then reward content creators besides zaps however they see fit.
Discussion
Yeah exactly, that's a very important point. Views are definitely not ideal as they might create echo chambers and thus an unbalanced reality. Zaps instead might reward hard work because they potentially come from hard work themselves. And hard work is always good (at least in my view) 😃
Either how, the fact that the architecture allows for different incentives/signals is the absolute key. The best mix of incentives will win.
I'm still not 100% clear on what are the incentives of relays themselves, need to study some more. Why would I setup a free relay for example?
Thanks for the answer!
Relays act as backups basically. If one goes down, your content lives on another. This means even if you are somehow deplatformed, you can just use another client to connect with people. Or if a relay censors, you just don’t use it as there are plenty of other options.
Free relay would only be for hobby I think. Or to back up your own notes. You’d want to be sustainably funded somehow eventually hence paid relays and or other ways of monetizing (which I don’t think we’ve figured out yet)