I think the original assumption was - downzapping is a "public good". And that a lack of downzaps is a "tragedy of the commons".
This definitely applies for someone downzapping junk copy/paste posts, or posts that were obviously AI generated. Downzappers are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, to curate Stacker News, and make it better for everyone else.
And that's great, as far as it goes.
However, what if that's not the reason people are downzapping? What if people have learned that by spending enough sats, they can disappear posts completely, even posts that are popular and get lots of comments?
They don't even have to openly disagree and debate with the poster, they just downzap.
And poof...the post disappears, unless the OP wants to spend hundreds of thousands of sats (like @Solomonsatoshi does, see #1464032) to zap it back up again.
What if it's about actual propaganda - deleting content that you disagree with, that puts your cause or country in a bad light? Like what's been occurring here on Stacker News?
Check out some of my recent posts (https://stacker.news/Signal312/posts) to see more details of what I'm talking about.
Let's talk about this. What are your thoughts?
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I think you’ve been overstating the impact of downzapping.
Many of the posts you talk about were highly visible on the Lit page for long periods of time.
What you might be missing is the decay rate of zap importance. Even a large downzap can be outweighed by a much smaller zap later in the day.
I first started looking into this topic when a post of mine that got pretty popular all of a sudden disappeared. Then I looked into it, and saw that it had been downzed very heavily.
I wrote a browser extension to compare the lit feed with another version of the lit feed, that didn't include down zaps. There's huge differences.
this gotta be the most Bitcoiny/SN-y thing to do... oh, weird... let me build something to get around it!
Yes it's fun, and interesting to see, but the browser extension mainly just exposed the problem for me.
If some kind of protection against downzap censorship, doesn't become a default for all users, then it's almost useless.
I don't want to write into a vacuum, and have well written , thoughtful posts be downzapped to oblivion.
one of the major promises of AI is that it enables much more of this behavior - bespoke solutions to bespoke problems
I might be misunderstanding how much the downzaps affect ranking, over time. Could you explain more about that?
The order and timing matter a lot because the weight of each (down)zap decays exponentially.
Oftentimes, the posts you're talking about were visible for hours because of the zaps they received. Then they received the downzaps and got knocked down. In this case, you're ignoring the initial hours of visibilty.
Other times (and often because you draw attention to it), posts that were downzapped out of visibility receive new zaps. Because this happens hours after the downzap, the new zaps significantly outweigh the downzap and the post becomes Lit again.
Yes, I don't doubt that downzapping has a noticeable impact at any particular time.
That’s true.
If @Solomonsatoshi is spending hundreds of thousands of sats just to keep a post alive, Stacker News is the only one truly winning the Zap War revenue.
Stacker News, the business, doesn’t take a cut of zaps or downzaps
well, us, its users -- of which the business' people are included, obviously -- do.
Yes, but most people aren't nerds about the business model and assume SN takes a cut of all the action.
I mean, dont they? Territory rent
That's a totally different model that's agnostic as to how people use the site.
The presumption underlying the comment was that SN is a direct beneficiary of zaps and downzaps, when it's actually those of us receiving rewards who are the direct beneficiaries and SN is an indirect beneficiary.
Maybe you can say that since a portion of zaps and boosts go to territory owners and territory fees go to SN, there is some incentive to increase zaps and boosts there.
Downzaps go 100% to rewards.
Definitely an incentive, but SN is definitely not "the only one truly winning the Zap War revenue".
What he said
Tax incidence etc. economically speaking, doesn't matter who ultimately pays the rent. Value comes fr the zappers and posters
You saw the part of the comment claiming that Stacker News is the only beneficiary, right?
Tax incidence and etc. aside, economically speaking, there are clearly other beneficiaries.
Territory rent and SNs long term economic viability does ultimately depend upon sufficient revenue for territory owners...or charity...
My purpose was to test the determination of the downzapper to silence any mention of The Greater Israel Project, and more generally any wider and critical discussion of The Iran - Middle East War.
It is not only my posts that are downzapped with great vigour but any post critical in any way of the US-Israeli war crimes currently ongoing.
The downzapper is determined to silence any such open and transparent dialogue.
Perhaps SNs is owned-financed by devout Zionist/s.
How the fuck would we ever know?
Unless downzapping carries with it identification of the downzapper.
Still struggle with the rationale.... fine, burning sats is fun, but what are you achieving? There's like twelve people on here, "hiding" or disincentivizing content for them achieves what, exactly, in the world?
I think it's more like thirteen or fourteen.
Ah, yes. Forgot about the news dudes
There are other people on this forum who are critical of Israel and don't get downzapped. So maybe consider why.
The downzapping on anti-zionist post doesn't occur unless they achieve some visibility.
Where does revenue from downsats go?
Downzaps go entirely to the rewards pool.
and the rewards pool is also skewed because isn't tied to a net number (zaps - downsats)?
