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.