Here's a chart showing the comment fees for territories on SN:
As you can see, almost all comment fees are below 10 sats, and most are 1 sat.
I think we've all noticed a lot of bot and spam posts showing up
I really do think the pay-to-post model can fix this, but it seems to be the case that we are not making them pay ( I miss you Darth) enough.
Did you have a bot problem during an ama?
No. I just have this uninspected belief that pay to post fixes slop/spam/bots, but as I've been thinking about it, I am forced to admit that this is clearly not the case. So, I am wondering if the problem is that the cost right now is still so low that it does not really deter bots.
It is also possible that I need to rethink my mental model of pay to post. Perhaps there is no world where pay to post fixes spam and bots entirely, and the gain is always to remove the extremes. (Except I don't think it's doing that either, right now).
Most bots use freebies for comments. I went through exactly this motion this year:
I set comment fees to 45 sats on ~AI. This was prohibitive for human comments
Then I lowered to 10 and this was ok, but then the freebie nostr-key driven cycle bots came in[1] and I just lowered it to 5 because bots can fee and mute evade on comments this way.
you basically only need snappy and some nsec encoder and you have unlimited freebies, which at least 1 person is running, but I think I've spotted at least 3 distinct entities ↩
I asked k00b to allow territory owners to disable freebies. That would at least close the loophole.
I saw. I think the difficulty is cross-posts (one item, one freebie, multiple rules)
Cross-posts must comply with the rules of each territory, so all restrictions apply.
Cross-posts are also the limiting factor for raising comment fees, which is why I think we should move to OP-defined reply fees or parent-defined.
You think this because the relation of territory->item is inverted in the code?
Sorry, which part?
Do you really think 45 was prohibitively high? I'm tempted to see what happens with higher comment fees because so many territories are at 1 or 2.
Yes, because there were nearly no comments. And people literally complained.
Some of us are not bot we just need help.From Lagos here. Naira is 1500+ to dollar now so saving is hard. My shop work pays small but I want to convert small small to sats weekly. Do you stack daily or weekly? How do you avoid fees?
The risk/reward ratio for bots posting freebie comments or 1-sat cost comment is really skewed towards reward. If even one stacker accidentally zaps say 40-100 sats, that pays for 40 to 100 one-sat comments just on its own.
That being said, I am not sure how many of the bots are economic bots vs. someone's personal lab experiment.
it's kind of hard to tell them apart these days. (At least it costs too much attention and follow-up to do so.) And on high-rewards days, the incentive is to just spam out zaps to everyone...
Do you have a good optimal/curation/fix for this?
Only zap comments that you're pretty confident aren't from a bot, if you care.
I still owe you a list. It's still on my todo, apologies.
that's the uncomfortable alternative explanation. ooopsies
I will raise fees soon as I break even on my initial investment!
do you feel there are lots of bots/spammers in your territories or not so much?
Not so much
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha @ meme
I will match your 21 sats
No problem for me to spend worthless Cowboy Credits
YES. 100 sat minimum (ask me why)
Even 21 satoshis is not big money if you consider 8 $ to buy 10000 satoshis
inflation.
wen SN post fees in the CPI?!
Depends on the territory. Sports should have and will continue to have a low comment fee because we want to encourage a lot of back and forth discussion especially during games. It may make sense for other territories to raise it.
Upto 2 sats it's absolutely fine with any territory. Beyond that even if they make 100 sats/comment this does nothing good.
It will stop both the real conversations and bots - but most likely it will stop human conversation, and bots will carry on as usual they are filthy rich.
By carry on I mean they will come and go.
Yeah I feel like if you crank them up it cuts back on the banter which stacker sports has which is important for sports lol!
I am not one who does much banter, so I'm probably missing something there.
Do you really think people would be that much less likely to comment at 10 sats than at 1?
Not sure but I don’t want to charge people 10 sats to say “nice throw by Allen” and 10 sats for someone else to say “yeah that was awesome”
You make a good point.
Long live the low fees (and banter) on ~Stacker_Sports!
Can't say I have noticed bots.
Helpful feedback, thanks!
I seem to have a jaundiced eye when it comes to bots.
People with sats filter on default setting don't see the downzapped comments though.
This is why I subscribe to accounts I think are bots and downzap, but I'm getting lazy and missing more.
Yeah, you get a lot of pain. I don't do that myself and just downzap what I see.
While your argument about spam and and bot is true, I believe comment fees should be absolute minimum. Discussions are what attracts me to a post more than the post itself. Also, sometimes I see that comments fees are too high when a post is clubbed under many territories.
Does this stop you from posting?
I agree that we don't want to stifle discussion, but the high frequency of bot posting is making me think that the sats aren't doing the work we want them to do.
Yes sometimes. I don't remember but on a post the fees was more than 50 sats. I wanted to post but resisted purely on this "what drama is this about comments fees too high!!"
It's my personal opinion that we should ignore spam, bots or bad actors as we have the ability to mute which works absolutely fine. But Alas! Here on SN, humans muting humans absolutely on grounds of nothing and sometimes Slop has been promoted (though could be by mistake).
Absolutely, and they won't because you can't make it too costly for humans in order to remove the bots/spam.
(and who knows if the bots are richer than us poor humans!)
What then is the purpose of charging to post/comment at all?
You think this is the only purpose to charge for post and comments.
No it's not.
SN is a BCE and all the use cases it has we have them too, the sats are rotating and we are doing absolutely fine.
In addition to that I'm not sure why we should cry aloud about bots/spam. I absolutely don't see them flourishing here. They come here, stay for sometime, then go away.
Ah! We are a circular economy here. That is a very good point.
I make a habit if subscribing to everyone I think is a bot (in order to see how awful it is), so this may be coloring my view.
I'm glad to hear that you do not see bits flourishing here.
They won't flourish because mute + downzap work better demoralising them than raising the fees and inadvertently demoralising real stackers (and newbies are a bigger concern).
I'll also raise ~Quotes and ~Coinjoins to 21 sats.
Raise it to 210 or 2100. ;) be the strict owner of your territories.
~Scam_Reports is also my territory, I charge 210 for comments there already. The maximum is 1,000.
I see. It's absolutely a territory dedicated by you to you for your own engagement. Cool, keep it up. 😂
You got one post there in almost 13 days, says it all.
I'M ABSOLUTELY AGAINST IT.
How do you see a newbie stacker would feel about the high fees on comments??
Darth is like
"Pay-to-post" is a good threshold for having only good and useful comments.
If you are focused on getting sats (assmilking) then lower the fees and you will get mostly garbage.
If you are interested in good content, raise the fees and you will get the right info.
I wonder if bots, spam and slop would be lesser if comment costs were more dynamic? Start high, get lower over time or based on positive zaps, etc. ?
It's already more expensive to post as anon, so this is in a similar vein
From Lagos here. Naira is 1500+ to dollar now so saving is hard. My shop work pays small but I want to convert small small to sats weekly. Do you stack daily or weekly? How do you avoid fees?