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.