The State of Zapvertising

It is very early to be talking about the state of zapvertising and how it can (and should) be made better, but that is exactly how long it took to see what this was, and what was both good and bad about it. Then I stopped, and decided to ponder it for another day and night to make sure I wasn’t just being an ornery old man.

I’ve come to appreciate ornery old men a little bit more over the last few years though. Sometimes the skepticism, experience, and general distrust of “new things that will solve all our problems” serves as a valuable breaking force to smash these new ideas against, to see if they survive. Ideas that don’t survive scrutiny after all, probably won’t survive the real world.

So What Is Zapvertising?

Zapvertising has two forms, and I believe there is a crucial difference between the two. In one version, a company or creator zaps a ton of notes on the Nostr feed. Blockstream has done this for a couple of days at a time, to great success. It is very unobtrusive. Just a gentle reminder that they are there, and it is a way to earn good will that may lead to follows and possibly conversion to sales. This method has already proven itself to be fairly successful, as I think the amount of goodwill towards Blockstream shown in the timeline has shown. There is very little downside to this method, and there are already tools implemented on most clients to turn off zap notifications if it ever becomes an annoyance.

The other form of zapvertising saw its first trial run in Damus testflight build 1.5 (4). It involves zapping a note with a message included, and that message is pinned with the note at the top of the replies to it. This form, as far as this author is concerned, is a very different thing. It violates one of the principal features of the Nostr network - the organic feed. Until this test, your follow feed (or follows + replies) has been a chronological feed, with no algorithm applied except the  mutes or blocks applied by the user. 

There are, of course, other feeds designed by client developers, such as Primal, nostr.band, et al. that curate a “What’s Hot” type of list of notes. These feeds are, however, clearly labeled as such. There is no confusion as to whether a note is listed the way it is because of an algorithm - because the user specifically requested an algorithm.

Zapvertisements have none of this clarity, are opt-out instead of opt-in, and affect the normally chronological feed. This is a fundamental paradigm shift for Nostr, and one that I believe should be carefully considered before being adopted. During the recent conference at BTC Prague, I had to scroll through entire screens of playful “zapvertisements” on popular individual’s notes in order to see legitimate replies. This was such a negative interaction for me, that I chose to use a different client for the remainder of the day, until the playful enthusiasm died down. I ended up reverting to the stable version of Damus - because to be honest I absolutely love Damus as a client, and using anything else felt clunky to me - until controls are added to the zapvertising feature.

What are the weaknesses of the zapvertising model?

It is important to note, this feedback applies to the experience as seen during an early test of zapvertising during the 2023 BTC Prague conference. I will try to note where I am already aware the developers are already working on corrections.

There should be a way to turn them off. (In Progress)

This is the most crucial feature to add to zapvertising. There should be one toggle in my client, and *poof* - I never see a pinned note via zap ever again. Nostr is all about user choice and curation, and nobody should be able to short circuit my curation by paying a few cents. My freedom is worth much more than a few cents.

It should be limited to one top zap.

Seeing five or six zapvertisements on a popular profile’s post is heinous. This destroys the flow of interaction with that user, by requiring someone to scroll through pages of these ads to get to the genuine interaction. This is noise, not signal. Human interaction - one of the key defining features of Nostr - should never be expended for monetary gains.

This would also benefit creators, by creating a little bit of a bidding war among potential advertisers to get their ad seen. In a world where sats are still fairly cheap in fiat terms, this is an essential safeguard to ensure that profiles are not weaponized for nearly free.

Sat thresholds for displaying zapvertisements.

Users should have a control for how many sats an advertiser must have paid a creator before they are willing to view this ad. This is similar to a reserve price in an auction. I am not willing to view your ad because you gave my creator friend half of a cent. I might be willing to view your ad if you gave them 10 cents, or whatever seems appropriate to me. This should absolutely be settable by individual users: they are the only ones who know the appropriate value to place on their attention.

Zapvertisements should be limited to my web of trust.

