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Thank you for the data check and the nice table.
Why do you think it is, then, that downzaps -- at 1/10th or 1/20th the quantity as zaps -- lead to such turmoil? Clearly, they are not merely downvotes but have a much higher emotional value than zaps.
you just throw sats at whom you hate and then it goes away
It does feel like this. But the reverse is also true: throw sats at what you like and everyone else will see it (unless they mute it). The difference is that downzapping is a negative emotion. This seems to cause a lot of strife. Perhaps there should be no downzap at all, and only mute.
I wonder if you could mute a downzapper (so that their downzaps don't affect your rankings), but then this would lead to attaching identity to zaps which is not a good road.
There is something about boosting and its negative twin downzapping that strikes a chord in people. I don't think it is good the way it is playing out now, but it makes me wonder if there isn't someway to channel these energies into a good purpose.
Why do you think it is, then, that downzaps -- at 1/10th or 1/20th the quantity as zaps -- lead to such turmoil? Clearly, they are not merely downvotes but have a much higher emotional value than zaps.
Because:
- A handful of stackers are intentionally wiping out posts.
- They are concentrated and selective, with some minor exceptions, but those too seem plausible to be grudges or done with ulterior motives.
- Many of the posts that are downzapped most today are not done by assmilkers. Not by stackers that are only here to make a buck. The topics are just wrong for that. So it hurts extra because they spent their time on that post; blood sweat and tears. Maybe to inform, maybe to protect, maybe to need some feedback because they're insecure or otherwise afraid.
I think that if you did the work and you were hoping to maybe reach some stackers, and then that gets taken from you with a steep downzap, it'll be emotional.
But the reverse is also true: throw sats at what you like and everyone else will see it
Yeah I tried that. It's the 4th entry in the OP's list. There was a sympathetic stacker that joined in at scale to upzap a censored post and our joint effort bought @SimpleStacker a territory. It didn't buy justice. It didn't buy victory. It didn't even make the post visible for more than a few minutes all the way until the downsat weight change. And although this was under 3x rule, I'd still lose to a rich stacker with a grudge today at 1x. It is that simple: I don't have the coin to spend.
What I was testing at that time was to see who would join in. Stackers that would say "fuck it, here's a 100k sats to defend freedom of speech against a tyrant millionaire". I know who did that. I also know it was only 1 stacker. The experiment didn't fail on it's own, just the outcome was extremely disappointing. I do know the single stacker I can trust tho, lol.
So no. People won't upzap that much because it's not worth it for them. SN isn't their life, their family. They can leave at any time. And maybe they will. That's my fear.
Ah, sorry, I didn't know you felt that strongly about it. My intention isn't to take advantage of your principled stance, nor to make light of it. I'd be happy to zap you back the amount you spent fighting SS on my joke post, or to send it via lightning.
I appreciate what you're trying to do. I think the main reason I don't join in isn't because I'm trying to save sats, it's because I don't feel like I have the attention bandwidth to really engage or stay on top of this battle. Attention is a scarcer resource than the typical amount of sats we play with on SN, though to be fair some of the zap/downzap battles have been dealing with objectively large sums.
No, no, you're welcome to it. That's not the point. I was simply expecting that for something like your post that I don't expect many people would dislike - it was a good post - that literally got downzapped because you undermined a single person, the reaction to be more principled too. After all, we hear a lot of principled takes here on SN. People with morals that lament the lack of morals in others. So the test was how much of that was true. It's just money after all. Not like we're throwing ourselves in front of a tank.
The test was good, because it also shows that stackers will complain about downzaps before fighting it. And I get it. It's a steep wall. It's not in proportion to what a normal post gets in zaps except those written by stackers most likely to help get higher rewards.
So this is not criticism of you. It's basically of everyone except you.
I keep thinking that some of the issue with this is that we are all trying to make a front page that looks like what we ourselves think it ought to look like...and there's no way to produce such a page.
Some people clearly want to talk about Iran/Israel, other people really don't want to talk about Iran/Israel. The result is zap tug-of-wars.
One might think that territories are a solution to this: just view the territory that matches the subject you are interested in. But because there is a front page, there is something to fight over.
Maybe we should be rid of the front page and default to a specific territory, and if stackers want to have discussions about other topics, they have to switch to viewing the territory suitable for such topics.
Wait didn't you want stackers to say "stop it Scoresby"? Not gonna say it. haha.
I don't think the solution to the frontpage not reflecting what we individually want to see is to kill the front page. There must be a way to dampen the rich-rank. It'll be hard without a second dimension to sat bean-counting. But... (re-)introduction of a second dimension is likely superior to a kill switch.
Markets aren't holy because there is more to life than money. If there weren't then why the heck would people with a lot of it spend it on suppressing speech of others on a platform with 1k MAU? So, the SN content ranking game must be intrinsically wider than exclusively money. The Msat question is: what is it?
analytics
check the downzaps for each month in the top right graph... or wait, let me type you a table:
So there was one real outlier and that was Feb '26, which was the emoji war. Also note that back then, 1 downsat counted as 3 upsats, so there was in terms of signal almost as much down as upzap. Also notable, March '26 - the aftermath of that war - was the worst month in terms of zaps since Aug '23.
I personally feel that the January stats were reasonable. I also started downzapping more in Jan, but not excessively. Mostly to counter things that were never popping up on the front page but started to get boosted 1-2x the amount of sats such a post would usually see in total, and back then, I didn't want to mute anyone but trolls.
The increase in amount of downsats comes from the novel developed suppression tactic 2 months post release: you just throw sats at whom you hate and then it goes away, for everyone. This is common now, there are multiple stackers doing this.
I suppressed 4 posts myself: the first was a 100k boost in October by what I believed (and still believe) to be a scammer, under the trust and "top boost" model. The 2nd and 3rd were also under that model, they were boosts on ~AI. The fourth was Boog's one day after the new rules and that was accidental and due to a bug.
And then in Feb, "the rich" decided to spend almost a million sats to downzap everyone that didn't have a gun emoji, or hid it, or undermined them despite gun emoji, or just disagreed with them... exactly the outcome you say it was to prevent except the concept was applied in inverse.
But to come back to your first assertion, I don't think stackers like downzapping more than upzapping. Maybe some do. But the majority doesn't.