I don't think it's the incentives that are perverse in this case. Meaning, at least so far, and as far as I can tell, this is irrational behavior.

SN needs to blunt irrational behavior as best it can, but incentives don't have much to do with that afaict.

I suspect the reason that downzaps have grown to be such a large share of rewards is that there are zap "shootouts" (#1436873) happening -- where two users are escalating zaps against each other.

If someone posts downzap-bait it's trivial to bury it (100 sats could do it -- assuming it is not actually an interesting post, just bait). However if that same user boosts their post in response, the downzapper has to respond with a similar sized downzap. This seems to me to be the reason reward pools have been big lately.

100% of a downzap goes to rewards, only 9% of a zap does (70% goes to the poster, 21% to the territory owner). So in any zap shootout, the reward pool will tend to fill with downzaps 3x faster than other sources.

It's curious to think if there is a perverse incentive here. I think if you look at top spenders, you'll notice that there is one primary downzapper who is subsidizing the rewards pool at the moment.

rookie numbers