Yeah I think KP said something on a lightning twitter spaces once that made sense to me.

As a lightning node operator, you're locking up your BTC capital in a hot wallet that has risk. You deploy that capital into channels essentially as a bet that there will be monetizable activity on those channels in the near future. By charging fees on transactions that you route, you earn yield on that capital.

Deploying your BTC into a lightning node is absolutely not as safe as keeping it in cold storage, which is ideally where many people would be keeping it.

However, in exchange for taking on that risk, noticing those information asymmetries in the lightning market, and maintaining your node to stay in an optimal condition to route payments, you can be rewarded with yield. With those natural incentives in place, we don't need to rely on just good faith of the community for functionality and reliability--it's an investment opportunity and a business venture. As a node operator, you are providing a service to other nodes in the market and other users in the lightning network. In exchange for providing that service, you are rewarded with fees.

I'd say with people on SN trying to stack sats, it's more of a psychological hurdle, rather than a business problem. Nobody is earning a living on SN just yet, so the sats are (sadly) still at a similar level of functionality and impact as reddit upvotes. However, with a psychological problem, there's always a psychological solution. Governments have convinced masses of men to willingly go to war and fight people they've never met. I'm sure with a little PR, there can be more of a "pass it on" mentality in the SN community.