Sats, knitting and the consequences of monetising communities \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Sats, knitting and the consequences of monetising communities

3324 sats \ 11 comments \ @td 31 Oct 2023 bitcoin

Incentives rule the world.

Nostr and Bitcoin are two sides of the same coin, the Venn diagram almost overlapping I would guess, or at least very close, with Nostr almost completely subsumed.

Right now Nostr is where Bitcoiners get together and hang out (as well as other places of course like stacker.news etc.). As such it is very natural for Bitcoiners to reward each other for interactions using Bitcoin as that is what they are all about. You are rewarded in Bitcoin for being close to Bitcoin.

Cast your mind forward now and what happens when the, say, knitting community springs up on Nostr. Would Sats flow as freely? How about the oil traders? I would hazard a guess that oil traders’ zaps would be orders of magnitude larger than the knitters’, no offense to knitters.

I am not trying to pretend that these incentives do not already exist in our modern society but would the monetisation of interactions mean that people are, consciously or unconsciously, dragged towards “high value” communities?

Will everything be monetised? Is it good?

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1373 sats \ 7 replies \ @elvismercury 31 Oct 2023

Why all the knitter hate? J/k.

It's a good question. One way to look at it -- an obvious and sensible way -- is to say these communities are being monetized. Since btc is money, clearly that's technically true.

Speaking personally, though, the money-ness of all the zapping I do on SN is almost totally irrelevant to me. I've made something like seventy bucks or so on here, and while I guess getting seventy bucks is better than not getting it, I don't care about that. But I do really care when people seem to value my contribution. And the fact that it's real money is relevant to that. If they were totally imaginary units, there would be no stakes.

Point is, it's kind of monetizing online communities; but it mostly isn't. But the way that it is is incredibly interesting! How can sats be used to help communities form and take shape? SN is a fascinating opportunity to be at the forefront of that question.

152 sats \ 6 replies \ @td OP 31 Oct 2023

I don’t know man, I wouldn’t trust those knitters further than I could wrap a scarf around them… 😆

I hear what you say about it not feeling like money. A large number of fractions of a cent or a penny do eventually add up, and like you say, the more you give, the more you get.

That dopamine hit you get when you get positive engagements from your stuff is super-compelling, though it doesn’t always have to be tied into Sats, just look at hacker.news or Reddit (not to mention more conventional “social media” where that dopamine effect is really turbocharged), people engage just for the craic and the kudos.

Interesting to see where chucking actual money into the equation will lead us.

All that said I’m not speaking from a position of any real knowledge so could be talking out of my 🫏

1709 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 31 Oct 2023

It's noteworthy how these different communities have dealt with this. There's some amount of status that maps to the real world from stackoverflow activity, for instance. If you're a dev, or an expert in the relevant topic area, those upvotes matter. And it feels good to get a bunch of upvotes on Hacker News, since the people over there are generally really smart, and the level of discussion over there is really high. But it's notable that it's all fiat -- nothing is sacrificed in order to upvote something, or like it, or whatever. Which is why zaps are so interesting -- something really is sacrificed. Even if it's something tiny. And that thing is non-inflatable.

@Undisciplined talked about this the other week, wrt normalizing zap amounts. For whatever reason, most zappers on SN are ridiculously stingy -- e.g., 1 or 10-sat zaps are the default; which is such a stupidly small amount of money that it's not even worth stooping over to pick it up in real life; so it can't be that someone is so broke that they can't afford to budget a nickel per day in zapping, it's just what people are used to, and what is socially modeled.

There's something important in there, too, but it's not clear what it is, exactly.

10.1k sats \ 2 replies \ @evanbaer 31 Oct 2023

Yeah I confess I was a stingy 10-sat zapper

For me I didn’t want to refill my Lightning wallet and top off my account after I signed up to SN

Now that I’m several days in and have more in my account, I’m zapping more 100 satty zaps

⚡️ ⚡️

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 31 Oct 2023

Have some sats to get you established in the world young man :)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @evanbaer 31 Oct 2023

Nice!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 31 Oct 2023

Thanks for the shoutout

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @cyberpunk02 31 Oct 2023

You get the dopamine hit from the like button already, but it's from fake fiat ilkes. Adding sats makes the clicks more genuine and I think just makes the reality of the online activity more inline with the phisical effect. It is more power to the internet god though

40 sats \ 1 reply \ @cyberpunk02 31 Oct 2023

Knitters will zap more, because it's a more high value community

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @evanbaer 31 Oct 2023

Is knitter.news taken yet?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 31 Oct 2023

You're describing arbitrage opportunities and they are how market actors discover the most efficient allocation of scarce resources. It's prosocial for people to adjust their activities towards what others are most willing to reward.