3212 sats \ 44 replies \ @Undisciplined 13 Jan \ on: Stacker Saloon
I've reached something of an equilibrium in my initial search for the optimal default zap. For a couple weeks now, I've been hovering around 270.
Now I want to refine my approach.
Rather than just zapping everything I like 1/1000th of my wallet balance, I'd like to add some nuance. Here are the terms of my next experiment:
- Normal/small comments get 1/10,000 of my balance (currently 27 sats)
- Normal/short posts or insightful comments get 1/1000 of my balance (currently 270 sats)
- Longer thoughtful posts get 1/100 of my balance (currently 2700 sats)
I'll be utilizing the turbo zaps feature for this, so watch out for accidentally large zaps!
How are other people's (@ekzyis and @elvismercury) current zap experiments going?
I like this method a lot -- I'll steal it, or something like it, after January. I'm slowly bleeding out from 1k zaps, and it's produced a couple of informal effects on myself: I zap zero in cases where I would have zapped my old default of 22x. There's a serious friction to the floor being 4x more than your old floor. I could, with great effort, over-ride it, but part of the game was to see what would happen, and that's what's happening.
Based on @ekzyis's kick-ass reporting, I suspect that I could be slightly in the black if I posted a lot, but I just don't have the time to do that. This needs greater investigation, since it's at tension with another thing I believe 100%, which is the outsized benefits of action. But the type of action matters a lot: in the time I devote to SN, I spend it overwhelmingly on comments, and I spend a lot of mental effort on them. But a comment is extremely unlikely to get you enough zaps to keep you in the black; so it's clear where effort should be allocated if you're looking to not get rekt.
Anyway, I think I'll get through January without blowing my balance to zero, and while this isn't about making money, I don't have unlimited appetite to lose money, either, so maybe your methodology will help with that, along with more effort at posting [1].
The thing I cared the most about -- to show people who are producing things that I think are undervalued that they are seen and cared for, with the hope of inspiring them to do more of it -- seems to have not manifested. Still a negligible number of link posts with good descriptions -- you and @siggy47 are the main exceptions that come to mind. Still very little experimentation in form or different perspectives besides the obvious btc ones. But a ship like that will turn slowly, if at all, so I haven't given up. I think the bigger lever for this is modeling. @ekzyis and @davidw have been burning it up on this one lately, and if I find it inspiring and thought-provoking, I'm sure others do, too.
[1] Ironically, this should probably have been an interim report post. So meta.
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a comment is extremely unlikely to get you enough zaps to keep you in the black; so it's clear where effort should be allocated if you're looking to not get rekt.
I'd love to make great comments competitive with great posts. Comments on
home aren't great feng shui, but maybe we can surface hot global comments some other way.reply
I like that idea, the tricky thing is comments require more context. So if there were a way to make it as “top conversations” than just comments, I think it might have more success.
Most people are not aware that ranking for upvoting top comments is WAY easier than ranking for upvoting posts. To me that’s plenty of incentive already to engage with comments and a way for them to compete with posts.
Comments can be extremely detailed and valuable, but there is plenty of work in posts, especially those generally speaking with more sats & longer word counts.
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I know it's already part of how things become "hot", but maybe there could be another feed specifically for hot conversations that only weighs the zaps to comments. (or, something like that)
That would be cool -- the context thing would be an interesting challenge, though a fun one, and it would help w/ notifications, too. You wrap the thing you're being notified about in a bundle of context so it can be interpreted.
(Perhaps could also incentivize people to make their comments more 'sovereign' in that they contain enough ingredients to be interpretable with minimal other context.)
You could always just have a feed of "hot comments" treated as a territory? If you wanted to not do something bespoke. But what the hell do I know. Well, I know that such a thing would probably be more interesting to me than the post-centric version, as I can dig into any conversational cul-de-sac regardless of topic if it's hopping, but many things I won't see because the post's topic is not a particular interest of mine.
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This might be a good example of what you're talking about.
No one would have any reason to suspect this interesting little chat, that belonged in ~meta, was in a ~Stacker_Sports post, but it would have been nice for more people to have weighted in on it.
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Perfect illustration, thanks for providing one. It's fun to imagine how one could display this on some kind of feed, and how its candidacy for such a feed could be determined. First thing that comes to mind is a weighted-subtree thing, e.g., sum up the zaps of the whole subtree, and then show the highest ones; or the subtree up to some depth, or only top-level sub-trees bc the first thing I said is computationally unfeasible...
