Hmm, very interesting post.

My first reaction was with my "engineering hat" on: Is there a problem here that needs fixing? In other words, are zaps not sufficiently incentivized right now? Is the "beauty contest" phenomenon becoming a problem?

From my observation, it doesn't look like there is a problem. Top posts can easily earn 20k-50k sats which is USD $18-$45, far above the minimum hourly wage in the U.S. and probably much more outside the U.S. Unless these zaps are mostly from SN-affiliated accounts, (or perhaps subsidized by a handful of generous stackers) it doesn't look like Stackers are being stingy with their zaps.

Moreover, I generally find the top posts to be good posts. So, if there's any beauty-contest dynamics going on, it doesn't seem to be elevating low quality posts, at least from my perspective.

But it does bring up the interesting question of why people zap. Here are some of my reasons:

• For the cowboy hat / pistol
• I find the people are more willing to engage with my content if I consistently zap their replies. This does two things: it tells them that I read their replies, even if I don't respond, and it tells them that their thoughts are valued.
• By zapping, I encourage and reward the content that I want to see. While it's true I could potentially free-ride off other peoples' zaps, no one here has the same preferences as I do. If I want to tailor SN more to my own preferences, my only choice is to zap the content that I like.
  • Strategically, I suppose the incentive here is to zap content that others don't like but I do. I think I do do this, in fact. I'm more likely to forget to zap a post that already has a bunch of other zaps, and more likely to zap lonely posts that I find interesting that others haven't yet elevated.

All this to say, I'm not sure that incentivizing more zapping is a problem that needs to be solved, yet. But this is my perspective as a user, perhaps SN thinks differently about it.