TLDR:
You can trust zaps to yourself, so you can use zaps for ranking dms or personal spam filtering.
You can’t necessarily trust zaps sent to other people, which makes things like ranking unreliable (top zap list, etc) nostr:note1xx2nmgayvqkru0yf5m3w6p69xzn7f5vtx7jzzxh27qtp7zkjw6msgk0m6d
If everyone could just change their LN address on nostr to crizzo@minibits.cash so I can accurately rank posts that would be great. Thanks.
You can also trust zaps from yourself as well which makes it useful for surfacing content by people that there is evidence you have valued enough to zap.
The reality of ranking content is something of an art but I believe this contains weighting based on a few buckets “people I have interacted with”, “people who have interacted with me” and “content which has been interacted with by people the previous buckets”. This creates a loose web of content that, through your own actions COULD have more weight when deciding what may be of most interest.
That said I do think any sort of algorithm should allow for looser or more simplistic items like “within timeframes”, “tagging specific to interest”, “random high traffic content”, “news/advertising”.
You can almost imagine a world where a user declares to clients through a simple event something like “Show me content with a mix of 0.60 personalised in my web, 0.20 associated to my interests, 0.10 news and current events, 0.10 random. With a restriction of last 7days”.
It would be super simple I think to create and maintain these types of events but complex perhaps for clients to implement. Any client that can figure this out would add massive value and perhaps it could even be an option for tiered systems. Non-paying get general algorithm building, paying/premium get access to more bespoke (higher complexity/infrastructurally demanding) algorithms.
Ranking based on zaps is one of those things I wish could exist but sadly isn't possible right now.
Hypothetically, what could make it possible?
You can whitelist trusted zappers and only use those? Or blacklist bad ones.
If you’re building top zap lists from your follow list then its no problem if you trust everyone within that group.
so: get some zaps and check with the lightning wallet if they are correct. if the zap and lightning wallet match, whitelist the zapper pubkey?
If I may, I think you phrased it a bit confusingly judging by the comments.
To clarify you can trust zaps to your own notes (so long as you can trust your lightning node), but you can't trust zaps in other people's notes.
So for example if I zap this note you know for sure whether or not it's real, and you can trust that the amount is real.
If however you see another person's note you can't really trust whether the amount zapped is real because their lightning node could just be lying
