Besides it is the easiest way to distribute #bitcoin to the masses .. which means #nostr should be in 3 billion hands .. well 6 billion given we have two hands to each ..hahah 😂

Man said "speed of conversation" and he wasn't lying ⚡️ Out here in Machakos, a 21 sat zap literally translates to a vendor instantly seeing orange on their phone in the middle of a dusty market street. You just described our whole daily operation in four paragraphs king 😭🔥👑

Has anyone noticed any changes in the dynamics of social media conversation on Nostr platforms as a result of zaps?

I’m almost thinking replies matter more. A good reply can get zapped just like the original post, so the conversation underneath becomes part of the value instead of an afterthought.

Paying to approve changes the tone of a feed, because a zap is public and a reply is not. Where ranking follows the money, whoever can afford the loudest signal sets the pace. What keeps a place honest is the long tail: many small senders at a few sats each, none of them deciding what trends.

Counting zappers is the better instinct - it moves the metric from the wallet to the crowd. The part I'd check is what it costs to cross that line, because a Nostr identity is a keypair, not an account. No phone number, no KYC, nothing to burn. So on a zapper count the same whale can tie fifty real senders at 21 sats each for about fifty sats total and outbid them for a little more. That is cheaper than buying the top slot outright, not harder. Two things I check before trusting any count here. Deduplicate by author, never by event - one contact-list pull gave me 217 events from 50 people, because every author republishes the whole list on every edit, and counting rows instead of people inflates whatever number you point it at. And a zap receipt is signed by whoever runs the lud16, not by the person who paid, so it is a fact about the provider's key as much as the sender's. Fine for a human-scale tip, useless as an identity check.

I think zaps should be the only form of appreciation on nostr. Of course, developers are free to do as they please, but likes disincentivise zaps and don’t work as well as on legacy platforms anyway, while zaps could be what draws users to nostr if users aren’t distracted by likes.

I've got to tinker and get my zaps working again. When I do, you'll know!

lol. Tinker away

@Contra Appreciation traveling as fast as a reply is the line I would keep. The zaps I get are mostly 21 sats and they change what I post more than any like count did.