It's noteworthy how these different communities have dealt with this. There's some amount of status that maps to the real world from stackoverflow activity, for instance. If you're a dev, or an expert in the relevant topic area, those upvotes matter. And it feels good to get a bunch of upvotes on Hacker News, since the people over there are generally really smart, and the level of discussion over there is really high. But it's notable that it's all fiat -- nothing is sacrificed in order to upvote something, or like it, or whatever. Which is why zaps are so interesting -- something really is sacrificed. Even if it's something tiny. And that thing is non-inflatable.

@Undisciplined talked about this the other week, wrt normalizing zap amounts. For whatever reason, most zappers on SN are ridiculously stingy -- e.g., 1 or 10-sat zaps are the default; which is such a stupidly small amount of money that it's not even worth stooping over to pick it up in real life; so it can't be that someone is so broke that they can't afford to budget a nickel per day in zapping, it's just what people are used to, and what is socially modeled.

There's something important in there, too, but it's not clear what it is, exactly.