The rewards pool is still based off a trust graph.
These sections from the SN faq may be helpful:
Let's pretend there are no downzaps.
In the case where a user boosts all their posts and covers the front page, what would the rest of SN users do?
go find some well-known nyms or territories and manually zap stuff+comments they like -- and enjoy the gains from the outsized rewards pool.
I can stay patient and inconvenienced longer than you can hurl sats in silly endeavors.
Raising the topic of the war in Iran and Middle East is perhaps in your opinion a 'silly endeavor'.
Not everyone shares that viewpoint, nor that arsemilking is the primary objective in participating on Stacker News.
This is a great discussion to have. I think there's a lot of options out there.
For instance, only allow down zaps to affect your feed ranking if they're not anonymous?
Or don't allow down zaps to affect your feed ranking unless they are established accounts?
One part of the answer, I believe, needs to be that this must be a default setting. Because it's if it's some obscure thing that 99% of stackers don't even know about, it'll be useless.
Why not simply make downzappers accountable for their actions?
If someone posts something and boosts it they are being open about and accountable for their actions.
In such a case stackers should be free to downzap content that is crowding the front page but downzappers currently seeking to covertly silence particular viewpoints would also now be accountable.
It is the covert nature of the downzapping that is encouraging it to be used to censor content.
If the censor/s are identified then they are then also accountable.
I think you should be able to downzap as much as you want as long as everyone can see that you are doing it.
#732035
I posted something yesterday on AI, cryonics, and the Tower of Babel (#1480297).
It got downzapped almost immediately, before any real discussion formed.
That’s interesting to me.
Not because I mind disagreement. I expected pushback.
But because it raises a different question:
Is downzapping here mostly about filtering low-quality content…
or is it also being used to suppress ideas people don’t want to engage with?
Genuine question.
Curious how people think about that distinction.
I was under the impression that down zapping was originally meant for that purpose, to downvote low quality content. But now it's being used for something completely different.
We should talk about this. There should be active discussion.
That’s my concern.
Downzapping may have started as a way to filter low-quality content.
But in practice, it can also let people suppress thoughtful posts they disagree with without ever engaging the argument.
That changes the incentive.
Instead of “bad content gets filtered,” it can become:
“uncomfortable content gets buried.”
If someone thinks the post is low quality, say why.
That would make the signal stronger.
I think your post may have been down-zapped potentially just to obscure the actual target of the downzapping. You can see a pattern happening, especially if you look months ago, into what was downzapped.
Older posts that were downzapped, there was usually a very obvious quality reason - ai content, copy paste posts. And the amounts were much smaller.
Now the pattern is completely different. Except for posts that I believe are decoy downzaps.
I checked some of my old posts, to see if they were downzapped. There were a few, but only very minor amounts, on some of my old carnivore posts.
But now there's crazy high downs zaps occurring on anything that is anti-zionist or anti-iran war.
Check out some of my previous posts to learn how to make downs zaps more visible on stacker news with a browser extension.
Looking at my own posts that get hit with downsats, I’m starting to see a pattern.
They’re not low-effort or copy/paste.
They tend to:
That’s on me to some extent.
At the same time, if the reaction is to downzap before engaging, it’s hard to tell whether the signal is “low quality” or just “high friction.”
Feels like there’s a difference there worth talking about.
I don’t get the zapping things
I'm sorry that this happened to you.
It is the perennial problem of governance.
You try to fix a problem but there will always be consequential effects from whatever solution you devise.
In any system governing human behavior a community will have certain objectives and values.
SNs ones are based upon freedom of speech but also strongly held views on other topics like economics and political structures.
Most communities rely upon some general degree of social pressure for members to conform to agreed standards and behaviours to discourage that which reduces the achievement of objectives.
Where a topic is raised what most of us would say is we want the ability to hear, share and consider contrasting viewpoints, but this clashes sometimes with fiercely held but ultimately insecure participants.
At this point some members of the community seek to avoid and evade reasoned dialogue and debate and instead indulge in personal attacks and obstruction of reasoned dialogue- perhaps because their strongly held views are being challenged but they feel unable to credibly and transparently respond. Don't mention the war!
The misuse of downzapping could be easily substantially reduced if one simple mechanism was put in place.
That the nym of the downzapper was identified and attached to the downzap action.
That would bring accountability to the downzapper and avoid the sly anonymous censorship that can and does now occur.
The downzapper would have imposed on them the social pressure to explain their reasoning for downzapping certain topics into obscurity and would have to weigh that up against their own ongoing credibility. Currently there is zero credibility risk incurred by deliberate and malicious downzapping because the downzapper can conceal their nym.
Imo, here's freedom of speech everyone can post whatever he/she wants unless there's sats/CC on their account. Downzaps is some kind of "report system", legal method to say: I don't like what you post here. This way healthy community works
We’ve invented a decentralized way to pay for the right to be heard or the right to silence others.