I turned off likes/reactions in my UI so I don't even see them or have the option. If it's not worth replying, boosting, or zapping, then I just scroll on by. Likes are a useless relic of ad-supported algorithmic-driven social media feeds. Into the waste bin they go.
Discussion
so then how the trending notes are displayed, based on what?
Not sure the best answer to that. Likes are such a low-cost metric that they're easily manipulated when there's some benefit of doing so, such as a trending feed that relies on them. So far every trending feed on nostr has been lackluster. They are programmed centrally, and the result is that is certain hand picked accounts get obviously favored over others, or the likes and zaps are artificially manipulated by someone to make their own note trend. We've seen all of these problems with existing trending feeds on Nostr. The goal is better discovery of people and content/topics, and I believe it's better to approach that by giving users the power to define what criteria they value in their trending feeds. Data vending machines (DVMs) seem like a good approach to explore, but we still haven't seen much of that catching on.
I once accidentally zapped one of my own notes and realized that people could easily zap the hell out of their own stuff at virtually no cost. That's definitely going to be abused if feeds are using that as a metric.
💯 and new npubs are easy to create. So you can just create 100 fake alt accounts and zap yourself from them.
Lol Are we just creating the next generation spam network without even realizing it? Probably
"Web of trust" is an idea talked about a lot, and I think it can go a long way in filtering against spam if implemented well. Coracle utilizes the idea, and so does Nostur. Nostrgram was also utilizing this idea, but unfortunately was abandoned by its developer last year. We each already vet our own follow lists anyway, and if we could decide from there how many additional levels of follows we want to allow into our own web of trust, then we can still have a broad network of other users to interact with while mitigating a lot of spam. For instance, "follows of follows" and so on. As you identify spammy accounts in your own list, you could easily eliminate people them and their network of follows from being part of your own web of trust by simply unfollowing them or even muting them if necessary.
I'm sure it'll evolve out somehow as time goes on.
I like the idea of paid relays. May help with some spam in the future.
Masturzapping ⚡😆