Oddbean new post about login | logout We don’t need to focus on the size of the zap we need to focus on amount of zaps which ultimately mean purple pilling. If 1 million people zapped an artist 21 sats that would be 21M sats ≈ 10K cuck bucks
That’s not going to happen. A good pipe dream though.
I could see this happening, I believe.
The scale to which Nostr would have to grow its user base in order for this to be possible even with the most popular accounts is something we won’t see for a LOOOOOOOOOONG time. But sure, for the sake of discussion, yes more scale will make the smaller zaps cumulatively worth more. That still doesn’t address the atrociousness of thinking that tipping someone 1¢ is a good tip though. The average Nostr is not that poor. Good content isn’t free or cheap to make, and if people aren’t willing to pay what it’s worth, then creators will go elsewhere. If you think good content is worth 1¢ then you’ll only get shit content that’s worth 1¢.
It is free the moment you put it out there for free. That's the nature of content in electronic format: once you put it out, it's not your anymore and people will simply not pay. Why would they? It boggles my mind, this insistence that people somehow have an obligation to pay for stuffs that's made available for free, voluntarily, or that they have to pay a certain fixed amount, but without explicitly making them do so by putting a price on the access to that content. If you feel you deserve 1 dollar instead of 1 cent for a piece of content, have the courage to paywall it. V4V has all the incentives upside down and will never, ever, "work", if "work" means paying as much to the content creator as they would get from a paywalled system.
gotta be careful zapping dat 🌽 😂 https://i.nostr.build/4wuYvHb3ILSqgtFl.jpg
I don’t think the creators will come if they have to wait for 1 million people to show up. Nos.social has been recruiting creators for a couple of months now and it’s slow going in part because the zaps are low. If you net out at the end of a week with 500 zaps that’s $0.30 USD. Creating content takes a HUGE amount of work. I do the bare minimum for nos and it is a giant time suck from my day. I don’t even make videos or live stream.
The other issue is that most artists are not in a position to save 100% of their tips for some time in the future when bitcoin is worth 10x more. Artists who are working to make a living are living in part off their tips. If they can manage to save some of it, of course that’s all the better, but many times income from any source is simply going straight to pay the bills. Doesn’t matter if it comes from Bitcoin or Venmo or physical cash.
Agree. It's economies of scale. We can't sustain with value for value now because we don't have millions of users. It will come.
Scale is part of the issue. It will help but won’t happen for some time. That’s ok though. It will come. The other, and more immediate issue is the culture that has become commonplace around zaps amounts. Number bias absolutely works against us with this aspect. 21-sat tips is a cute meme amount for the fun of it. It’s an insult though to unironically flip a penny’s worth of sats at someone for their art/music/video and expect them to consider it a meaningful tip.
I agree. I also think we need to consider that it's not sustainable to have a small amount of users pay more just because we don't have more users to zap and consume the content.
Users who can afford to tip more but aren’t because they’re accustomed to getting all their content “free” from ad-supported platforms ought to pay more. The average Nostr user can afford to tip more than 21 sats for good content they consume. Doesn’t mean you have to tip every post or every creator. Doesn’t mean the user base can sustain a living wage. But it means that you, the individual, can tip an actually meaningful amount when you enjoy something.