The web of trust is an essential feature for Nostr to work in the long-term. There are a great many people doing an excellent job of theorizing how it can be made more effective, and how it can be implemented to maximum effect. Zapvertising should build on this work by only being shown if the advertiser already exists in my web of trust. This prevents a new company from coming in with a big budget, or a bad actor from coming in, and plastering every post on the timeline with spam. Trust is earned on Nostr, and it is not a bad thing to expect advertisers to earn theirs as well. If the advertiser is followed by friends of my friends, then it is appropriate to allow them to extend their reach by showing me their zapvertisement. If they are not, then chances are I am not interested in their services, or they have not done the work of fostering goodwill from my community. As Blockstream has shown, it is not difficult to garner some good will by posting, and engaging in the first, non-intrusive form of zapvertising.

Zapvertisements should be limited in length. (In Progress)

Since these notes inorganically push real content lower in a thread, they should not be able to be any arbitrary length. A short (120, or 240 character type) maximum displayed length should be imposed to prevent abuse.

Zapvertisements should not include images or previews. (In Progress)

This is both an experience protection, and an abuse protection. Many clients already do not load image previews from people I do not follow, or people not in my web of trust, to reduce the likelihood that I am exposed to material that is morally or personally repugnant. Images can also take up more space in the feed. It is a common sense design choice that these notes should not include this type of content.

But What About The Benefits?

Will zapvertising work?

I have my doubts that this will be a successful model without violating the principles espoused by the Nostr community. Even in an opt-out situation, if they become popular, the majority of users will probably switch them off. The popularity of ad-blockers already built for the Internet demonstrates that the majority of users do not like ads getting in the way of their content. If the majority of users switch them off, then there will be little financial incentive to pay for zapvertising. If users *cannot* switch them off, then Nostr is really nothing more than a Twitter clone made complicated by strange keys and relay management. I do not see how the incentives align for this model to be successful.

Is it better for small businesses?

As it stands now, yes. If it becomes intensely successful, probably not - although some of the ideas listed above, most particularly limiting zapvertisements to the web of trust, may mitigate some of the threats to this model being subsumed by large businesses that have large pools of funds to spray and pray their way into our timelines.

It is also worth noting that zapvertising is going to be limited in its attractiveness to businesses engaged in e-commerce, since we do not track location data. Location data is one of the key elements that allows traditional marketing, such as Facebook Ads, to be successful for small businesses engaged in traditional brick-and-mortar style commerce. Ad dollars need to be maximally effective for these small businesses and we have none of the tools to do so for retail.

Is this method of advertising better because it’s paying me?

I’m not convinced. The person actually *viewing* the ad is not being paid. The person posting the note is being paid. The advertisement is living in the viewer’s head rent free. This will likely incentivize advertisers to spend their dollars on popular profiles, creating an influencer culture, which leads to some of the same issues we have seen played out time and time again on social media - cancel culture, self censorship, follow farming, and posting for the “likes.”

The democratization of social media in Nostr was due to the fact that anyone could post quality content, slowly gain a following of people who valued their content and insight, and receive direct appreciation from their following without involving corporate money.

It is certainly not the fault of the people pursuing this idea if the culture has failed to live up to its ideals by actually participating in and funding the ideas they espouse themselves to hold. Creators put a great deal of work into the content they produce, and earning less than a dollar for dozens or even hundreds of hours of hard work is hardly an incentive to use this platform to promote their content. The issue is that producers of anything are incentivized to please their *paying* audience. The most powerful form of feedback for the vast majority of people is going to be their ability to eat and pay their bills. If zapvertising becomes a primary revenue stream, then we return to advertisers being the primary influencers of content - the opposite of the democratization we hope Nostr to be. To claim that financial incentive will not modify the behavior of people ignores a time-proven feature of human nature.

So What?

At the end of the day, whether zapvertising turns into a hellscape, whether it is even really necessary, depends upon every one of us. If we do not support the businesses, creators, developers, and operators that we claim to want and need, then we have nobody but ourselves to blame when they end up turning to advertising revenue to fund their work. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

You can look at it as being a patron of things you believe in, a contributor to a cause - perhaps all of these - but you have to do it. You have to actually put your money where your mouth is and pay up. Because the bill is going to come due, and whoever pays it will own it.