Something I've experienced on occasion is that SN users are so eager to respond to a post in the hope of getting sats as a reward. They often jump to assumptions or conclusions in the hope of gaining sats rather than constructively adding to the conversation.

I for one don't see any negatives. Giving and receiving rewards in sats teaches users about wallets, the lightning network, and incentivizes learning. It also helps users get used to paying in bitcoin as we create a circular economy.

The undesirable behavior we've seen so far as it relates to the sat incentives:

There's other bad behavior on the site, but it's similar to what other platforms experience.

Voting systems like Reddit's would be more useful if they weren't so easily gamed by bots and brigades. A costly voting system like SN's could go some way towards addressing this, depending on how it gets implemented.

r/cryptocurrency is a good case study in what not to do. When the mods introduced a rewards token, the forum quickly became overran by attempts to farm it. Memes, sloppily written how-to guides, boring "unpopular opinion" posts, etc. It seemed to make the sub much worse (and it was something of a cesspool to begin with).

So far, the only possible downside I can see is that maybe it creates a semi-addictive chasing of sats on the platform, but that also is non-unique to stacker news as a social media platform, and the micropayment cost of doing anything makes you think a bit more, making a counterbalance to social media's addictive nature. So really, it has problems, but they are less severe than what you find on other platforms. Maybe I'm missing something though