We've been talking about downzapping a bunch. Obviously, the rewards are absolutely, wild with some stackers receiving 6-figure payouts. The discussion on the most recent SNL reminded me that I wanted to write up some of my thoughts about this situation.
I wrote about Incentivizing Downzapping and how Punishment is a Public Good a couple of years ago. Check those out for background to my thoughts here.
Are the incentives broken?
A prevailing sentiment seems to be that the incentives on SN are not working to curate content (and maybe they aren't). We should be cautious about overreacting to the actions of a particular bad actor, especially in the short term, though.
We're seeing general SN activity increasing (zaps, unique stackers, item creation), as the boosting vs downzapping battle rages. This is part of the mechanics of the site and it's at least directionally having the self-correcting effect we hope to see. More users making good content, supported by more zapping, makes boosting stuff to the top more costly for scammers and, more importantly, is exactly what we want for SN.
I've lived through a few other periods of fervor about the incentives being broken, usually ignited by a particular bad actor seemingly getting away with something. I urged caution and patience in those episodes too and in short order the self-correcting mechanisms we have in place did seem to kick in.
Ultimately, though, incentives drive outcomes by affecting aggregate behavior, not necessarily each individual's. Any given individual can have utterly bizarre preferences and with sufficient resources they can do undesirable things.
If we think the incentives have mostly been working to curate content well, then we should let this situation breath and see how it develops. Hemorrhaging sats to promote your scam to people who are wise to it is not sustainable behavior and unsustainable behaviors burn themselves out.
Are direct confrontations the solution?
Another aspect I've been thinking about is whether getting into a Downzap War is even the strategically correct move. The natural half-life on visibility from boost and zap decay is a powerful mechanism, especially for those of us with supposedly low time-preference.
Might this scammer have passed silently into the night, if not engaged in a big battle for visibility? Once egos get involved, behaviors can become extreme and entrenched.
What if, instead of directly challenging offending posts through a downzap confrontation, territory owners put their new (arguably ill-gotten and undeserved) revenue towards boosting the good content on SN?
Punishers go hard
Something I didn't mention in my post about punishment is that once someone decides to engage in punishment, they are often willing to expend quite a lot of resources on it. We're seeing that now with enormous downzaps that are well beyond what we see zapped towards good content.
What's curation worth to you?
It's sort of odd that punishers are willing to spend more on punishment than they are on support. It's all just curation, after all. Moving someone down 10 spots is the same as moving those 10 people up 1 spot, except that the sats go out community wide instead of to the producers of the better content.
What I think is being revealed by very large downzapping is that some people value the curation of the front page of SN far beyond what they've been putting towards zaps. I've been banging on about this forever (just scroll through my top discussion posts), but it still seems to me like stackers haven't internalized the rational self-interest value of zapping the content they like.
For your own sake, zap big and zap often.
How to do wanted posters
@Car pitched the idea of wanted posters as a mechanism for flagging scammy bullshit but didn't offer @k00b any real way of implementing them in a fashion that is emergent from the community.
This is a place where I think relying on our global trust scores is valuable. Any post that's underwater with trust-weighted, time-discounted zaps vs downzaps could be tagged with a wanted poster to alert readers of SN that the upstanding members of this community think caution is warranted with those posts.
TL;DR
Stacker News has an impressive array of self-correcting mechanisms, but they are not instantaneous. Think about what you want SN to be and whether you're already doing what you think you should towards that end, before pushing to change the rules.
I very much look forward to a lively discussion about this.
I think that this is only true if we forget that when the zapwar was the other way around earlier this year, roughly the same people were actively upzapping downzapped posts. But upzaps aren't recycled as much as downzaps (or as they could be if stackers were on board), and therefore upzapping is way more costly (especially when downzaps were 3x in the first war.)
