I do think the leaderboard, while I like it, has had a negative effect on big zapping and incentivized optimizing for rewards. Before stackers weren’t really aware of how many rewards they would get at the end of the day so they just went on about their day posting, commenting and zapping. I think they are more strategic now because they know zapping top content early will garner more rewards so they might zap more posts but less sats than before.

I also think there are a lot of new stackers around and it does take awhile to figure out it’s ok to zap a lot. It is good for the community and you will likely get it all back in zaps and rewards. I think it takes some time to be comfortable with that.

I also think territories had something to do with it. I need to ensure I have 100k sats in my wallet when it is time to pay the monthly territory fee. If the territory only brings in 20k sats revenue in a month then I need to set aside 80k sats over the month for the fee. Thats less sats I have to zap.