Do zaps incentivise group think or useful discourse? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Do zaps incentivise group think or useful discourse?

1160 sats \ 25 comments \ @halalmoney 21 Feb 2023 bitcoin

“Zaps are an interesting dynamic.

In theory it should lead to a higher quality of content by incentivizing thoughtful discourse.

Or maybe it incentivizes group think? Masses of people trying to figure out what to say in order to get zapped by appealing to emotional stimuli. Anger, tugging heart strings, erotic content, fear porn, and things exploding, always get eye balls.

It’s an exercise in marketing I suppose. Do things people like, get finically rewarded.

So maybe it doesn’t lead to a higher quality of content but a competition to provide content that people like. Does this result in decentralized “Only Fans” and doom scrolling? So far it doesn’t seem that way but I only interact with Bitcoiners.

But one thing is for sure. The ability to get rewarded for your content prioritizes the use of Nostr over other social media. Trad social media can not compete with this. The centralized model is to attractive to not be captured by interested parties. The more money involved the more attractive it is to rent seekers and authoritarians.

When people talk about Bitcoin being the internet of money. This is it.”

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801 sats \ 7 replies \ @JohnRawlins 21 Feb 2023

I think that largely, what its doing right now is incentivizing interaction, but is it for the right reasons? A few things going on here:

-people realize they can send money to and fro without "banks and fees." so they feel liberated in that sense, and are sending eachother fractions of cents and sometimes more back and forth. nothing wrong with this. what it leads to as secondary tertiary and quaternary behaviors is more interesting.

i have seen the following playing out so far:

-people posting a line like "first ten invoices that write in this post get zapped 50 sats. this is strange behavior, because it's much akin to the free stuff mechanism, first ten people to run into this line get a reward. okay, fine. mostly innocuous.

-people posting stuff like, help me pick a new toaster oven, first person to post something i like gets zapped 2000 sats. okay this is a neat use case scenario, crowd sourcing a problem of lacking knowledge or time. i kinda like this one.

-people asking others to zap them so they can zap others, then crying about it when they run out of money to send other people. (this is strange, and i worry it may breed or deepen emotional codependency issues in a crowd sourced, and openly public way, leading to development of certain character flaws,or exacerbation of others, or the development of entirely new psychological hang-ups, for some involved in this specific behavior. Say for example, people with extremely low self esteem.

-people saying post an invoice, i'll pick several random invoices and pay them at my whim and whimsy. okay that's alot like the first scenario, and not much different.

there have been a few other strange ones, mostly that felt a lot like a gambling type of situation, but i can't remember them specifically enough to share them here.

All things considered though, what I'm really seeing are people finding new ways to distribute extremely small amounts of money, online- and feeding the dopamine addiction big networking worked so hard to trigger in people through tiktok, instagram, facebook and the like. While many of those people are no longer on those networks, they still have this inherited character issue, and this certainly isn't going to help them grow as people, and remediate that character flaw, bringing them into new awareness of self and of their spiritual well being.

With that all said,

What I would really like to see, are people forming charities, and contributing larger amounts of funds and then donating it directly to charities, teaching them either how to hold the funds in cold storage, and apply them as needed to real world scenarios, or working together to harness this new excitement and energy in ways that inspire developers to bring rapidly a great many useful things into the sphere, rather than just zapping eachother all day. That's a lot of wasted creative potential.

Perhaps we need to establish bounties on solving creative thinking issues, and abstract them to not just typical "re-design, this with nostr" use cases, but apply this idiomatic to actually generating ways that society can function better, with less govt reliance, because this is all as currently observed, just very very 1.0 stuff... lets go to 3.0 and then 4.0, and build self sustaining networks that can remove large swaths of the GDP, for example, or do other powerful things, like eliminate the need to work...

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 22 Feb 2023

Lol the way you summarised early zap culture is so spot in its hilarious there's already some accounts that may not have got much play on other social media and this is a chance to reinvent themselves and start from zero, engage a lot and recycle sats between one another and build a following, and who knows it might work out for them.

