Imagine that you posted something on Twitter or nostr and got a hundred replies. It might feel pretty good because lots of people were interested in what you said or it might feel pretty bad if they're not happy with what you posted.
Now imagine a hundred bots reply to your comment with badly punctuated, repetitive invitations to follow some scam account. This is not very interesting at all. You might get angry because you thought you had started a real discussion or because it seems like something weird is going on, but you'll probably move on.
Let's do one more hypothetical: what if you posted something on SN and you got zapped 1000 sats, but the zap was from an automated account trying to increase it's rank on the MSM leaderboard. Does it matter why someone zaps you?

Substance or source?

When it comes to replies, maybe it doesn't matter; afterall, it seems like a good thing to focus on the substance of what is said and not necessarily on who is doing the saying. If you get a hundred thoughtful replies to a post, who cares whether they come from bots or humans?
Then again, reading a book is a different thing than talking to a person. There can be a lot of substance in a book and not very much in a conversation, and yet we still might seek out the conversation. The substance is interesting and useful, but in order to have a conversation people must take time out of their day, time they could be using to do something else, and use it to interact with you.
Perhaps you have seen that Joaquin Phoenix movie where he falls head over heels for his operating system. The budding romance between the man and his computer stumbles when the man discovers that the computer is seeing other people (often simultaneously). While Phoenix's character seems to get over it, there's a real problem here: you can't copy love.

Likes are proof that I'm awesome (but only if they're real)

I'm a simple and sometimes shallow man; often when I post things online, I'm hoping for a positive response. I enjoy the feeling of people thinking what I posted was interesting or cool.
It's not as enjoyable to be loved by computers. A computer can compliment a billion people at the same time, but you and I can only kiss one person at a time.
Copies are cheap in the digital world, and a like from a bot feels a lot less important than the fact that someone, somewhere read what I wrote and made a decision to signify that. Maybe it's just supply and demand--but maybe not: there's this famous thing Adam Smith said: 'Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.'

When you make copies of love, you get flattery

We can't see what's lovely about ourselves except through the eyes of another. This is why looking in a mirror is so rarely a pleasant experience. It's hard to see a copy of yourself as lovely, but there's no other way to get a glimpse of ourselves--unless we ask others. A big part of what social media does is scratch this itch to feel lovely by letting us find out what others think of us.
Can a computer make us feel lovely? I'm sure we can get something like ChatGPT to say nice things about us, but at the moment it certainly doesn't feel like much more than flattery. It may know what a compliment sounds like, but meaning it is another thing entirely.

It's not lovelyness if it doesn't come from the freely-given part of France

Perhaps the reason we aren't satisfied with bot-likes is related to the way that it doesn't feel as good to get likes if you pay for them. Paying people to tell you that you are lovely makes the likes much less convincing.
What we want out of likes is the sensation that we are genuinely interesting. But people will do things just for the money, and so the likes that are paid for don't help us know that we are lovely. I don't think we know, yet, why computers do things. Before ChatGPT, I would have said computers do things because they have to follow the code. If that is still the case, then bot likes don't help us feel lovely because they aren't genuine, and it's as simple as that.

We don't like likes we zap sats

Zaps can't be "done cheaply" or "faked" like likes and upvotes can. A sat is a sat, whether a bot sends it to you or I do.
How would you feel if there was a bot on SN that zapped every one of your posts? Would that feel less good than some stacker doing the zapping?
I'd probably try to automate my posts so I could get a bunch of sats from the bot. With bots, it's not about the interaction, it's about the arbitrage. A bot that zaps every post is a faucet.

Is there such a thing as a genuine zap?