And then what to show for it? The parent comment? An LLM-summary of the subtree? The parent comment + a summary? Lots of cool things you could pilot. Harder to figure out how to do user influence on top of it, though -- graph embeddings beyond my paygrade, but maybe some simpler way would be 60% as good.
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And then what to show for it?
That's tough, because the interesting topic could have started anywhere in the tree. Just showing the parent comment might not give any sense of why that subtree generated so much value.
Even if there are good LLM summaries of the conversation, they will still have to decide where to send users who want to check out the thread.
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If there's a high-value embedded comment lower in the subtree, it would hopefully have been zapped appropriately, though, right? And practically speaking, it's not usually that onerous to read a subtree. It's rare for them to cross the "see more replies" boundary, empirically. Or at least, that's my sense.
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I think you're probably right. I haven't thought about what kind of metric to look at, but it should be pretty easy to at least get close to where the interesting conversation started.
top-level sub-trees
This is something we've been planning to do, ie rank sub-tree roots by their sub-tree's zap sum. Posts, being sub-tree roots themselves, could also see their ranking enhanced when they contain a great sub-tree.
We'd do this when writing the zap at a cost
log(zap_depth), ie one update for every ancestor.reply
Illustrating a principle with a concrete act, e.g., if you want to see more posts that surface old content and add value to it, provide commentary that synthesizes things, etc., then you should create those things yourself and model it for others.
I zap zero in cases where I would have zapped my old default of 22x
I've noticed myself doing this a little bit with comments that aren't nothing, but also where 270 seemed a bit rich. Someone mentioned having a low zap that basically just acknowledges the other person. So 27 from me is sort of a "don't leave me hanging" zap.
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the default zap for me is 210 atm, and the other zapping depends on my mood, so I'm a mood based zapper ( also depends on how much interaction I've with that stacker ) probably not so "good" in terms for the rewards wise, but it's more fun. 🤔
and where's the SSL from yesterday? @ekzyis
Beginning of Secret Sauce Live? I still have 10min to proofread before posting (and another 10min after posting) because I just posted this and I don't want to pay 33% of my wallet to post this post.
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Your mood has probably served you better than whatever strategy most of the other stackers are using.
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It's hard for most bitcoiners to fight their own stinginess, even when it would clearly benefit them. Without a strategy most of our purse strings get tight.
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but Bitcoiners should be mostly rationalists? and according to conservation of energy
The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form of energy to another.
so zapping sats to someone, something else should be back right? maybe not in sats, but in other forms, it could be new knowledge, fun or something else...🤔
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People aren't rational most of the time. They develop heuristics and operate off of those. The "HODL" mentality is deeply ingrained in the community and it anchors people towards stinginess, even in circumstances where generosity is highly rewarded.
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reminds me of a discussion I had with someone - do you know why some chefs are more well-known than others? Not because they actually cook the best, but because they are sharing their "recipes."
sharing often leads to more happiness, e.g. when it comes to food, there are different feelings when you are sharing with others VS eating alone, even with the same food.
so what good does that do even if you got all the Bitcoin in the world but no one there to share with?
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That made me think of the psychology research that shows people enjoy doing favors for others more than they enjoy having favors done for them.
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safer than turbo zap but slower
There are no solutions, only tradeoffs. I want the speed...for now.
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So the day I get 2700 sats from you is the day I know I have made it as a content creator 😆
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Or it's just the day you got an accidental double click. Now, if you ever get 27,000 sats, you can be pretty sure I was trying to zap you 2700 for a great post.
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lol. Btw how did you come to the conclusion that 270 sats is the optimal zap for you, rather than raising it higher to say, 388 sats?
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It's not inherently fixed here. I explained my search procedure in this post.
Basically, I was looking for the amount that caused me to break even, on average, with my SN usage. That amount happened to be about 270 sats.
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Thanks! I read your post before but reading it again made me float over to DarthCoin’s comment and learn that if you donate sats to the pool, you may just receive back your donation (and more) the next day. Gonna try that haha
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Let me know how it goes.
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Just donated 50 sats to the pool haha. I’ll see how things turn out
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Interesting experiment, reminds me of the saying a penny for your thoughts. Trying to think of a clever saying for satoshis.
How are other people's (@ekzyis and @elvismercury) current zap experiments going?
Am I not writing every day how my current zap experiment is going? :)
But I guess you are right, I kind of lost to share what I learned in these posts like I did in the beginning.
Will think more about this and reply here or create a post or just add them to my next Z2Z post.
Food for thought…..
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