1) Zaps don't really signal anything Nostr-native, yet, as most people follow (and therefore) zap the same handful of people that they followed over here from Twitter or that were in the "recommended follows" list, when they got here. It's all quite insular.
2) It's relatively rare for someone to get followed or zapped regularly because they are providing some value "on Nostr". There's only a small handful, who have accomplished that feat, who aren't devs of popular clients or one of the oldest accounts, and we basically had to work at it like it's a part-time job because discovery is so bad on here.
3) Hot takes that appeal to the ingroup get reposted because they are low-risk to the reposter. Truly novel or interesting material, that might unsettle the reader, rarely gets reposted for that reason. It reveals a tolerance or bias from the reposter than might surprise their followers. They only read that stuff in secret, often not even hitting the like.
This results in reposted notes often being the dullest notes and akin to shouting "Amen!" in a church. Lots of attention at no personal cost.
I suspect Twitter could detect such "lurker favorites" and surfaced the notes to a wider audience.
4) Topic-based discovery, and the uncovering of high-signal notes, is still abyssmal. Some teams (including ours, see #[2] and the people working with #[3]) are trying to fix that, but it requires entirely new features, events, and/or clients. It's less about traditional, dynamic "algos" and more about manual or programmatic curation of npubs and events. Akin to clustering library books onto shelves, or selecting paintings for a gallery.
5) We shouldn't expect people to be any different on here, then on any other social media, or anywhere in society. Many people can barely read fluently and most have pedestrian tastes. Some only come on here to chillax, shitpost, and find out the buzz, and get their quality reading elsewhere.
Popular culture is not high culture.
The goal should be helping someone to cultivate their variation of "a high culture feed", if they so choose, but some npubs won't want that, or only want if for particular topics or social spheres.
I live a mix of pop and high culture, depending upon my mood. Sometimes I just want to zap funny memes and crack jokes, and that's also okay.
