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It turns out that the kind of zapping stackers enjoy is downzapping
check the downzaps for each month in the top right graph... or wait, let me type you a table:
| Month | Zaps | Downzaps |
| 09/25 | 2.8M | 65k |
| 10/25 | 2.5M | 36k |
| 11/25 | 2.3M | 39k |
| 12/25 | 2.5M | 40k |
| 01/26 | 2.9M | 114k |
| 02/26 | 3.0M | 933k |
| 03/26 | 2.2M | 216k |
So there was one real outlier and that was Feb '26, which was the emoji war. Also note that back then, 1 downsat counted as 3 upsats, so there was in terms of signal almost as much down as upzap. Also notable, March '26 - the aftermath of that war - was the worst month in terms of zaps since Aug '23.
I personally feel that the January stats were reasonable. I also started downzapping more in Jan, but not excessively. Mostly to counter things that were never popping up on the front page but started to get boosted 1-2x the amount of sats such a post would usually see in total, and back then, I didn't want to mute anyone but trolls.
The increase in amount of downsats comes from the novel developed suppression tactic 2 months post release: you just throw sats at whom you hate and then it goes away, for everyone. This is common now, there are multiple stackers doing this.
I suppressed 4 posts myself: the first was a 100k boost in October by what I believed (and still believe) to be a scammer, under the trust and "top boost" model. The 2nd and 3rd were also under that model, they were boosts on ~AI. The fourth was Boog's one day after the new rules and that was accidental and due to a bug.
obvious that a weakness was that the system might turn into rich-rank where people who had lots of sats just boosted their own content and dominated the front pageAnd then in Feb, "the rich" decided to spend almost a million sats to downzap everyone that didn't have a gun emoji, or hid it, or undermined them despite gun emoji, or just disagreed with them... exactly the outcome you say it was to prevent except the concept was applied in inverse.
But to come back to your first assertion, I don't think stackers like downzapping more than upzapping. Maybe some do. But the majority doesn't.
Thank you for the data check and the nice table.
Why do you think it is, then, that downzaps -- at 1/10th or 1/20th the quantity as zaps -- lead to such turmoil? Clearly, they are not merely downvotes but have a much higher emotional value than zaps.
you just throw sats at whom you hate and then it goes away
It does feel like this. But the reverse is also true: throw sats at what you like and everyone else will see it (unless they mute it). The difference is that downzapping is a negative emotion. This seems to cause a lot of strife. Perhaps there should be no downzap at all, and only mute.
I wonder if you could mute a downzapper (so that their downzaps don't affect your rankings), but then this would lead to attaching identity to zaps which is not a good road.
There is something about boosting and its negative twin downzapping that strikes a chord in people. I don't think it is good the way it is playing out now, but it makes me wonder if there isn't someway to channel these energies into a good purpose.
Why do you think it is, then, that downzaps -- at 1/10th or 1/20th the quantity as zaps -- lead to such turmoil? Clearly, they are not merely downvotes but have a much higher emotional value than zaps.
Because:
- A handful of stackers are intentionally wiping out posts.
- They are concentrated and selective, with some minor exceptions, but those too seem plausible to be grudges or done with ulterior motives.
- Many of the posts that are downzapped most today are not done by assmilkers. Not by stackers that are only here to make a buck. The topics are just wrong for that. So it hurts extra because they spent their time on that post; blood sweat and tears. Maybe to inform, maybe to protect, maybe to need some feedback because they're insecure or otherwise afraid.
I think that if you did the work and you were hoping to maybe reach some stackers, and then that gets taken from you with a steep downzap, it'll be emotional.
But the reverse is also true: throw sats at what you like and everyone else will see it
Yeah I tried that. It's the 4th entry in the OP's list. There was a sympathetic stacker that joined in at scale to upzap a censored post and our joint effort bought @SimpleStacker a territory. It didn't buy justice. It didn't buy victory. It didn't even make the post visible for more than a few minutes all the way until the downsat weight change. And although this was under 3x rule, I'd still lose to a rich stacker with a grudge today at 1x. It is that simple: I don't have the coin to spend.
What I was testing at that time was to see who would join in. Stackers that would say "fuck it, here's a 100k sats to defend freedom of speech against a tyrant millionaire". I know who did that. I also know it was only 1 stacker. The experiment didn't fail on it's own, just the outcome was extremely disappointing. I do know the single stacker I can trust tho, lol.
So no. People won't upzap that much because it's not worth it for them. SN isn't their life, their family. They can leave at any time. And maybe they will. That's my fear.
Ah, sorry, I didn't know you felt that strongly about it. My intention isn't to take advantage of your principled stance, nor to make light of it. I'd be happy to zap you back the amount you spent fighting SS on my joke post, or to send it via lightning.
I appreciate what you're trying to do. I think the main reason I don't join in isn't because I'm trying to save sats, it's because I don't feel like I have the attention bandwidth to really engage or stay on top of this battle. Attention is a scarcer resource than the typical amount of sats we play with on SN, though to be fair some of the zap/downzap battles have been dealing with objectively large sums.
