It's been one year since I began my campaign to get stackers to zap more: #287074.

I've made several such appeals based on how zapping benefits the zapper indirectly by supporting the territories they like (#614066 ), rewarding the kind of content and behavior they want to see (#523858), and reducing spam (#621288).

I also described how incentive problems in the reward system might lead to pathological zapping behavior (#473181) and why it's not in Stackers' best interest to game the rewards system (#546904).

There have been a few instances of people clearly gaming the rewards system by correctly predicting which posts will become top posts and zapping them very shortly after they've been posted (clearly too quickly to have actually read the post). I'm not particularly bothered by this, but I know some stackers are.

What these gamers are doing is exploiting an inefficiency in how the rest of us are behaving. In previous discussions about this, I made the point that this behavior is self-correcting. That was based on basic econ logic about profits tending to zero when there are no barriers to entry (basically, someone else will try to zap posts immediately, too, and the gamers will cannibalize themselves).

One way to resolve that inefficiency is to zap faster, but another is to zap more. Zapping faster may not be feasible if you actually want to read posts before zapping them (although you can sort on recent if you're not already doing that to catch posts earlier). However, as I've been harping on for a year now, zapping more is often in the Stacker's own interest anyway.

The reason these gamers are able to fly up the leader board with relatively few sats zapped is because they're getting to the top of the "top post zapper" rankings. The leader board rankings are based on where stackers rank in four separate categories: top posts, top comments, zapping top posts, and zapping top comments. It is also non-linear: i.e. the difference between 1st and 2nd in a category is greater than the difference between 5th and 6th. The gamers are essentially ranking 1st in one category and last in all the others, but that's sufficient to make it high up the leader board and reap significant rewards.

The threshold for ranking 1st in zapping top posts would be higher if the rest of us were zapping top posts more (and zapping them quicker). At the very least, that would mean those trying to game the system would also have to zap more to hold onto their place, which would mean more rewards for the rest of and less net benefit for them.

If you don't like seeing people gaming the leader board, zapping more will make it harder for them, while getting more sats to the creators you like and netting you some more rewards. It's win-win-lose, but you don't like the loser.