I can easily see this turning into engagement pods, lets say we are 10 users and we all put in 10 000k sats we can recycle the sats between us to make it look like we're so generous so people will follow to try and get into the drip and build accounts, plenty of the engagement hacking things we see on linkedin, twitter and insta will come to nostr

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @halalmoney OP 22 Feb 2023

Hopefully the fun element of zapping will be combined with the adversarial mindset mentioned quite often within “Bitcoin culture”. So, if you suspect you are being conned into zapping you can send your sats elsewhere.

10 sats \ 4 replies \ @halalmoney OP 21 Feb 2023

Thanks for your thoughts. I especially like your last paragraph:

“Perhaps we need to establish bounties on solving creative thinking issues, and abstract them to not just typical "re-design, this with nostr" use cases, but apply this idiomatic to actually generating ways that society can function better, with less govt reliance, because this is all as currently observed, just very very 1.0 stuff... lets go to 3.0 and then 4.0, and build self sustaining networks that can remove large swaths of the GDP, for example, or do other powerful things, like eliminate the need to work...”

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @JohnRawlins 21 Feb 2023

happy to contribute to the discussion.

I think the biggest things moving forward as a society (both as individuals and individuals as parts of groups) gaining inter-correlated self sufficiency are going to be on the community level,

and as things move forward, people will gain trust in themselves, and their neighbors again, and folks they live around.

what i'm egging at here is multifold, but in specificity, we need to foster a barter and skilled trade economy, and make this work to reduce the negative impact of what's coming. re:cbdc's. the BIS and the IMF have been working on their pilot programs for the greater bit of 15 years now, on and off in various parts of the world, and it's coming together at an alarming, and quiet rate.

if we're to keep people living how they want and even improve their quality of life, people need to start functioning differently, and by this i mean moving away from their acclimatized transactional behavior.

I've got a wonderful idea for a site to accomplish just this, but it's been a real burden trying to find people that can actually see the good it would accomplish, rather than just me waving money in front of them and saying here, lets code this thing. I'm doing it this way for two reasons - i don't actually have the money to pay them, and its a turing test for those who can actually see the thing, and why it's so sorely needed in our world today. (i have the dedicated debian server, and a great domain all set up and waiting to go..) :) the project is called "will trade" and i've got willtrade.org

but anyhow, I digress, for the time being.

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @halalmoney OP 21 Feb 2023

I hope project “will trade” works out well.

Keep us posted please - on stacker news or whatever platform/protocol works well for you.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @JohnRawlins 4 Apr 2023

https://willtrade.org

it's live. it uses pleroma and federates with activity pub to the 7 million or so people on the network...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @JohnRawlins 21 Feb 2023

Thank you so very much.. I will.

Right now I've got one guy in Italy that wants to work on it, and looking for a few other good folks. anyone interested can drop a line to hello @yeshua.is and let me know what they're good at.

There are some notes about how it would function here, for anyone reading this and intrigued:

https://www.writehere.is/nwo/tag:willtrade

878 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 21 Feb 2023

good question, i think about this a lot.

i also wonder how zaps could change the importance of text, photo, video, and ephemeral formats on social media.

will people zap written content and visual content in the same ratios that they “like” written and visual content today? what about disappearing stories?

and what kinds of information (cute puppy videos? ) are people willing to like but not willing to zap?

452 sats \ 0 replies \ @Anonomoto 21 Feb 2023

I wish to see the like button removed and replaced with zaps.

It seems like the perfect time to do so.

735 sats \ 0 replies \ @monk_cactus 21 Feb 2023

Looks like we're on the same wavelength today, I made this post earlier: note1pyrca02fkyale9n7rnxr9gnk7ca455gw4805m6pmvu7zu5srsdjsqk6usz

A few people chimed in with their thoughts in that thread.

I think there will be a lot of low-quality but highly zapped content out there. Essentially Marvel movies on Nostr

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 21 Feb 2023

IME it biases people toward being more polite than they otherwise would be online. I don't think encouraging politeness necessarily leads to group think.

Politeness has a good side and a bad side. Just like the absence of incentive to be polite has a good side and a bad side.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @037447d9ca 22 Feb 2023 freebie

Zaps are not a new thing on the internet, STEEM had this feature since 2016. There's a lot to learn from that experience.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @JohnRawlins 4 Apr 2023

[[[UPDATE]]]]

WILLTRADE.org is now LIVE.