No, no, you're welcome to it. That's not the point. I was simply expecting that for something like your post that I don't expect many people would dislike - it was a good post - that literally got downzapped because you undermined a single person, the reaction to be more principled too. After all, we hear a lot of principled takes here on SN. People with morals that lament the lack of morals in others. So the test was how much of that was true. It's just money after all. Not like we're throwing ourselves in front of a tank.
The test was good, because it also shows that stackers will complain about downzaps before fighting it. And I get it. It's a steep wall. It's not in proportion to what a normal post gets in zaps except those written by stackers most likely to help get higher rewards.
So this is not criticism of you. It's basically of everyone except you.
I keep thinking that some of the issue with this is that we are all trying to make a front page that looks like what we ourselves think it ought to look like...and there's no way to produce such a page.
Some people clearly want to talk about Iran/Israel, other people really don't want to talk about Iran/Israel. The result is zap tug-of-wars.
One might think that territories are a solution to this: just view the territory that matches the subject you are interested in. But because there is a front page, there is something to fight over.
Maybe we should be rid of the front page and default to a specific territory, and if stackers want to have discussions about other topics, they have to switch to viewing the territory suitable for such topics.
Wait didn't you want stackers to say "stop it Scoresby"? Not gonna say it. haha.
I don't think the solution to the frontpage not reflecting what we individually want to see is to kill the front page. There must be a way to dampen the rich-rank. It'll be hard without a second dimension to sat bean-counting. But... (re-)introduction of a second dimension is likely superior to a kill switch.
Markets aren't holy because there is more to life than money. If there weren't then why the heck would people with a lot of it spend it on suppressing speech of others on a platform with 1k MAU? So, the SN content ranking game must be intrinsically wider than exclusively money. The Msat question is: what is it?
I think it is clear that downzapping is encouraging more downzapping which is just ugly and nobody likes it.
Exactly. That’s my point.
I believe the SN will soon head back to something that is closer to how it used to be.
Having often had the experience of being a low-trust or low-karma user of platforms, I worry that such systems achieve less toxicity by effectively banishing troublesome people.
While it may be a good thing, it creates the problem of how to decide who the troublesome people are.
I wonder what SN would be like if there was no such thing as downzaps, but it still used money as the only moderator. Do you think such a system would be less toxic?
I wonder what SN would be like if there was no such thing as downzaps, but it still used money as the only moderator. Do you think such a system would be less toxic?
I think so. But only if “boost” didn’t exist either. Without downzaps and boosts, no one could manipulate the algorithm or push posts up or down. As a result, a bad post wouldn’t survive in the rankings, because no one would zap it, and the person who posted it wouldn’t be able to boost it to the top.
This would create a balance. I guess.
But only if “boost” didn’t exist either.
Ah, but this is the problem: what stops a stacker from self-zapping? If there is no boost, why not just create a second account and zap your own post with it?
How would we make sure that bad posts aren't zapped by their own authors?
This is the main reason there is a sybil fee on SN. So that when such self-zapping happens, it is at least costly to the self-zapper.
Boost being a thing is just SN making that flow more convenient so that it's not only available to power users.
I think also that this is why most social media uses trust tools like karma or merit or they use an algorithm which is basically the platform telling people what they should look at...or they kyc.
Money is a moderator is an experiment in something different, but it certainly hasn't solved the problem. I appreciate your insights and patience.
isn't self zapping more efficient than boost?
self zapping you get 70% of your sats back, relative to boost, if I understand correctly. and 91% back if you're the territory owner
what does that have to do with downzaps though
Isn't self-zapping the same as boosting now? I thought that was part of the recent changes...
The amount of downzapping continues to surprise me. For years, stackers have talked about encouraging people to zap, otherwise how else will money be the moderator? It turns out that the kind of zapping stackers enjoy is downzapping. Go figure.
It is worth asking why downzapping even exists. I believe the reason is this: when the front page ranking was turned to LIT and money was truly the only means of ranking posts, it was obvious that a weakness was that the system might turn into
rich-rankwhere people who had lots of sats just boosted their own content and dominated the front page.Rather than solely relying on stackers to zap all the other content they enjoy (which has never seemed to be something stackers do with gusto), it seemed like it would be good to give the stackers a tool to counteract one user boosting their own content. This is the role downzapping could play.
(Downzapping existed before this, but it used to be tied to trust, and was honestly much more powerful: if high trust users downzapped a post, no one saw it and there really wasn't a way to reverse that in the trust-regime).
Now, some people may treat downzap like a way of moving posts up and down the rankings. Others may treat downzapping like a way of hiding content they really don't like. I don't know which one is more common.
I think it is clear that downzapping is encouraging more downzapping which is just ugly and nobody likes it.
But I also think that trust-based systems aren't necessarily better. The users who don't get seen in those kinds of systems have no recourse. The reason we are talking about all of this right now is that using money as the moderator allows users who maybe otherwise would have been hidden to bring their posts back into the conversation.