Replying to Carlos

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.
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Leo Fernevak 2y ago

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.

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Carlos 2y ago

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.