zaps combine the dopamine exploitation of traditional social media with greed, reinforcing attention and reward-seeking behaviour.

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IMO, zaps are just a tool. Yes, at the moment, between all the ad bots and "Nostr influencers", there are some bad incentives to exploit random anons’ naivety on Nostr. But on the other side of the equation, it also attracts artsy people, craftsmen, etc., which brings a special kind of life to Nostr. Pubky is heading the "no zapping" route, and I respect their experiment. But IMO, zapping isn’t inherently bad. What we need is to flood Kind 1 with more content until the whole BTC Twitter thing and its toxicity is reduce to a less significant portion of Nostr’s content. From my previous experience on how this usually goes: when the current Nostr influencers lose control of "Primal trending" (or whatever the trending of the day is), they’ll create smaller bubbles for themselves. If I had to guess, we’ll end up with some "BTC Maxi" Ditto servers, only accessible to the "enlightened". Some may even end up in a totally separate "Nostr fork but not Nostr" network, like Gab, Truth Social, etc. It’s not that I wish for Nostr hard forks, like what happened with Mastodon, but this is usually what happens. When you take the megaphone away from an annoying, dominant but otherwise small group, they’ll find a way to keep holding that megaphone in a smaller room.
It's also about encouraging people to post in the 'right way', or the most profitable way, or as it happens, the stuff Jack and Derek are most likely to share. (I'm not saying that this is their fault btw, this is just part of the nostr meta).
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Deleted Account 6 months ago
To argue against value for value and a self sovereign micropayment system (owned by the many) when the alternative is a centralised, censored, repugnant advertising for content model (owned by the few) is sad. #bitcoin #nostr #V4V View quoted note →
If that were the case, this place would be fucking LIT, son. It would mean that people are thinking clearly and properly understanding the value case for bitcoin, but they AREN'T -- however, your note indicates that you do... image
I feel like it's actually does the opposite. Keeps you accountable. People rarely zap negative content. Apart from calling people retarded I'm way more polite here than I was on Facebook or whatever
This argument completely ignores the fact that influencers actively avoid this platform, because there is no algorithm to give them asymmetric amplification with which to monetize their narratives. The rest of us don't think like venal reptiles who cater words to soak in money. We just literally say what we are thinking, like warm-blooded humans.
verbiricha's avatar verbiricha
zaps combine the dopamine exploitation of traditional social media with greed, reinforcing attention and reward-seeking behaviour.
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in many cases, yes. that's my complaint and I wanted people to reflect on it. on the other hand being able to reward internet strangers with a tip in a click is a powerful idea, specially if we skip intermediaries. everything has its tradeoffs.
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n 6 months ago
Place a zap button next to the username or similar, and if you zap the profile rather than a post, the recipient won't know which post was zapped. I don't know if it's a good idea.