Great description of the differences between SN and nostr.

Because zaps aren't large economic amounts (often ranging from fractions of pennies to a dollar or so) it feels like public zaps would tilt the signal from zaps too far towards social and away from economic.

I wouldn't be looking at zap amount as much as zap amount + zap sender. Currently, when i see a post with 10k sats, I usually know it's going to be worth checking out, even if the title doesn't grab me. I really enjoy how clean this signal is.

I know SN is not pure economic signal (most sats != most seen content) and that trust plays a role. But I also like that I don't have to think about it too much. Private zaps facilitate this.

I wonder what it would be like if there was a mode of SN front page where the only thing you could see about posts was how much they had been zapped (no title, no stacker name, no date?). It might be an interesting content discovery mode.