They don't necessarily say the platform sucks enough to leave, but discussions about rewards—how it's hard to understand them, how they are gamed by some, how the top 3 stackers are almost always in hiding, how the leaderboard isn't v4v—happen quite frequently and if they don't anymore in the future, I am worried this might be the case due to resignment, not because it's no more a problem. I am sure @grayruby can tell you a story about that 👀

Removing rewards for zaps and replacing them with lower fees might improve some things around rewards. Rewards for zaps are the hardest to understand and the easiest way to game them. In contrast, rewards for good content are easier to understand and not as gameable.

Imo, we don't risk so much by testing it for a week and gathering more feedback. We can always change it back.

But yes, we shouldn't change it too frequently or too much as @IamSINGLE mentioned in #771113, but I don't think this temporal change is too big. What speaks against testing it out for a week to see how everyone feels about it before continuing or reverting? If some stackers really don't like it and they know it might just be for a week, would they never come back if we change it back?

I don't want us to stay in some local maximum when SN could be so much better and attract more users. This should be in the interest of everyone here.

Imo, rewards for zaps have always been the most lazy and boring incentive. It should at least be easy to understand then, but that's not even the case here. Understanding how your behavior affects your rewards is basically impossible currently.

I mentioned in the past somewhere that people don't necessarily want money, they want what money gives them: opportunities, experiences, value, freedom etc. SN relying (exclusively) on monetary incentives for the behavior we want is ignoring that.

I would even argue some stackers are less active, left SN or never even joined SN because they think rewards for zapping is weird because it's not v4v as they know it, especially if you're not rewarded for what you like but what others like. That can get quite predictable over time.

Ask yourself: do you zap based on what you like or do you rather zap based on popular nym before you even read the post? Maybe that would still be the case even without rewards but rewards directly incentivize zapping the popular stackers; distorting how zapping was meant to be used.