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It’s interesting. This thread is kind of proving the point.

If downzaps were purely about content quality, you’d expect them to track arguments.

But the pattern here looks more like they’re tracking who is speaking and how it lands, not just what’s being said.

That doesn’t make them useless. They still counter spam and low-effort boosts, but it does suggest they’re carrying more than one signal:

• content disagreement
• social/identity reaction
• timing/incentive effects

So the real question might not be “are downzaps good or bad,” but:

what signal are we actually pricing?

what signal are we actually pricing?

It’s whatever signal people want to give, which is why we need an easy way to see the canceled content.

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444 sats \ 2 replies \ @Yermin 5h

If the signal is

“whatever people want to give,”

then a downzapped feed is just as arbitrary as the main feed.

You’re just flipping the sort.

The real issue isn’t visibility, it’s signal integrity:

are downzaps measuring content quality, or something else?

If it’s the latter, then both feeds are just different projections of the same noise.

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No clue what the signal really shows, we can’t ever know what everyone’s thinking when they up/down zap!

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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @adlai 5h
we can’t ever know what everyone’s thinking when they up/down zap

right. I sometimes even include "please comment rather than zapping unless you have absolutely nothing to add"

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