Introduction
Hi guys. Just wanted to point out a potential function of @anon. You could call it an exploit of sorts, or you could just say its a feature not a bug. I'm not proposing that it needs fixed, but I wanted to see what the community thinks of it.
The current situation
Currently, if someone decides to boost a post, they have to use >5k of their own hard earned sats. Those sats will then get paid into the pool and distributed to other stackers. Stackers can see what posts were boosted or not, which is useful information in determining whether a post is being semi-artificially promoted.
The @anon boost exploit
However, it is possible to similarly boost a post without the OP paying any extra sats and without the disclaimer that the post has been boosted. Using @anon, they can zap the post 5k sats to make it look like someone just dumped 5k sats on their post. The OP gets all the sats sent to their SN wallet, so they've only lost a couple sats in fees.
I'll demonstrate this on this post itself, which will have >5k sats zapped to it by @anon within a few minutes of my posting it.
Solution
Is this reason to be worried? Not really. SN already takes into account how many different users have zapped a post, and @anon only counts as a single stacker. Thus, it would be the same as if I made an alt account to zap myself. It makes the number big, but may not change the post's rankings too much, as rankings are by default organized by a mix of sats and unique zappers, not the pure number of sats.
If @k00b or anyone feels this is a reasonably problamatic exploit then they could potentially differential @anon zaps from regular zaps. Of course, the exploit can just be done using an alt account, but it still might help.
Conclusion
@anon zaps allow for a stacker to boost their post without actually spending any satoshis. This "exploit" could be used to create artificial traffic on the site. Although existing pieces of the algorithm would likely prevent this from becoming a massive issue, it could be mitigated by differentiating @anon zaps from regular zaps.
Let me know what you guys think of this in the comments.