I personally downzapped more in absolute numbers of sats than I upzapped in the previous 2 wars (about 2x), but, from a money-that-I-spent minus recycled-money-from-rewards/boosts p.o.v., I actually spent a lot more non-free sats the previous rounds than I am spending now. The previous rounds hurt me much harder than this one, but that only goes for me. Others got hurt real hard this round.
Stackers weren't really willing to defend a principle back then, and stackers aren't really willing to defend a principle now. It's still the same shit. Everyone is fishing for rewards and it's pathetic.
I am looking forward to stackers that made up to 1M sats from boosts, to zap all the high quality evergreen posts with 1M sats so that they're ranked at the top again, and then all the pretty good posts with 500k so that they rank underneath. I'm sure that learned people also understand that upzapping good content with millions of sats is much less capital efficient than downzapping the few posts that are bad content with a few million sats.
a pathetic system creates pathetic outcomes
Why are we all still alive then? We work around the most pathetic systems every day. Is there no willpower anymore? Just enslaving ourselves to short term incentives?
Come on, you’re smarter than this. Why ask such misleading questions? You can be alive and still be pathetic.
It's not meant as a misleading question at all. What I'm arguing is that whenever a system is shitty then we work around it. To do the right thing. Or whatever we think is right. That's also what Bitcoin is. If the system dictates all outcomes, why are you running nix and not the windows app store?
You still have choice within a poor system. And you can choose to make a change. You can choose to not be a victim of a system and reject something, even if it hurts (and in this case even that isn't true). You're not a slave. You can effect change. Even in a broken system.
downzapped for immaturity
how insightful of you... NOT
Humans are pathetic- get used to it!
War is human - get used to it!
Now you look like Darth! ahah
No, Darth doesn’t make reasonable arguments / argues in good faith.
He thought he did and that's all you can say for your own arguments.
Darth recycled the same talking points over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
again
Obviously, but he probably does that because he thinks they're reasonable points.
you are being too kind
Darth is a big fucking baby
edit: I am surprised that his cult member circle jerk fags are not coming to his defense
haha
you cannot be serious
edit: he does it because he is lazy, I can only assume he was born and raised in latin america, stupid fucking wetback
too bad he can't reply to me
because his first language is Spanish
What makes you think that?
He’s not very good at arguing, just like you’re not being right now! Exactly the same, hahaha!
downzapped for stupidity and a pathetic attempt at being glib
Personally I see that people were having fun, and that SN has survived multiple shitstorms and still has people posting valuable (and unique) content, so I wouldn't say this is a bad outcome necessarily.
Noted
Humans are pathetic- get used to it!
https://m.stacker.news/157236
War is human - get used to it!
https://m.stacker.news/157237
US wealth and power are based on use of force...just ask @Cje95 and @coffeebadger
You want to live in poverty?
blah blah blah blah blah
this topic is so tiresome
This is when I started thinking along these lines.
Is there something like the sunk cost fallacy going on here? Once you have the sats, their source is irrelevant to what you choose to do with them.
True for the immediate term. I'm not sure it's true for the long term.
Right now? Not for me. I'm just using the sats I get from these scams and people fighting scammers, to fight scammers. I'm sitting on today's reward sats to see how it can be used best, depending on how the situation develops, as there's a delay between the rewards side and the damage being done. Ultimately, if there's no use for the sats as down, then I'll just distribute them to good content.
The cards in the current system are stacked against any scammer. The masses win if they wanna. They just don't wanna. Which I found out back during the first war. It didn't get better since, not for upzaps and not for downzaps. And that's ok. It just shows the algo has weaknesses.
FWIW, and to your point about
I've personally been very careful to not downzap such posts into oblivion because I hate zap wars. Only need to get it back to a normal balance without the boosts, and I don't care if it's on
litfor 4 hours or even a day: if 99.95% of a post's display value is boosts, then that's the threshold for down; maybe even 99.94%. In all cases, the post started with a boost. "Initiation of hostilities" was done by the poster in each case.PS: If I lose my mind (more than I already lost it) tomorrow and were to start posting scams, I'd hope you all downzap me. I truly do. You really should. Because don't let new people fall for the scams. I've already seen some results that I really do not like to be caused by SN in general. I see people being at risk because they are attracted to the wealth of this scammer. Luckily not on my territory because then it would have been my failure.
