Which is why, all things equal, you should zap the smaller accounts that say something insightful or offer value because it will stand out more and have a greater incentivizing effect.
But I agree with both of you — Twitter drags you down into the cesspool of paranoia, while Nostr clearly has different incentives. Don’t think it’s so much “positivity” as saying something everyone is thinking but hasn’t yet articulated to themselves.
And that’s how it should be.
Yeah, I doubt the big accounts even look at zaps. Basically giving $5 tips to millionaires. I'm not against it, but the idea that they notice or care is laughable.
Especially when, no offense to any Nostr Client Dev the zap notification systems kind of get silly at times :/ .
I hope that "incentivizing effect" will also mean that zapped post will remain longer into the future (not be deleted a la "Delete * from posts where zaps = 0") and be used for AI/knowledge base training in the future.
actually, maybe that's how proganda works. but at least with zaps, you will run out of zaps on your favorite topics and so your personal influence machine will never be an energizer bunny.
Katy Perry sang about this
" Come on baby show 'em what their worth, as you zap across the Nostrverse, make 'em go 'ah ah ah'..."
It is a well-known phenomenon that people prefer to put their money where lots of other money already is. It feels like a safe investment.
And, as you note, people aren't only enthusiastic about positive notes. They're also enthusiastic about insightful, uncanny, or revelatory notes, which are often "negative" in tone.
That isn't reflected in zap statistics because the follower count is by far the strongest pull-factor, as visibility is required to receive a zap. We would have to analyze zaps/views, in order to determine a correlation.
Same as we can't analyze how influential someone's writing is without accounting for the effect the writing has on the subsequent writing of those who have viewed it. Some npubs may be very high-visibility, but have little influence, and vice-versa.
nostr:npub1m3xdppkd0njmrqe2ma8a6ys39zvgp5k8u22mev8xsnqp4nh80srqhqa5sf you were talking about how we could analyze this, right?
similar phenomenon in music too. Some of the biggest artists by record sales had relatively little influence while some niche ones with cult followings had massive.
But I do think nostr due to lack of algos and centralized thumbing the scale is already way better at surfacing interesting posts from anyone than the legacy social platforms.
Things tend to be popular because they offend nobody, not because they inspire anybody.
Niche music shifts the artistic Overton window and then more-popular musicians adopt a sanitized version for the masses.
You can observe the same thing on here. Some npubs are unpopular, but constantly shift the window and have enough readers to demand a response of some kind. The responses to their notes often get more play than their notes do, but they're effectively driving the conversation through novelty.
That could be mapped. You'd see waves of responses and speech patterns rippling out from their notes.
That would also catch air replies, by the way. You would be able to see the connection through the content of the note.
Nostr is actually much more centralized than legacy platforms, in practice, as there is no mitigating effect to counter the name recognition some npubs have when they arrive here, and so many people are only here to read what some particular person or persons writes. It's mostly a collection of fan clubs.
Discoverability of material is an effect of overt human reactions, so that creates a permanent vacuum to the same handful of npubs, as they have fan clubs who react as a sort of homage ritual.
