Surely, many users will either zap, not zap or even downzap this post, based on my nym, the territory, or the (formatting of) the title. I am not writing for them.
my problem
The concept that, irrespective of where I am in the world, I can zap bitcoin to you from my node at home, is pretty far out. I have no technical quips about zapping. It works very well. In fact, being able to ‘tip’ the writer of a post or comment I find to be a convenient and effective ‘filtering’ mechanism.
My problem with zaps is that I think it makes stackers lazy, overly-competitive, and greedy[^1 and somewhat ties in with another problem I have with bitcoin culture in general, but I’ll leave that for another post. The ease with which I can send you my hard earned time and energy relegates bitcoin transactions (or tips) into something as arbitrary as likes. At least, that has been my experience.
Yes, you might argue that sending bitcoin has higher stakes than merely clicking a little heart emoji. I can’t disagree with you there. A zap would be a higher-stakes action if it meant that I had to earn my bitocin back through more proof of work. But, as it were, on SN, the proof of work is, more often than not, more zapping.
Provided you are zapping ‘top’ posts, i.e. content that other trusted stackers have zapped or commented on, you can usually earn back what you have spent, plus some. But let’s be clear, my problem is not in earning bitcoin rewards. In fact, my problem is not with zaps per se but with the over-financialization of online culture in general. What, in fact, do we have left of culture that has not been infiltrated by the monetization gods?
rewards seeking fleshy machines
Zaps financialize online engagement. The result is that instead of writing something thoughtful and engaging in response to something we like, we just zap. Call it done and wait for the rewards to roll in. Profit.
I am no luddite and I’ll admit, it is very exciting that this is possible, that ‘money as moderator’ has worked to this extent. Something, however, that I feel is lost to the growing complexity of new incentive/monetization models such as we have on SN or even other “blogging” platforms like Substack, is the good-old-fashioned engagement for the engagement’s sake.
In the early days of blogging and online forums, whose relics still exist, like fossils, under heaps of data-slop that you can still find if you know where to look are the places where people used to engage for the sake of dialogue around ideas, without so much as the expectation that someone else might leave a comment or a breadcrumb to another rabbit hole or their own little oasis where they write their thoughts.
Ok--I might be romanticizing. But that doesn't take away from my main point that the internet is inundated with models and algorithms that are designed to encourage reward-seeking behaviour and SN seems to be no exception, and that is to none of its creators' discredit. Given an environment where algorithms feast on human greed and vanity, what else can be done to attract people to your platform? Sure enough, this is a case of 'don't hate the player, hate the game.'
My problem with zaps is not strictly speaking a problem with zaps, but a problem with the ecosystem they exist in. At a base level, humans are something like reward-seeking, fleshy machines. If there is not a grand purpose to their work or behaviour, a telos, that transcends mere selfishness, then rewards seeking becomes the default.
trustfor that to mean something. Also, if I'm having a conversation with someone here - even if we're disagreeing - I will often zap the other side. Because conversation is important to me.Footnotes