There's something missing in zap incentives that's upstream of all this, haven't quite put my finger on it yet though...

On Nostr, zap's can be faked, so there's really no signal in them with regards to social context

Here on SN they're notarized as a centralization trade-off, but still not useful for the zapper other than the loose hopes each engagement incentivizes better content/peers... but the niche and still shrinking scale shows that's not playing out

Free-Zapping ecosystems seem to have plateaued as a niche selection criteria, I distinguish this from micro-paywalls and payments. Entirely possible Lightning enjoooyers are still hungover from the busking/tipping fever that was kind of "current thing" in the early days of Lightning as a proof of concept when it wasn't reliable enough for actual useful things.