Money is money and if you want to throw me some sats, I certainly don't care why you do it. But when I don't understand why you are zapping me, do I start treating you like a bot? Or worse, like a faucet?
There has been a lot of conversation about how SN's experiment this month is changing behavior on the site.
It seems stackers aren't zapping what they might once have zapped because they don't think it will have a payoff or they are zapping content they wouldn't normally zap in order to increase their zaprank. In short, it's become a little more transactional.
SN introduced social media intertwined with sats--something completely new as far as I know. Zaps provide signal, return value to thoughtful posters and commenters, and likely prevent spam.
But SN isn't just about the zaps. There is a community here and we enjoy each other's company...or least we enjoy yammering back and forth at each other. Using SN isn't just a commercial interaction.
@k00b and crew have done an incredible job navigating the difference between commercial interaction and social interaction--creating a use case for money that is completely novel. I don't think social media will ever be the same. I wonder if money will.
How does it feel when bots zap your posts? πŸ€–βš‘
Remember when social media was brand new? When you got an upvote or like (or fav) for the first time ever? When it was new and exciting? Little electric adenaline in your fingers?
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28 sats \ 1 reply \ @Asara 21 Mar
Zaps feel more personal than likes. I get the same feeling as I use to when I got FB pokes.
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Agreed. But I would rather know who zapped me than them all be anonymous. I zapped you 1 sat, btw.
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How would you know when a bot zaps your post, zaps are anonymous?
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Maybe that's what I'm getting at: with zaps it really doesn't matter...so much so that they can be anonymous.
Likes... not so much.
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As long as zaps are anonymous, the bots can do it to their heart's content, and I won't know (or care, because as you note, money is money). It's crappy interactions I'd be more concerned about (and I'd mute them harshly, which I also did on Twitter back when it was a thing).
If it came out after the fact that, say, 20 sats on every zapped post of mine came from a bot, I don't think it would bother me much; but if I found out that literally 75% of my sats here came from bot activity, it would feel a little depressing. The sats are nice, of course, but I also just enjoy having my ego boosted, and that would be a blow.
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I feel silly for omitting any discussion of bots from my post yesterday (#473181): they are the most likely mechanism that will push SN towards the outcome I was warning about.
If the incentives on the site remain fairly easy to figure out (and still not entirely aligned with zapping quality content), then bots will arbitrage the rewards system. That will mean exaggeratedly big rewards for the bot owners and the top stackers, at the cost of lower rewards for genuine engagement.
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Your post was very thought-provoking.
I hope I didn't make it sound like SN has lots of bot accounts or anything like that.
More, I was trying to think about how money changes social media interactions.
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Thanks.
I think this was a great follow up to my post. I love the way you articulated how we could come to treat each other as faucets. That's a horrible thought, but it is definitely one of the ways SN could fail.
I've had to change some of my zapping habits fairly recently, because I felt like I was getting some comments that were just fishing for sats.
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The hope is that with zaps in our taps humans become heavier weights in the algorithms.
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That certainly seems to be the case. Bots thrive in low marginal cost environments, so the posting fees here are helping to keep them at bay.
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This really became clear to me when I first started playing with the AI chat tools. Its not so much that I was impressed by the machines. I was more depressed about how robotic humans are. I include myself in that when I'm doing writing for work at least.
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What I mean by this is that these LLM chat apps are very good at doing formulaic writing. Business writing is very formulaic. So is academic writing. There are mountains of this data for these algos to chew on. I suspect the tools will get better. They are about 50/50 for me at this point but my point is that this isn't creativity. Its pattern copying. I really have to bite my tongue when people tell me they are terrified about AI taking over. I'm more concerned about the dumbing of humanity. At the rate we are going we are gonna need AI tools to function.
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Include me in the list as well. πŸ˜‚
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πŸ˜‚
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then the majority of them πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚
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Fair enough. And that way things seem more human. πŸ˜‚
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I would prefer genuine zapping but if bots want to give me sats I am not going to complain. On social media the bot experience is highly annoying because they comment and even if they are just liking posts and not commenting you get a notification whereas on SN you only get a notification for how many total sats your post or comment has stacked so you aren't inundated with notifications of every single zap, which is a much cleaner experience.
I created a twitter account for the stacker sports territory and I think I have had 4 or 5 genuine interactions with that account on twitter in 5 weeks and the rest are all bots. It is pretty much unusable as a new account.
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Twitter remains a mystery to me. I agree that the cumulative zap total notification on SN is a great feature.
And I think most of us probably don't mind getting extra sats, whatever the source. That's the magic of sats.
Overall, the experience becomes cleaner, as you say. And less irksome than legacy social media.
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Sometimes my wallet of satoshi lightning wallet gets zapped satograms. I never mind. I don't read the messages. Thanks for the sat(s).
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Agreed. As long as its not 1 sat spam replies... but 1 sat is 1 sat...
The game theory is that it becomes too costly to run these bot armies, at least without enough suckers falling for the scams and feeding their machine. I mean, i know it costs money to put junk mail in my mailbox, but companies do it when they know the monetary tradeoff.
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What are you talking? My default zap amount is 1 sat. I freely zap posts and comments, be they worth or not. Does that make me human-robot?
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I guess its the sat-o-grams that annoy me. Imagine if your bank statements had 1 penny deposits from strangers that included spam memos.
Thanks for the money, but keep your spam out of my brain.
1 sat zaps are fine tho!! I zap 3 sats and give my finger a workout if I like something. Its like clapping πŸ˜‚πŸ€£
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My kids make fun of me when I start tap tap tapping my phone really fast. They like the lightning though.
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My daughter loves to zap on SN. I haven’t done it in awhile but I used to let her sit on my lap and go on a zapping spree.
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πŸ€£πŸ˜‚β€οΈβ€πŸ”₯
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I have not had the privilege
Zap me bots πŸ€–!
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The entire issue is the reason bitcoin, and zaps, exist. 'Likes' cost nothing and are spam. 'Zaps' cost the spammer, and any adequate economic model will disincentivize that.
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There are no bots sending me PayPal or Cash app.
So the problem you are describing is solely due to incentives from SN. Fix/Improve the incentives or add penalties for gaming the incentives and your concern should disappear.
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I don't think there are many (any?) Bots zapping people. I was trying to get at the way zaps feel different than likes or comments. And how they change our behavior on social media.
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It seems stackers aren't zapping what they might once have zapped because they don't think it will have a payoff or they are zapping content they wouldn't normally zap in order to increase their zaprank. In short, it's become a little more transactional.
I deny. I am not doing it that way nor I am being so much over-stressed with the MSM. May be that the behaviour of stackers have changed a little due to MSM but it has definitely brought the madness back. Or, correct me if I am wrong, we have witnessed some of the best content on SN only largely because of MSM.
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