98 sats \ 16 replies \ @grayruby 1 Apr \ parent \ on: Stacker Saloon
Can your zapping finger stay irrational longer than your wallet can stay solvent?
I think my balance is publicly visible. I'd say my zapping finger is looking pretty rational right now.
I've been telling people for the past year that they aren't zapping enough.
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Just zapping won't get it done. I zapped over around 10k sats to themadnessking NCAA pool and I zapped 30k sats to the music video post for the great song manlikekweks and joemartinmusic created but because those aren't prominent accounts it did nothing to my standing.
The zaprank is a being gamed and it actually has me kind of down on SN. I don't want to spend my time optimizing my posts, comments, zaps to try and earn more rewards but that's the incentive theses contests create. I really hope the April one is an April Fools joke.
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I too hope this is an April fools joke as I don't want to waste anymore hot air on this but I see that the rewards page has changed, so it looks like MSM v2 is here for another 31 days.
It's quite obvious that some users are gaming the system.
Which as the name implies, SN has been gamified. I like to interact with comments that interest me, not should I interact, as that won't get me up the zaprankings. I feel the gamification of SN is ruining the experience.
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I think the competitiveness will decline quite a bit this month. I'm going to take a much more relaxed approach.
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This thought had crossed my mind and I hope your right. Those that went all out for 31 days, did so in the belief that it would only be for March. Now you've got to do it all over again and maybe May, June, July.
So hopefully it will settle down in the future and the sad try hards might get disillusioned over the long run. One can only hope.
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Some of my habits have probably changed, so I'll be somewhere in between February me and March me.
Fortunately, being a try hard paid off pretty well.
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As you said, the metrics were up, so I can see that they'll pursue with the current experiment until they see that people are getting bored and can't sustain that level of commitment long term.
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I think I really soured on this when I was thinking "hmmm I should have ran the pool out of my own account and got all the zaps and comments assigned to me instead of the other account that has no zaprank standing and then instead of transferring the winnings to stillstacking, I could have zapped him the winnings improving my odds of moving up even more."
I don't want to approach SN driven by perverse incentives but even after I was souring on the format and the incentives I felt compelled by sunk cost to try to at least maintain my top 10 standing.
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Maybe we should join the hidden, so that we can't even see ourselves in the rankings.
It might be useful for SN to allow something like a parent account for people like you and @ek who manage multiple accounts. There shouldn't be a rewards tradeoff between these accounts when it's all you contributing to the site.
As we get more people into these pools, I think survivor pool posts will become major posts and our zapping them will matter more.
For the time being, you're essentially acting as a philanthropist supporting the upstart areas of SN.
Even though it went very well for me, I would also prefer if they did something a bit more different. If we think about why they do these experiments, though, it makes sense that they would continue it when all of the metrics improved.
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It remains to be seen if the metrics improvement is sustainable.
One could argue a lot of the increased activity was artificial due to the contest and will go away once the contest goes away or when people get bored of the format or when some people get really good at gaming the system and the rest decide chasing on the hamster wheel is a waste of time.
I love hanging out on SN but I always look at SN from a business perspective as well. What would I do if I was running it? What needs to occur for it to go beyond a niche platform to something more? Maybe I shouldn't be looking at it that way, it is not my company after all, but it's the way I am wired and I have no other business to think about right now. Haha.
I am just going to go with the flow this month and do my thing. I don't care where I rank.
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I fully expect you're right, but it makes sense that they want to investigate further.
I am just going to go with the flow this month and do my thing. I don't care where I rank.
That's exactly how I feel, too, and I'm sure we're not alone. That will make this month the better actual test of this rewards scheme.
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