If all the top posts have 1M sats positive balance, then that's the new bar. The future content that is better than what is there, then requires at least 1M sats positive balance. Feasible with a growing money supply. Not so feasible for Bitcoin denominated posts.
Maybe we're talking about different things. When I say downzapping may not be more capital efficient in the long-term, I mean that it doesn't not incentivize the creation of more quality posts in the same way an identical amount of upzaps would.
We likely differ on this, but I care more about people realizing that they will be rewarded for adding value here than I do about people realizing that they won't be rewarded for trying to extract value from here.
But they're not mutually exclusive, and here's why:
downzaps are 100% circular.
So the ultimate recipient of even more encouraging zaps for good content than was possible before can be had the next day, when the boosts have been redistributed through downzaps into rewards.
To that end, I have the perfect solution: pay rewards in CCs 🤣 (I'm actually only half joking, but still not recommending this, to be clear.)
I've also kicked around the CC rewards concept.
I think it's a bad thing from a custody pov. Just like removing boosts is bad from a sybil pov. And removing downzaps is great... from a shamelessly self promoting scammer pov.
There are multiple hooks into the system as a whole and if your discussions (and my endless venting so I can cope with things) are proving anything, it is that balance is really, really hard to find.
Since rewards are the mechanism for turning CCs into sats, we'd at least need to replace that with something.
Ultimately, I think it is better to make everything withdrawable sats that can be withdrawable sats and moving in the other direction is sort of scammy.
I have proudly never downzapped anything!!
do you want a participation trophy or a blow job?
Boomers deserve everything they have and you're just jealous of them.
Coolio bro
chess is pointless because computers already do it better
FUCK YOU BROWSKI
aaaah, you didn't tell me you're retarded?!
Still no downsats? I'll stop if you downzap me
nono, keep going. I'm having fun.
fancy cocktails help...
Me too.
Here: Stephanie Kelton is the genius voice of her generation.
downzapped for a stupid comment
Ok, I'm sad you think that.
not even a teeny little downzap?
Nope.
Seems stupid. I will hold the line (and save the sats!)
I guess downzapping, while not making as much sense as promoting quality posts, helps induce adrenaline and endorphins because the downzappers fancy themselves on a moral crusade, eager to shield the ignorant from scammy stuff.
The downzappers might have the best of intentions, but maybe reacting so aggressively backfired because it garnered more attention for the posts that they wanted to push into oblivion. And after a while, people stopped caring, so it kinda hurt to see people expend so many sats on stuff that others just don’t see as an issue.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the windfalls - but I won’t miss this period when it disappears
That's exactly what I was thinking but put much more succinctly. You should try teaching English.
There's definitely a place for downzapping, but I'm not sure getting into these wars is prudent.
well, this too shall pass
speaking as a downzapper, I don't have good intentions
If i see a comment or post that is dumb, I will downzap out of prinicple
Stupidiity must be penalized
system worked as intended and successfully so
Uh oh
exactly
Facts!
TLDR what the heck k is going on?
Begun the Zap Wars have
Need more?
Bro was indeed from the future, as he always claimed
the latest SN fork just proved it. made a good clean up. the most valuable thing there is the
/transparencypage, the vibe there reminds me of the old good SN timesMost impressive
I do not. I recall those screechings well.
~lol
🔥⚡
Someone doesn't want the party to end
One of the top 5!!
Very helpful
Now you know, if you not, no worries...have fun..enjoy the downzaps.
I was being sarcastic. You had already reduced it to the two possible people who are known. I can't infer much with the information that it might be two rather than three different unknown people.
