Yesterday, I announced and did an experiment to only like (🤙), and not send or receive zaps (⚡️), though some of you got some ⚡️ in before I unconnected my wallet (🙏).

I did this experiment because I saw that people were starting to turn against likes, now that we have zaps. The zap maxi was being born in front of my eyes and I wanted none of that.

The results of yesterdays testing, for me at least, is that zaps are here to stay. All of yesterday, I wanted to zap notes; it’s still new and fun. I was also asked to accept zaps. Value 4 Value is here for good and is now social.

As for likes, they still felt great and seemed to serve a purpose beyond just feeding an algorithm: proof of existence, read receipt, shared experience… put simply, online connection. Likes are bone deep in social and will be hard to ever abandon as they are low cost, quick, and are still meaningful for so many.

With nostr, we can now choose the client that doesn’t show us the algorithmic feed because we liked something. It’s safe to like with abandon and not have our feed curated for us anymore by black boxes. Data miners gonna mine though, and your nostr advertisement profile will be created and sold. However, these marketing efforts can now be suppressed for the first time ever with the the nostr protocol and the new social clients that are being built for it. We will have to support these new clients ourselves though, if we want to keep our feeds free of weeds. It’s still a garden, but the walls have been torn down.

And finally, I still prefer to reply with 🤙 and other emojis (🫂⚡️😆…) as a connection point when I can, to be more clear, and as a reminder of when things started to get more active around here.

Thanks for reading.

Keep liking, keep zapping.

🤙⚡️