What i find really interesting is that the defensive zaps mostly (70%) go to the stackers who work on the posts you zapped, while the downzaps 100% go to the reward pool. So on any kind of longer term scale, zaps ought to promote the kind of content we want to see more than downzaps discourage it. Downzaps only are succesful if they manage to hide the content before people notice it.

Nonetheless, it is true that we saw the true power of downzaps today.

We're certainly in your debt on this day, but norms may adapt to this environment and such outlays could become unnecessary.