This is the barter and skilled trade and gifting platform I was talking about , back in Feb in this thread.

https://willtrade.org

 discussed on

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @SpaceHodler 21 Feb 2023

Currently most zaps are worth pennies, sometimes sub-penny, which probably doesn't make people think that much before zapping.

Yet people with a large following and adding value to the community (not necessarily directly with their posts, but e.g. building open-source software, creating music, art, writing quality articles, tutorials etc. and announcing their work on Nostr) can fetch decent donations. This is a new economy, based on micro-donations rewarding people's effort, which can be anything from the micro scale (such as a meme or a joke) to work that could be published via traditional channels, but whose author chooses the new way, which is more fluid, scalable, decentralized and free.

Personally I feel I'm more likely to reward quality contributions with zaps than I am with likes.

I guess the issue with voluntary donations is there will always be people who choose to consume content for free. But for what it's worth, while I've always embraced the BitTorrent way of life, I've been finding myself zapping for Nostr notes and stacker.news posts and comments with little resistance. The small amounts make it easy to swallow, especially knowing that people are also zapping me. I'm happy to zap because I can afford it, and I know that when I can afford more I'll zap more, and karma will do its job, because with this new financial system there is no friction in its way.

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bubba 21 Feb 2023

Sad to say damn near everything works toward group think. If its on the internet. Echo chambers are popular but damaging in the long run

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @02777e5262 21 Feb 2023

The content quality won’t be perfect, but will definitely improve. Bots and brigading, which are frequently used to manipulate low quality, low fact, or agenda-driving content to the top of rankings, are greatly discouraged. I think the discourse will become much more civil. Outrage as an incentive goes away. These are just a couple improvements.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 22 Feb 2023

Both.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @halalmoney OP 22 Feb 2023

“zapping is NOT just a donation for percieved value-add or some charitable thing. It is that.

But it is also a payment in a auction for having one's name,handle, pubkey associated with a note.

People will start to bid for this association as nostr grows into the millions of users in 2023”

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @halalmoney OP 22 Feb 2023

“Observation:

Posts on Nostr are much less “edgy” than those on Twitter.

Despite being able to post freely about any topic, Nostr postrs don’t seem compelled to make edgy statements.

It seems that an awareness of suppression makes many people more inclined to test the limits of suppression.

In an environment where suppression is not an issue, people are free to focus on things that are enjoyable, creative, and productive.

Will Nostr thrive without the drama and controversy that other social media algorithms optimize for?”

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @halalmoney OP 22 Feb 2023

“Nostr is a city.

It feels nice and peaceful right now because the demographic is homogenous.

Pure homogeneity can lead to stagnation and atrophy since no muscles are being challenged. This is unsustainable.

Twitter farmed engagement from intentionally causing conflict. Strategy of tension. Clearly this is also unsustainable.

It will be interesting to see if Nostr can attract the right balance demographics to survive and thrive.”

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @2minutebitcoin 22 Feb 2023

It should be strictly better than group-think, because one person who feels strongly can counteract much of the group-think zaps by just zapping a greater amount.

Compared to one thumbs up, it's a meaningful improvement.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 22 Feb 2023

Like anything we give humans, we will find a way to abuse it until we come to a healthy relationship with it and then there will always be a cohort of nutters that simply lose themselves in it, that's just my summation of what I've seen on traditional social media and I think it will roll over into Nostr and the monetary aspect will supercharge certain things

I do think zaps foster groupthink and self-censorship because you don't want to upset the apple cart because it could mean losing out on zaps, like how when influencers get big they clean up so they don't lose followers and try to have a healthy churn where those that see their cookie cutter content is boring and leave, but the there are always new ones joining who are just there because well this person has a high follower account.

I think that zaps are a novelty that will wear off eventually with time, right now its a new tool, people want to try it out but we get used to it and later the zaps will dry up and people will not zap just about anything unless they want to make a statement or attract some sort of attention

I think that there will be all sorts of weird and wonderful ways, to zap farm and this is only the beginning also a lot of people will get scammed out of their sats and that's just a reality

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @HardMoney 22 Feb 2023

SN has a pretty diverse set of viewpoints. Zaps are basically an extension of what SN has been doing for awhile

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bshell 21 Feb 2023

If porn sites were all shut down completely, and they only were monitized via sats, would porn be as widespread as it is now on the web?

I would think no.