For many creators, precise follower counts and related metrics can literally determine their income—whether a company agrees to work with them, how much they can ask, and so on. Without such they might feel like a fashion model with their height listed by the agency as "potentially between 150cm and 190cm."
Zaps of course can serve as an interest proxy, but zaps can easily be gamed, and if Nostr catches on—which I believe it will—there will arise a whole zap-gaming industry. Get ready.
And creators earning from zaps alone isn't overly realistic. Zaps can be a very nice added source, but I'm pretty convinced that even in a zap-happy world the bulk of revenue for most creators of a certain type will remain sourced from more traditional sponsor deals.
Could it be Nostr is just not the right place for creators that need dependable metrics to attract the kinds of regular sponsorships that will keep them afloat? They'd best remain on YouTube or Instagram? Quite likely, and I don't doubt that a lot of people here on Nostr would be delighted for the whole lot of them (creators, influencers, personalities, whoever) to stay as far away as possible. But I still think it's something worth mulling over.
You are thinking and operating in a traditional advertising-centric mindset that other social media has trained you is the best way to do things. That leads to all sorts of problems related to censorship and centralization. Building around communities and enabling greater #value4value methods is superior and is what nostr needs to continue building towards.
I don't disagree entirely, But seems to me methods have always been value for value—or some attempt at it—since the dawn of humankind. If not value for value then what else?
I mean I like the idea that more and more online creators will be able to make a living directly off of community appreciation and without the need for any sponsor in the mix. I'd imagine many future Nostr creators will be able to do so, and definitely the creator world at large ought to be rebalanced in that direction. But I think many creators will still need multiple income sources, a mix of zaps, sponsor deals, ad revenue, collaborations and so on.
And if a sponsor is going to pay a creator then the value that sponsor wants is—well it's sales. And sales don't happen without awareness. And the seeds of awareness aren't meaningful unless they're planted in fertile minds. And in a high enough number of fertile minds. So value for value there too.
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Fiat world, fiat metrics. A zap in which x Satoshis go to a 3rd party institution, organization, sovereign wealth fund, mutual company, or charitable trust that I rate highly for purposes of my web of trust filters, will have a greater efficacy as valuation metric, and will be recognized as such by those I value most.
I'm betting big on zaps for what I'm building, so I'm with you in spirit! But zaps on Nostr (at least at present) are not reliable reports. A zap is a report of a event that may or may not have happened on another network, in this case the lightning network. There's no cross-referencing vis a vis delivery. Right now it's fine because there's not much motivation to game zaps. But if motivation develops then we may see zap metrics start to lose some value as they're systematically gamed.
Web of trust helps (sort of like crowdsourced verification of zappers and zap recipients) but only to a degree. A lot of zap commerce will be outside of people's web of trust.
Nutzaps I think represent the best fix because you only have to trust the mint. Actually Nutzaps fixes a lot of things. They introduce their own issues, like making nsecs juicier targets, but all in all I think the stuff the Nutzaps people are doing is really exciting and that's where I hope things move.
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