I'm hoping zaps will help incentivize friendly behavior
Discussion
I'd like to believe that were true but I'm sure we'll end up with tribal behaviour on here just like on all social media. I think the lack of algorithms that are geared towards optimising engagement can help with that to some extent but people will still enjoy arguing with their enemies. That probably means a good put-down or attack on said enemies will be rewarded in zaps by their tribe.
To err is to be human. We will never have a purified experience because it's simply not in our nature.
That said, I'm not sure there's a better way to promote good behavior than to be able to incentivize it, so I'm optimistic we'll have an overall better experience than on the existing legacy platforms.
I would argue that the pure mind is the base layer of your nature. It's just that many are blown about by mental inertia and cling to fixed views and beliefs. When that is the case your mind is not flexible and open and the Self identity feels easily attacked by ideas/ thoughts that challenge its world views.
I'd agree with that. Will financially incentivizing for good behavior promote to curb negative & unproductive dialog? Time will tell.
I think it will drastically change human behavior through incentives, because up until now the incentive has been to exploit others for self gain but bitcoin creates a cooperative game. Whatever you do to add value to the network increases the value for all of us in equanimity as the network increases in value because it has 0 entropy.
So the incentive to do what is unhelpful, unwise, and unkind will over time go to 0. This is probably on a multi century scale though. Yet these incentives are sorely needed in a world that has the technological capacity to destroy itself with nuclear war due to not being sociologically advanced enough or wise enough to handle its technological capacity.
Humans. What can you do?
I think mostly the best we can do is to be mindful and self aware of our own nature so that we can avoid getting caught up in such dynamics ourselves. And also to lead by example in rewarding more pro-social behaviour.
Like I said, I do think nostr changes the incentives as compared to centralised social media, but I see that more as removing an amplifier rather than really affecting human nature itself.
We'll see how it plays out here as adoption grows and a more diverse set of people join, connect, and clash with each other. I do think its great that such a positive and friendly culture has developed so far.
Yup. Its human nature.
I think zaps will incentivize the opposite.
If you want to reward people on nostr, you already can with simple LN tips. Nobody has to know, other than you and the recipient. If you want the recipient to know it was from you, you can send a DM, a reply or add a comment in the LN payment.
Simple, private, elegant.
Zaps, since they're public, bring other incentives (vanity, peer pressure, perceived importance of highly-zapped notes or profiles, etc).
Influencers are already pushing it. Some are shaming wallet devs into integrating it. Memes are memed into existence and hype is hyped to the sky.
Soon you will have a sea of people on nostr who see zaps as inherently valuable.
In such a world, whoever can fake zaps is king. Whereas "plebs" have to earn zaps backed by real sats, sent by real people -- such an individual could "print" themselves some, and get all the social clout for free.
Turns out anyone can do that. There are two ways:
1. Since zaps are not "anchored" in LN (the same way LN is anchored in BTC onchain), one can receive zaps without having received any LN payment. Its a matter of publishing the right kind of events to the relay.
2. A different way is you can zap yourself from different (sockpuppet) accounts. You could recycle 1 sat endless times, and increment your "zap counter" as much as you like.
So not only are zap incentives skewed, but they're also an unreliable metric. Anything that can be measured in zaps (appreciation? relevance of a post?) can be gamed, because received zaps can be faked.
In addition, they're distracting people from the simple and effective LN tips, which don't suffer from any of the above.
And what do you gain by faking zaps? Why are people so obsessed with this notion?
All these concerns are a nothingburger compared to what zaps enable - seamless value transfer. Want to fake your zaps? Go right ahead. I’m sure some will. Fuck it, let the thousands do it and get off on it. The rest of us will just use it for real value transfer.
All of the publicly published descriptive analytics and vanity metrics have this potential downside.
Zaps have the potential to be just as bad as likes in terms how it negatively impacts social media use. It could be much worse though because there is some financial value attached to it.
I agree that the lightning tip is really neat and a clean way of handling it.
My project will implement zaps in our apps, but we’ll make it configurable. Users should be able to turn off the ability to zap their own notes and disable the display of zaps across all notes.
In general, more control of the user experience should be given to the user.
That's the right approach, IMO. Glad to see apps giving users more choice.
One thing to keep in mind is that, as per the current zap spec, if a receiver LN addr supports zaps, you cannot (should not?) allow both a plain LN tip and a zap to that recipient. So by offering users that choice in the app settings, you're going against the current spec :)
Which only makes sense, your approach is the sensible thing to do.
Oh, that’s interesting. My thinking was that tip was profile specific and zap was note specific.
I do think that the ability for a user to turn off the displayed counter for likes or zaps is a good thing.
Common misconception. As you saw with our test earlier, its very possible to tip a note as well.
Yes, the displayed counter is tricky. More of a distraction TBH, cause you can never be sure its real (note author can zap himself to "self-boost").
Same reason why I stopped paying attention to likes and retweets on twitter, cause its heavily manipulated.
I understand your concerns Carlos.
Personally I like zaps and see no reason to remove them, just as I don't see any reason to remove likes. Both can be gamed but I am more interested in considering in which situations they may become a problem.
As I see it, the problem of both zaps + likes emerges if/when notes are sorted algorithmically by zaps or likes. We are not there yet, but it will likely arrive at some point.
Such a sorting function will be gamed by influencers to gain visibility. High visibility = more zaps and donations.
Users creating their own Lists reduces the need to have sorting algorithms.
A positive sorting would be if I go to someone's profile, and I can see an option to sort their past notes based on likes or zaps. That would be a neutral sorting approach where the notes from one person compete against each other based on public responses.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Yes, everything that has a social aspect can be gamed, because social signals are shortcuts. Algos take this to the extreme, but human psychology tries to manipulate what it can. Well designed clients can probably keep that in check.
My beef with zaps (in their current iteration) is that they go against the ethos of LN, on multiple levels. It encourages centralization of nodes (DoS risk for receivers), loss of privacy (why document what you send and receive?), just to name a few.
In principle, zaps are very useful. They're are a great vector to drive nostr adoption and innovation.
However the implementation was rushed, thoughtful feedback was ignored, which left weaknesses open. The unintentional cost falls on LN newbies, nostr newbies, and LN decentralization in general, which is why I'm not a big fan of zaps.
Medium/long term though, I'm optimistic. It will soon be possible to have a LN wallet and a nostr client within the same app. This will let the app have direct access to the invoice preimage (e.g. undeniable proof of payment). When that comes, zaps and invoices can be more closely linked and a lot of the current implementation compromises that make zaps a bad design now IMO, will not be ncessary anymore.