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I think that in a world where we say that positive reinforcement is the only acceptable reinforcement, we should treat the clankers differently. We shouldn't punish a clanker for being a clanker, we're not going to stop them by downzapping. What I think that in that spirit works better is to perhaps punish imitation but reward transparency.
If I come to a post and there are three comments, one from a human stacker but not particularly interesting to me and two that are clearly from bots, my first instinct is to downzap the two, not necessarily to zap the human stacker's comment.
It's not enough for me that the human stacker post is most visible. By downzapping I want to be able to make stupid slop content invisible. It's a caretaker function like pulling weeds.
There are a number marketing clankers that include "ai" in their name. I still downzap them because I don't want other people to have to see such vapid comments. Perhaps this is the wrong attitude, but it has a certain gut-instinct appeal to it.
If SN is a visibility auction, it is a weird one that gives people the ability to places negative as well as positive bids against items.
However, there's also this bit about negative bids. I find the incentives of it difficult to think about. Even if stackers don't want to buy the visibility for their item or some othe stacker's item, they can pay to not see other things like marketing clankers get it.
I know that @k00b has done a fair bit of research on the bad things negative signals do to communities, so encouraging downzapping does seem risky. Yet, if we're crowdfunding the appearance of any given territory, comment section, or even the home page, it might be unreasonable to expect stackers to place bids on posts or comments that are not particularly interesting to them. Downzapping allows stackers to put bids on the value of not seeing things such as slop. Maybe this isn't a case of negative reinforcement, so much as positive selection for what we want to see?
Because I think it's like this, for me:
- I, as a meatbag, want to share my thoughts with those whom read and respond to me, so that we may have maximum synergy in our community.
There's also an SN-as-a-business p.o.v, which basically includes a-m bots:
- I, as a zap-harvesting business, want to share maximum value with those whom will zap and engage with me for my content, so that they benefit from my contribution and I in turn when I grow up have a massive stack.
Now, even if you're an experimental assmilking clankerish trickster on steroids, you still have a much higher chance at success when you're not being downzapped. Those that dislike your content will absolutely not be a good audience for you. Those that are prejudiced neither. But that doesn't mean that there is no audience on SN at all. And it doesn't mean that bots can't be useful. For example, I frequently zap @nitter because it provides a valuable service to me.
Bottom line, if there is no alternative, then we will keep this adverse environment forever, which is maybe cool for psychos, but that will deter growth for real. So imho, the best possible outcome is to serve audiences. Clankers don't have to suffer the same fate as shitcoiners, unless they're shitcoiner clankers of course.
I'm not so great at vibe-ing, but perhaps this is a way to solve @DarthCoin's dislike of rewards:
Instead of a reward pool, SN sybil fee sats go to powering a few SN-owned clankers that downzap other clankers. I don't know how one would avoid this downzapping human users, but it would feel nice to fight fire with fire. And if rewards were used to downzap clankers to oblivion it would still somewhat serve the purpose. I think it is circular though: the SN-downzapper bot wallet would only ever grow... (unless downzaps went to territory owners or posters, but then they would be incentivized to create their own bots so that the SN downzapper bot would downzap them...)
Also, this essentially becomes the new algo. So, that's not good.
Mutation of the idea: what if CCs can only be used to pay fees and downzap? But then we need some way to signal to users that it is easy (and hopefully fun) to downzap clankers.
Ah, really what we need is gamification of clanker downzapping. Stacker who is the fastest downzapper gets the most rewards for that day? Or just a special badge for downzapping x number of clanker comments?
I don't normally write stream of consciousness comments, but I wanted to show my line of reasoning (just like the chat bots).