801 sats \ 7 replies \ @JohnRawlins 21 Feb 2023 \ on: Do zaps incentivise group think or useful discourse? bitcoin
I think that largely, what its doing right now is incentivizing interaction, but is it for the right reasons? A few things going on here:
-people realize they can send money to and fro without "banks and fees." so they feel liberated in that sense, and are sending eachother fractions of cents and sometimes more back and forth. nothing wrong with this. what it leads to as secondary tertiary and quaternary behaviors is more interesting.
i have seen the following playing out so far:
-people posting a line like "first ten invoices that write in this post get zapped 50 sats. this is strange behavior, because it's much akin to the free stuff mechanism, first ten people to run into this line get a reward. okay, fine. mostly innocuous.
-people posting stuff like, help me pick a new toaster oven, first person to post something i like gets zapped 2000 sats. okay this is a neat use case scenario, crowd sourcing a problem of lacking knowledge or time. i kinda like this one.
-people asking others to zap them so they can zap others, then crying about it when they run out of money to send other people. (this is strange, and i worry it may breed or deepen emotional codependency issues in a crowd sourced, and openly public way, leading to development of certain character flaws,or exacerbation of others, or the development of entirely new psychological hang-ups, for some involved in this specific behavior. Say for example, people with extremely low self esteem.
-people saying post an invoice, i'll pick several random invoices and pay them at my whim and whimsy. okay that's alot like the first scenario, and not much different.
there have been a few other strange ones, mostly that felt a lot like a gambling type of situation, but i can't remember them specifically enough to share them here.
All things considered though, what I'm really seeing are people finding new ways to distribute extremely small amounts of money, online- and feeding the dopamine addiction big networking worked so hard to trigger in people through tiktok, instagram, facebook and the like. While many of those people are no longer on those networks, they still have this inherited character issue, and this certainly isn't going to help them grow as people, and remediate that character flaw, bringing them into new awareness of self and of their spiritual well being.

With that all said,
What I would really like to see, are people forming charities, and contributing larger amounts of funds and then donating it directly to charities, teaching them either how to hold the funds in cold storage, and apply them as needed to real world scenarios, or working together to harness this new excitement and energy in ways that inspire developers to bring rapidly a great many useful things into the sphere, rather than just zapping eachother all day. That's a lot of wasted creative potential.
Perhaps we need to establish bounties on solving creative thinking issues, and abstract them to not just typical "re-design, this with nostr" use cases, but apply this idiomatic to actually generating ways that society can function better, with less govt reliance, because this is all as currently observed, just very very 1.0 stuff... lets go to 3.0 and then 4.0, and build self sustaining networks that can remove large swaths of the GDP, for example, or do other powerful things, like eliminate the need to work...
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 22 Feb 2023
Lol the way you summarised early zap culture is so spot in its hilarious there's already some accounts that may not have got much play on other social media and this is a chance to reinvent themselves and start from zero, engage a lot and recycle sats between one another and build a following, and who knows it might work out for them.
I can easily see this turning into engagement pods, lets say we are 10 users and we all put in 10 000k sats we can recycle the sats between us to make it look like we're so generous so people will follow to try and get into the drip and build accounts, plenty of the engagement hacking things we see on linkedin, twitter and insta will come to nostr
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @halalmoney OP 22 Feb 2023
Hopefully the fun element of zapping will be combined with the adversarial mindset mentioned quite often within “Bitcoin culture”. So, if you suspect you are being conned into zapping you can send your sats elsewhere.
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10 sats \ 4 replies \ @halalmoney OP 21 Feb 2023
Thanks for your thoughts. I especially like your last paragraph:
“Perhaps we need to establish bounties on solving creative thinking issues, and abstract them to not just typical "re-design, this with nostr" use cases, but apply this idiomatic to actually generating ways that society can function better, with less govt reliance, because this is all as currently observed, just very very 1.0 stuff... lets go to 3.0 and then 4.0, and build self sustaining networks that can remove large swaths of the GDP, for example, or do other powerful things, like eliminate the need to work...”
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @JohnRawlins 21 Feb 2023
happy to contribute to the discussion.
I think the biggest things moving forward as a society (both as individuals and individuals as parts of groups) gaining inter-correlated self sufficiency are going to be on the community level,
and as things move forward, people will gain trust in themselves, and their neighbors again, and folks they live around.
what i'm egging at here is multifold, but in specificity, we need to foster a barter and skilled trade economy, and make this work to reduce the negative impact of what's coming. re:cbdc's. the BIS and the IMF have been working on their pilot programs for the greater bit of 15 years now, on and off in various parts of the world, and it's coming together at an alarming, and quiet rate.
if we're to keep people living how they want and even improve their quality of life, people need to start functioning differently, and by this i mean moving away from their acclimatized transactional behavior.
I've got a wonderful idea for a site to accomplish just this, but it's been a real burden trying to find people that can actually see the good it would accomplish, rather than just me waving money in front of them and saying here, lets code this thing. I'm doing it this way for two reasons - i don't actually have the money to pay them, and its a turing test for those who can actually see the thing, and why it's so sorely needed in our world today. (i have the dedicated debian server, and a great domain all set up and waiting to go..) :) the project is called "will trade" and i've got willtrade.org
but anyhow, I digress, for the time being.
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50 sats \ 2 replies \ @halalmoney OP 21 Feb 2023
I hope project “will trade” works out well.
Keep us posted please - on stacker news or whatever platform/protocol works well for you.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @JohnRawlins 4 Apr 2023
https://willtrade.org
it's live. it uses pleroma and federates with activity pub to the 7 million or so people on the network...
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @JohnRawlins 21 Feb 2023
Thank you so very much.. I will.
Right now I've got one guy in Italy that wants to work on it, and looking for a few other good folks. anyone interested can drop a line to hello@yeshua.is and let me know what they're good at.
There are some notes about how it would function here, for anyone reading this and intrigued:
https://www.writehere.is/nwo/tag:willtrade
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