Random Thought #1: Of Likes and Zaps
Image this.
You are scrolling through your favorite social media. It’s probably been 10 minutes Scroll. Like. Repeat. Scroll. Like. Repeat. And so on and on and on.
Does it sound familiar to you? How many times did you find yourself in this situations? Most importantly, how much attention did you pay to the hundreds of posts that you liked? What can you actually remember?
Attention and likes
Recently, I took a communication class. I was very surprised when the teacher told me that the average attention span is around 7 seconds! This means that when you are looking at something or talking to someone, you are actually paying attention for the first 7 seconds. After that, something else has already captured your mind. And it’s actually getting worse and worse. Why is that, you might wonder? Yeah, you got it right, social media.
The infinite amount of content that you can consume on social media continuously steals your attention. Thus, when you are looking to a post, your focus is already on the next piece of information, and on the one after and so on indefinetly. Finally, when you decide to leave a like to the first post, you are not actually remembering what you were looking at.
In this context, likes moved from being an appreciation for someone else’s work to a simple mechanism that feeds the social media algorithm. From a measure of the value provided by a creator, they became an empty number. Liking a post is no more action, but a mere unconscious reflex. A like is something free, something that you can leave without any conscious effort, to anyone, to anything. Even to something that you actually do not like.
In the last years, likes stopped being a measure of value provided.
And then, zaps came.
Zaps and the value 4 value revolution
Since I am publishing this article on Nostr, I expect most of the reader to know what a zap is. However, for the nebies whom may come across my random thought, here is a brief explaination.
Zaps are a simple way to communicate appreciation. Whenever you like a photo, a thought, a video, you can zap the creator. Exactly as a like, you might say. But here is the deal. When you zap someone, you are actually sending them some amount of money! And not a simple type of money, but the scarcest type of money on earth: Bitcoin! Basically, if a creator provides value to a user the user can award the creator with some monetary value. Nowadays, this concept is quite common and known as value4value (v4v for short).
This is a revolution. Anyone can provide value. Thus, everybody should be able to earn value if something of value is provided , not only some super influencer with sponsors and affiliate programs
Zaps from the user perspective
I started this article by talking about attention, and how there is such a huge competition for it that no one is actually able to focus on something anymore. How does it connect to zaps?
Zaps allow users to regain their lost attention. Since zaps provide real monetary value to a creator, a user has to be 100% on focus on what he is reading or watching: “Is this picture/video/post providing me value?”. You do not want to separate from you hard-earned sats for something useless. Unlike likes, zaps are not free. When you zap someone, it means that you have actually paid attention to the post and you are actually acting to signal your appreciation.
Zaps from the creator perspective
I am an amateur photographer. I love going around places and took hundreds of photos at everyhting that catches my curiosity. I posted more than a hundred pictures on Instagram and received even a decent amount of likes. However, I eventually started to wonder if likes came from a genuine appreciation of my work, or only from the aforementioned mechanical reflex.
This does not happen on Nostr. Whenever I am zapped, I instantly know that the appreciation is real. My God, someone really spent some time looking at my photos and decided to give me some real monetary value for that! I really provided value to someone! This is truly exciting.
The realization of this fact has been one of those “ah-ah” moments. Why should I spent my time posting pictures on a social media just to get likes, when someone can send me a chunk of the best money ever created?
And why should you?