Not sure if it’s worth it, but a good strategy to beat the downzapper might be to create a link post linking back to the original post, since the original already has a high downzap value. aahah
what's relevant for visibility is the difference -- so a post that has been downzapped 101,000 sats but boosted 100,000 sats will rank higher than a post that was only downzapped 2000 sats and not boosted at all. The raw amount of sats downzapped isn't as important as the net investment (zaps + boosts - downzaps).
So starting over with a new post that links to an older downzapped post doesn't help other than that the person downzapping the post might not notice right away.
Also, I think there is some amount of notoriety for being highly downzapped, so a link strategy might result in fewer people viewing your post because it disperses the downzaps across multiple posts.
Probably a dumb idea, but at that exact moment teh post were down 100k vs 8k up. The point was to push a new post to the front page, where 10k up was more than enough back then.
Ah yes, that makes sense. I had misunderstood. This is why smart downzappers never spend more than they need to in order to bury a post.
I think the idea here was that the 100k downzap came after about 7k of zaps, so it would cost 93k to overcome that directly.
Just making the link post regained visibility for only another 244 sats.
Let's see what happens!
lmao sneaky
For me, the main page isn’t really that important anymore. I still pop in and have a look, but most of the time I just go straight to the new filter.
I do too, which is why I think the incentives might actually be broken.
The front page should be the best page.
good meme
do you really mean it?
I wanted your approval tbh
I could ask you now if you really think I couldn't have meant it haha
I mean it’s an okay meme idk
I was sad that I didn’t make it. It’s really good. Your memes will go places. Would love to see more!
Personally, I don't think a handful of bad posts on the front page really ruin the experience for anyone
Because of that, I don't think downzapping is really motivated by front page per se. It's usually motivated by moral outrage, over Israel/Gaza, over scams, that cause a righteously indignant person to try and make sure no one sees the post at all
I forgot to make that point. It's like how you learn to look past the top result from a search engine once you learn that those are the sponsored ones.
There’s never really a “best”, it all comes down to personal taste. It’s just a page for mainstream tastes, or rather, the tastes of people who spend more on curation!
Of course, and people like us will have seen what we like on the front page already, but I still think the prevailing sentiment that the front page sucks is pointing to a real problem.
Me too
What if the size of the rewards pool was not publicized?
And what if distribution times were randomized?
You get the same incentivzied behavior, but because the connection to actions is more diffuse, you might get less distorted behavior.
Love it
I'm pretty sure I've pitched all kinds of randomizations, including that one. It's such a great way to preserve the general incentive structure while reducing gamability.
Also, splitting the rewards over different payout durations might reduce some of the extremes.
Have you thought about smoothing it out: e.g., paying out 10% of the reward pool every day?
I mentioned that to @Scoresby already.
I haven't thought about that for the rewards pool, but it is what I do personally for my zap amounts.
That could lead to some unfair situations. For example, a stacker who’s spent a lot on curation could miss out on the best reward intervals and end up getting the worst ones instead!
That seems more likely with the current situation.
If you spend a lot on curation for a day with low rewards, you miss out completely. If it were split across different periods, your daily reward share would suck but you might make it up on the weekly or monthly rewards shares.
I was thinking shorter than a day! ~lol
I actually think it might be possible to do dynamic rewards, where each zap skips the rewards pool entirely and gets distributed directly to rewards earners.
Sounds kinda complex, but maybe I'm just not seeing the whole picture.
k00b mentioned wanting to try hourly rewards awhile ago and I didn’t get how that could work, either, until we got the new ranking system.
Basically, at the moment of each zap we know the ranking of each item and the strength of each stacker’s contribution to the item. So, we can have a list of where everyone ranks in the rewards categories that updates in real time. That’s what informs the reward split of each zap.
That kinda reminds me of the old algorithm (was it the first or the second one?). Even so, I think you can get a rough idea by checking out the day’s posts. I’m just not sure that would actually make the user experience any better!
As someone who enjoys writing, all I see is that the current incentive isn't for those who enjoy creating, especially the evergreens.
