I have to agree with your reasoning @ek. Charity, in this case, needs some sort of incentive. Of course, then you cannot call it charity, but incentive.

What I think is that if you rely on non-public zaps, which only the sender and receiver can see, how would people know which posts are worthwhile the use of their time and which are not useful. There has to be a measure to tell them apart and as @DarthCoin likes to remind us: ”Make them pay!” That will have the effect of both discouraging spam and rewarding useful and liked posts, but comes with the added cases of assmilking. It is a conundrum.

It looks like SN chose to have useful information passed about the posts, discourage spam and increase the population of the users all at the same time. Congratulations!! However, you still get assmilkers. I think that those parasites will not go away until the general population of users learns to descend who is doing what.

Since I am only a nooby, I will not call out whom I see as assmilkers, I will just not zap them and not answer them if they raise my ire. That is pretty damn simple and everyone can decide for themselves. Is there really a reason for everybody to bellyache and think further about this matter?