113 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 21 Mar \ on: How does it feel when bots zap your posts? 🤖⚡ meta
I feel silly for omitting any discussion of bots from my post yesterday (#473181): they are the most likely mechanism that will push SN towards the outcome I was warning about.
If the incentives on the site remain fairly easy to figure out (and still not entirely aligned with zapping quality content), then bots will arbitrage the rewards system. That will mean exaggeratedly big rewards for the bot owners and the top stackers, at the cost of lower rewards for genuine engagement.
Your post was very thought-provoking.
I hope I didn't make it sound like SN has lots of bot accounts or anything like that.
More, I was trying to think about how money changes social media interactions.
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Thanks.
I think this was a great follow up to my post. I love the way you articulated how we could come to treat each other as faucets. That's a horrible thought, but it is definitely one of the ways SN could fail.
I've had to change some of my zapping habits fairly recently, because I felt like I was getting some comments that were just fishing for sats.
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The hope is that with zaps in our taps humans become heavier weights in the algorithms.
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That certainly seems to be the case. Bots thrive in low marginal cost environments, so the posting fees here are helping to keep them at bay.
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