Microtipping is a cool usecase but making it centerpiece of nostr is IMO the wrong play.
Zap counts should be auxiliary, a curiosity.
Using them as engament metrics or poll votes just sets the wrong incentives.
Discussion
If you go far back my note history, you will find I defended the exact opposite and trashed note reactions while claiming zaps were the real signal.
I was wrong and I have since changed my mind.
+1 respect for admitting you changed your views. Seems hard for people to do these days.
Zaps can't be counted reliably by anyone but the receiver. So that means, lots of use cases like trending, paying for stuff or voting, not really gonna work.
Maybe a future bolt or zap spec could improve on this, I'm not sure. I'm also not sure we would even want that if it did.
One thing a vote could do, at least, is the person who posted the vote, could tally the results based on the zaps that actually arrived in their wallet after the vote is closed.
Tipping and donations are extremely common in twitch and even that kind of centralized platform does not use that for any ranking metrics. Everything goes by viewer count since IPs are hard to fake.