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Yes, so for some reason I see the way stackers deal with scammers as a defining thing for adoption. If we can make a safe(-ish) environment for the whole community of stackers, and hopefully safe enough for sub-communities to form, then there's a path to growth that isn't even too hard. But since SN is very much about what the stackers want, and much less about what the team wants per se, due to the sats overall flowing between us more than between us and SN, and the sats ultimately deciding content visibility, I think it is in our hands as the set of stackers that are here now to decide how tidy a ship we want to run.
Personally, I really, really hate scammers. Even the naive kind that believe their "invention" will do good. So I don't want to profit off these. Heck - I used to dislike getting some sats from ~AI because everyone was zapping OpenAI announcements which were clearly lies, more than some original content we got. But I do think that it shouldn't be an obligation. I hate zapwars.
Agreed on zapwars. Even with sats at stake, it doesn't really feel much different than watching posts get thumbed-down to death on Reddit.
As far as the naive folks go, I don't actually consider them scammers; they're true believers. They may arguably be worse (at the very least, they're much more willing to keep pushing their cause), but they come from a different place.
The problem with the naive kind is not only the persistence, but often the willful ignorance of established patterns to failure, and the arrogance of insistence that no this is not going to go down poorly, and then it does. I have seen so many people give up dealing with it over the years. I have friends that have fully withdrawn into their shells and never come to a place like SN anymore, because they have burned out on dealing with scammers.
That's the real flipside of this. We preach don't trust, verify, but Brandolini's law makes it impossible with scammers because the scams pop up faster than you can debunk the claims. Like mushrooms on hot shit in the batcave. The guiding principle for me has also become: do you need it? No? then don't bother.
But then I see entire irl communities being taken over by scammers, much like the story in #1553722, but I saw that happen in front of my eyes. I saw the devastation. And the people that pitched it were truly believing that they could double their money by "fucking youtube" by watching ads through an app. They'd defend it with all their might when you brought it up. "Show me evidence that this isn't true".
And that is why I truly hate scammers. Because personally, I didn't invest blood, sweat and tears in Bitcoin for people to trade in one set of scammers for another set. We can be resigned and say "oh there's always scams". Which is true. But every one we can prevent or at least mute here on SN will (a) make SN safer, and (b) make scamming costlier.
Thinking out loud as I'm writing here:
So I realize that one of the groups most susceptible to being scammed are people who think they can't be scammed.
That said, I do think that people who use Stacker News regularly are, at the very least, pretty hardened against shitcoin scamming. If anything, I think sats spent promoting shitcoins basically being thrown down the toilet here, although that "toilet" ends up putting the sats in the hands of territory owners (and everyone else via rewards).
So my quick take is that it's just fine to profit from these people.
But, of course, I'm assuming the "core" SN audience here.
Without those downzaps, the scammy posts remain visible for visitors, who may not be immune to shitcoin posting (and more generally, if we talk about wanting SN to grow, that will mean more and more people coming in with a need to learn more, and who are therefore more vulnerable).
And, of course, shitcoins aren't the only kind of scam. There are plenty of scammy things aimed right at the heart of bitcoin, and the more complex and technical some of those things get, the easier it is to muddy the waters.
So all that said (and noting I'm not a territory owner), I don't see taking the adversing money as inherently bad, nor do I see an obligation for territory owners to spend sats - even the very sats they get as fees for the posts - to downzap. But I do see a collective responsibility of the community to fight bullshit. Downzapping's one way, but so is commenting and calling out the BS (Darth obviously was big on this, though I'd argue there's a difference between casual dismissal and actually arguments). Different people may prefer different tools, and that's fine.
As to the question about using my hard-earned sats to fight, well, my general answer is "fuck no," but with the notes that obviously commenting is using a small amount of sats, and I have done plenty of small downzaps (21 sats or so), just not some of the super large amounts that actually make a difference.