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473 sats \ 4 replies \ @Scoresby 13h \ on: my problem with zaps the_stacker_muse
@DarthCoin is exactly correct on this point: the value of SN isn't that you earn but that you pay.
You pay to post. You pay to comment. You pay to like (zap). These are the most important parts of how SN works.
The rewards system is trickier and it may be the case that the cost to zap is not correct. Just like territory owners can select the cost to post in their territory, and setting it too low will encourage spam, perhaps providing too much in rewards is encouraging spammy zapping.
When you zap someone, there is a 30% sybil fee. This means if you zap a post 100 sats, the poster only gets 70 sats. The reason for the sybil fee is to make it costly to zap your own articles. If it wasn't costly, you could be both poster and zapper and endlessly zap yourself without any consequence -- ruining the signal provided by zaps.
If zappers are able to reliably make back their zaps (or even a profit), it stands to reason that this would also cloud (or potentially ruin) the signal provided by zaps.
So why bother with rewards at all? Well, my assumption is that people aren't used to paying money for things like "likes" or commenting and posting. Rewards are a way to soften the blow and encourage the behavior. But they are probably also a distortion.
One possible solution could be for SN to reduce the size of its donation to the daily rewards pool. (If my memory serves, it used to be 100k a good while ago and it seems to be about 50k now. Maybe it's time to drop it to 25k or something). Alternatively, the share of rewards that goes to top zappers could decrease while the share that goes to less active zappers increases (this might just increase the number of sock puppets on SN, though).
In general, I think financialization of our interactions online is actually pretty great. I believe that interactions in the digital space are such that they benefit from having a cost associated with them.
My suspicion is that online culture is massively under-financialized. It's a product of our money (until bitcoin) not being natively digital. So lots of weird middlemen (ads, selling user data, tracking) have crept in to online interactions and this has made so many interactions gross and unpleasant. I'm hopeful that bringing money into play will solve or at least ameliorate many of the things we don't like about the internet.
the share of rewards that goes to top zappers could decrease while the share that goes to less active zappers increases
Two years ago, they did a bunch of experiments with different rewards parameters. I thought it was really fun and interesting. Certainly the site has changed a lot since then, so it might be time to do some further testing.
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I appreciate the input. to be sure, in no way was my post a lament on not 'earning' enough or anything like that. i am aware that has probably come up before, but im not sure where Darth got that from in my post. i definitely agree with him there.
If zappers are able to reliably make back their zaps (or even a profit), it stands to reason that this would also cloud (or potentially ruin) the signal provided by zaps.
yes, this is similar to what I was getting at. undisciplined (#1056806).
So lots of weird middlemen (ads, selling user data, tracking) have crept in to online interactions and this has made so many interactions gross and unpleasant.
this to me is a type of financialization, albeit more parasitic and exploitative, definitely not p2p, but still financializing. maybe over-monetization is a better term, or even over-faciltated ... im not sure.
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You've inspired me to write up some longer thoughts about how to address these issues. There's a principle of experimental economics called "saliency" that can help us out.