Nostr Web Client

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.

brianco 2y ago

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.

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Discussion

Carlos 2y ago

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.

brianco 2y ago

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.

Carlos 2y ago

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.