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It is hard on newbies
Yep, posting will be more expensive and maybe not even just initially, but overall for everyone since even if you post good content, it will be more expensive for you if you don't zap regularly. More zaps flying around sounds good, but not if it makes the experience worse for everyone by feeling like they now have to zap. Which is a good transition to your next point:
Positive reinforcement is better than negative reinforcement
Thank you for being the first who mentions this. I totally agree, I was just too lazy to mention this and simply said "There are a lot of UX issues with lower fees for zaps" in #771516 👀
In my perfect world, the base case for SN is a free market [...]
However, rewards were one of the things that blew my mind when I first started using SN and definitely got me more engaged than I might otherwise have been. [...]
Rewards are clearly an important part of how SN functions.
Same happened to me when I joined SN and I agree, they are an important part. I am just worried about rewards becoming too important and some new stackers "never growing out of them", diluting the v4v part of SN. It's all just feelings though. I don't have any numbers that I can point to, though I haven't even tried to find such numbers.
Btw, good description of the "theories" I am trying to unify: the perfect world of v4v vs a world where outcomes follow incentives. Both make sense but if you put them together, you get messy, misaligned rewards as we have now. Can we not do better?
Rewards are the incentive least directly connected to the behavior that produces them.
[...]
I'd love to see rewards become more specifically tied to the behavior they are trying to reward.
Oh, good point, I totally forgot that we had plans to make this better, we just didn't have time yet. Thanks for reminding me!
Gradually improving the issues in the current system instead of throwing it out for a new one with new (bigger?) issues definitely sounds smarter.