Why do the heavy thinking work if zapping fast is the way to game the system?
I do think people who make good posts and good comments should be included in the rewards pool.
They already get the zaps!
That was my feeling too, but I think the Keynesian Beauty Contest distortions might be more extreme when only zapping is rewarded.
Maybe a rewards portion, like 21% or less?
Unequal splits is something they haven't really played around with. Maybe it could be something like
It’s a good idea, but I don’t think those numbers work. I see it more like this:
These would be good parameters to experiment with.
agree.
I've thrown many ideas at k00b along those lines. Maybe he'll try a few more out.
Its fun and I started it.
To war is human and profitable - let it happen.
To me downzappers are like rabid dogs. Logic doesn't get involved. They bite and bite hard with little consideration for restraint. Most of it is politically oriented for a given stream of thought and stomping out alternative or opposite view, period (which is unfortunately all too common today). For those who have dealt with me, you know I will get into a vigorous debate on some topics, but I won't ever drop your opinion. You might insult me and I might block you, but that's my own preference of what I want to put up with. Downzapping is intentionally blocking a post from everyone, even if not directly involved, or at least trying to.
fuck off
downzap
Yeah, the only case where I like the idea of downzapping is content that you're confident is an attempt to harm others.
Any good faith expression of ideas, no matter how silly, should be allowed to sink or swim on its own merits (or lack thereof).
It's pretty obvious that there is a massive correlation between boosts and downzaps. Which comes first (chicken and egg style) is difficult, but they very tightly tied.
So it seems to me that we need to discuss downzapping as it relates to boosting (self-zapping). Any changes that might be made to downzapping would need to take into account boosting behavior and perhaps changes to boosting.
It doesn't take many people who hate boosting to create that correlation.
yes, but when we are discussing downzapping, I don't think it's actually about general content curation or punishing -- it's that there are a few stackers who think excessive boosting should be counteracted.
I think the downzap situation is clearly a phenomenon that is tied to what is perceived to be excessive boosting. I don't think downzaps in general have been used enough to really even have much data about how they work.
I think my arguments are just as relevant to those who want to counteract large boosts. That can be done by knocking them down or by lifting others up. It's not obvious to me that downzapping is the best way to go about evening the playing field.
Yes
No, you can't fix incentives with morals. If the system requires people who already pay for it to additionally boost “good content” for the system not to be broken, then the system is broken.
Problem is that it's easy to see the problems of the system, while not having a real solution that satisfies the requirements of system.
For example, bringing back sum(log(zaps)) would solve the issue of giving too much power to 1 or 2 big zappers. However, it advantages people willing to do programmatic sybil attacks, which would require KYC to guard against.
A non-KYC approach could require a fixed upfront investment per account. But that makes the experience even harder for new users.
I think the question of social ranking is just genuinely difficult. There are no excellent solutions, only tradeoffs of various kinds.
Where are you getting that from?
I'm suggesting one use of those funds might be more prudent than another (that at least some people are doing), not telling people to do either.
Glad I'm not the only one wondering about that
Too good to hate something on the web
-Dim Quixote
down zapped
Yes. And like you said, these fads pass. So we shall overcome this "challenge" too
I think this post is worth reviewing because the discussion around downzapping and boosting seems to be getting heavily manipulated. I’m not saying every large downzap is malicious, but the unusually large amounts being used to influence visibility could potentially distort the normal curation mechanism.
It would be good to look at the voting/zapping patterns and whether the same accounts are repeatedly using large amounts to push certain content up or down. If there’s no rule violation, that’s fine, but I think the behavior is worth checking rather than assuming the incentives will automatically correct it.
Yeah, I think we need more time and data before knowing whether downzaps actually improve the system. Right now it feels a bit early to judge.
The answer is right before us... all roads lead to WoT.
Zaps are a means to an end, not the end itself.
#1572807
#1539392
#1539391
#1474041