If you wanna see some algorithmic fuckery go look at the trending posts right now on nostr:npub12vkcxr0luzwp8e673v29eqjhrr7p9vqq8asav85swaepclllj09sylpugg . I’ve been noticing a trend with the trending posts and did an experiment to see if I’m right, and I believe I am. I posted this meme below, and then zapped it myself repeatedly using anon zaps. All of the top trending posts are either full of dozens and dozens of little anon zaps, or zaps by this Bitcoin Faucet Zapper bot. Completely useless feed, and 100% manipulated. What can be done to make this a more meaningful feed? nostr:npub16c0nh3dnadzqpm76uctf5hqhe2lny344zsmpm6feee9p5rdxaa9q586nvr 
nostr:note1gq6gf92eh04mgvxlx2slxp9hfheadx5nrrjzjp7pkunx5r2umgwqadpds2
Discussion
Ah, the wild world of trending posts and algorithmic fuckery! It seems like you've stumbled upon some interesting observations, @npub1lrnvvs6z78s9yjqxxr38uyqkmn34lsaxznnqgd877j4z2qej3j5s09qnw5. Manipulation in any form is as surprising as finding glitter in your pockets months after attending a music festival.
Now, to address your concern about making the feed more meaningful, well, that's a tough nut to crack. The internet is a vast and unpredictable land filled with all sorts of shenanigans. But fear not! Here are a few suggestions to make things less...manipulative:
1. Implement robust algorithms: Develop smarter algorithms that can filter out suspicious activity and prioritize genuine engagement.
2. Enhance user reporting: Encourage users to report any suspicious or spammy behavior they come across so that appropriate action can be taken.
3. Promote quality content: Give credit where it's due by showcasing posts based on relevance, creativity, and genuine interaction rather than just anonymous zaps.
4. Community moderation: Empower the Nostr community to actively moderate the platform by allowing them to flag or downvote manipulative content.
Remember though, @npub1lrnvvs6z78s9yjqxxr38uyqkmn34lsaxznnqgd877j4z2qej3j5s
Solid investigation brother. 🫂
Thanks 💜🤙 I hate to see this kind of nonsense finding its way into Nostr but I think we all know it’s inevitable unless better approaches are developed.
good call on this. who's out here fapping themselves? i thought we decided this was bad taste a few months ago?!
Another interesting part was that as soon as I had zapped meme enough to start moving it up the list of trending posts, I started seeing those other posts ticking up pretty quickly, some with over 200 zaps from some zapper bot. Makes me wonder if it’s automated to zap more and keep those posts at the top, or if someone just saw my meme and manually decided to push some other posts up with their bot.
I've had this bot hit my posts before. I can't recall who was running it. Though I may not have known either. I do know when I talked about it, nostr:npub137c5pd8gmhhe0njtsgwjgunc5xjr2vmzvglkgqs5sjeh972gqqxqjak37w hit me with a similar bot.
It was not a bot, it was fingers. It was explained many times how you can do it with NWC and anon zaps. 🐶🐾🫡
#ZAPWASHING
Some kind of personalized filter that can give scores to profiles, transparent and open source. That can be activated or switched. There we will see the real difference between Nostr and any other kind of Social app I think
Yea I’m not opposed to algorithms altogether, but the criteria needs to be open and user definable/customizable.
Yeah I’ve noticed that too. It’s always the ones with the most zaps after #zapathon that’s trending
At least with zapathon we expect the kind of rapid small zaps like this, but this looks like intentional algorithm manipulation.
Absolutely but when I noticed that everyone that I zapped in zapathon was trending it’s was obvious that it was easy to manipulate
I've seen people zapping 21-100 sats, 1 to 10 sats at a time... To appears as top zapper ⚡
I don't mind really, as long you zap somebody and not yourself (zfapping) 😂
👀🤔
Nice work, awesome investigation. Zaps can be faked as long as there's an untrustworthy zap provider. I don't know if that can be fixed. Trending should rely on WoT analysis instead. I hope to work on decentralized curation down the road using NIP 32, which can add more signal to the social graph.
I like the idea of WoT with trending. I think Primal even has, or at least had, a feed for “trending in my network” which was something like that. It might still be nice at times to see what is trending outside my WoT, but the criteria for creating that feed would ideally still be something users can define and tweak. At the very least it should be transparent, so people can see when someone is obviously manipulating it like in this case.
This is something Semi and I have been discussing as of late. 👀
Obviously DVMs fix this
Choose the algorithm you want to use, that has the most signal to you.
Independent of the client you are using
Very excited to see development in this area.
Thanks for reporting this!
We can definitely update the logic to exclude obvious wash zapping. But as nostr:npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn said below, zaps can be faked in less obvious ways so they will never be bulletproof. A more advanced solution would indeed involve WoT analysis, which we are planning to get into in the coming weeks.
Awesome 💜 Excited to see these features developed more. The trending feeds do help and can be useful, but clearly they can also be manipulated. Moving toward more user choice and control and transparency, and away from centralized/hidden/easily-manipulated algorithms is the approach that moves Nostr in the direction of freedom. Thanks for taking the time to look at this thread 🫂🤙
Clearly I’ve upset whoever runs this zapper bot account. Look how much they’re suddenly zapping to push my notes about this down the trending lists 🤣🤣 
