Onlyzaps, let's get started.

It's been a turbulent few days, where I've been able to have wonderful conversations but I've also seen how my little resonance box in nostr has been totally polarized in a dizzying way.

I will try to express my conclusions after 3 days of turbulence in this article.

Dopamine, likes and rewards.

The thesis about the brain reward system and the implication that likes have in modern society is more than proven and has had disastrous consequences especially in children and adolescents. I don't think this debate needs to be reopened, it is true, it is a problem and social networks have exploited it to limits that border on illegality. Meta, Twitter, TikTok, there is none that has not taken advantage of this to maximize profits, these companies have destroyed one (or several generations) and we have not yet seen the consequences of this.

Nostr came as a breath of fresh and clean air, it proposed a free communication protocol, resistant to censorship and very resilient to possible attacks by the establishment. Months later, a multitude of applications and services gravitate around the protocol, offering the user a multitude of alternatives on how to interact with each other.

I also remember, months ago, how it was argued that one of the main virtues of nostr is the absolute freedom of the user to decide what he wants to see, about whom, and in what order, without the intervention of algorithms or other systems to distort our experience in the protocol.

Damus, the greatest.

My first impulse last Friday 21/04 when I received the latest Damus update was obviously to test it and give feedback, as far as I was able, to its developers. I immediately realized that something was not quite in line with my principles, as soon as this option was activated you automatically affected the experience of other users by hiding the (controversial) like button without their consent and in a unilateral way.

After 5 minutes I deactivated this option, I was totally baffled as to how this had crept into the roadmap of the most used application by all. The breach was born and I couldn't believe this was happening.

My feed started to fill up with people proud of having activated this new feature along with many others (less noisy) who were baffled, discouraged or downright sad to see how many had fallen into this trap we had set for ourselves.

12 hours later a patch arrived that mitigated the problem, but the damage was already done. The breach was growing.

Horrified, I was a spectator of how what had always been my little corner of love, cordiality and companionship had become, let me sum it up quickly, Twitter.

The first algorithm had been born, distorting the way others could interact without their consent.

Influencers, content creators or in our case, mostly devs.

I don't know exactly what it must feel like for someone who receives hundreds of interactions every day on their social app, probably it must not be something easy to manage. From this point of view, I perfectly understand how many influential people have activated this option to try to minimize the noise they receive and to somehow filter their day to day life on nostr.

I fully understand that many people are in favor of eliminating one of the biggest attack vectors that corporations use to classify and influence us at their mercy.

I also think that many of them have not pondered the consequences of activating a feature that affected (I'm not talking about the last build) so deeply in the way their followers, fans and people who respect them in one way or another interacted with them.

I launch a question here, was it necessary a badge on the profiles that activate this? Isn't it a way to divide this kind of badges? I don't think it was a good decision either. Many users felt as if this was a kind of barrier (or small Berlin wall, as I have read in some post) between the wealthy elite who don't want your likes, but your zaps and the rest of the users.

The name, was not the most accurate.

Onlyzaps, is quite a statement of intent. It's a catchy name and certainly has a humorous component to it, but it clearly leads one to think that what they are looking for is zap over other interactions.

I'm sure there's no double standard here, it wasn't a strategy to maximize zaps on accounts with more followers (as many say), I think it was simply a poorly chosen name.

On the other hand, I throw a question, if the goal was to remove likes, why not put an option in the client that simply says "disable likes"?

That's it, easy, non-intrusive, I still don't understand why the reasonable option was not chosen.

Conclusions

I feel some responsibility for what happens in nostr, I have always been like that, protective and somewhat righteous, especially when my inner self definitely slaps me with the red flag insistently. I am aware that I am just one more, many will think, this guy does not play a role, he should not feel responsible for anything. It's true, but I can't avoid it.

I think that when an application acquires relevance it also acquires a responsibility towards its users, didn't anyone think that such a change would bring consequences?

Other apps have a similar feature and much less intrusive, also wider, not only likes, you can hide what you want, for you of course, not for others, here is the key. I'm sure no one talked about this feature before, it was done well and that's why it didn't generate controversy.

At this point I'm still wondering if this new "feature" was something consensual or just an occurrence. Yes, I know it's only been released in trial version, but I can bet 5 satoshis that this will be coming to everyone in a short time without anyone being able to do anything about it.

After 3 days nostr is now a more polarized place, less united and consequently more fragile. Some of the people who had connected with me the most have left, others are still wounded trying to throw good vibes to others to redirect the situation, honestly, I thought nostr would be different, but so far the reality has put me back in my place, I'm still perplexed.