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I like this take and don’t forget territory owners have a real profit and loss! (Mostly loss right now for most of us)
Putting down the 3M on all your territories does not make you immune from profiting off scammers though.
Unless they post enough for territory to recover its initial sat payment it will always be in a loss. Once the sat revenues are above break even then you can make this case. But I think all are underwater besides the bitcoin territory which is owned by SN daddy
If the only road to profitability is enshittification, because that's kind of what you're hinting at here, then maybe the experiment should just fail before people get scammed.
No I’m not hinting at anything. Scams are afoot everywhere. SN does put a real cost to scamming. If they fail they will run out of money but if they are successful they may try to continue the scam and if the territory owner is indifferent then the stacker can lose engagement or another territory can be established that moderates their content a bit better.
Plus many years ago k00b mentioned he wanted to make territories more robust but couldn’t due to all this work on the wallet. With that hopefully coming to a close with spark (which some bitcoiners view as an affinity scam) maybe SN will allow more tools for territories to fight scams and spam.
SN is far from a finished product. So the tools could get better to prevent enshittification. But it’s never going to be perfect. Tragedy of the commons is real! Just human nature
What I'm doing is this:
- On a normal day you get 10 posts at 30 sats + 500 sats in zaps. So your normal income is
(10*30*0.7)+(500*.21) = 210 + 105 = 215 sats. - On this special day a scammer pays you a 50k sats boost, which makes your income
(50,000*.7)+215 = 35,215 sats.
In scenario 2, you can keep the sats, or you can downzap the scammer for 35k sats. You're saying "but I wanna break even", and what I'm asking is: "by profiting from scams?"
Yeah I understand what you mean but in this example it is up to territory owner to make that judgement call. And stackers can shame him for not downzapping or moderating the scam.
I don't disagree with the bottom line, at all. I'm not advocating for any coercion or even shame.
What I do advocate against though is to think that profitability - of which you say there is none - stands in the way of taking pay from a scam. In practice, you are almost right, except that the decision to profit off immorality is not something that correlates with unprofitability per se, I'm quite sure that the opposite is true: the upholding of morals may lead to reduced profitability.
And from that perspective, a well kept territory in the red may be better than a poorly kept territory in the black; after all, the red/black only matters to the territory owner, whereas the quality of the territory matters to a whole lot more people.
Therefore I said that there's a suggestion to enshittify, if the profit of the territory owner has a dependency on scams.
If ~AskSN is currently paying month-to-month, then it's probably in the black.
Yeah it’s been hot has of late. But it started off hot with the old owner and then fizzled till he no longer paid the rent!
I can see the value of not allowing yourself to profit from scammers posting in your territory, though. It creates a moral hazard that doesn't exist if you dump those sats downzapping stuff that you think shouldn't exist on your territory.
It's a long-run/quality vs short-term profitability argument.
I don't really think that it should matter whether it is "generally accepted" to be okay / not-okay to profit from it - at least not much from the perspective of the rewards pool. It would be great if those extra-free-sats are used well, but it cannot be an obligation of course. Also the reward sats are not a direct income, it's extremely indirect. My question is more asked to find out how people feel about it.
Even for a territory owner, because - as turning off boosts would just invite sybil accounts, or even anon zapping - there isn't really a way to deal with boosts other than to monitor them. Not always the easiest job either, especially not if you get a bunch of them throughout the day while you're offline. So even there, it's not an obligation, though I may mute a territory that is continuously promoting material that I do not agree with. So bottom line it's in the interest of the territory owner to keep their territory clean of at least the most egregious scams that got boosted, I think. There is an incentive there.
it's in the interest of the territory owner to keep their territory clean of at least the most egregious scams
Exactly. Also, this should be self-correcting, as long as Stackers aren't zapping those posts or falling for the scams. Then, it's just scammers losing money to uninterested stackers.
Right! I think that the downzapping of clear scams (if someone posts a wall of slop and then in the end says "I'm here to sell you a token" it ought to be pretty clear what the intent is, even if ones IQ is lower than the total MBTC supply cap) ensures that there are less victims. Lower visibility, lower chance of victims.
And the beauty of the downzap-to-rewards flow is that it could come at zero cost.
Well, there's no getting around that the cost is the amount of sats you could have kept, but it might be rational to forego those for the sake of long-term reputational value.
The bigger problem, at least for me, is that I usually ignore slop, which means I won't see if it's peddling a scam at the end.
In my normal flow I force myself to ignore bad content that I feel one way or the other about, to not have zap wars. But I make exceptions for scams.
I applaud the diligence.
It's more hate than diligence haha
I applaud that too
Delusional idealism is an important part of what we're trying to do here.
It seems important to note that not all of us are equally equipped to assess scams, nor do we have an obligation to patrol content we wouldn't otherwise be interested in for the purpose of searching out scams.
So, I'd say it almost has to be ok to profit from people promoting their scams on SN (which is different from actually profiting off the scam).
I do agree with you about territory owners. We probably should try to neutralize scams when we see them posted in our territories. It's not exactly the same as an endorsement, but we are taking payment for visibility, even if it's a permissionless process.