The reaction button is the EVILEST engineered tech of the digital, if not the entire industrial era. No military apparatus has mass-colonised the human psyche to such complete subjugation.
Disguised as generosity, predatory by nature -- it runs a chemical charade over the neurological system, farming the individual into an optimisation-hungry vegetable, with the artistic prowess of a broccoli.
As an average Xennial, I witnessed first-hand the transition from poorly-written MySpace dossiers on single-processor desktops to a gamified Facebook in multi-core pocket phones. We went from retarded blogging to revolving in cesspools.
The nostr protocol and its team of 4000 keep me awake at night. Its ungovernable nature could prove more destructive than all other platforms combined — precisely because it mirrors the same feature rails as its predecessors: reactions, reposts, comments, etc.
If nostr is to WIN, it must do so through unprecedented innovation that enhances human cognition, intellectuality, and empirical truth.
Today marks three years of #nostronly for me.
May I commend nostr:nprofile1qqsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqelpt5w for "pioneering" user control over the button row by enabling removal of the reaction button entirely, an Amethyst update last week.
Zapping is poised to be the greatest innovation for healthy social interaction. Its skin-in-the-game nature carries a singular bias: genuine desirability. Inversely, a zapless post, perhaps what this note will turn out to be, is not inherently bad, undesirable or nefarious; merely a tractionless idea registered at a particular time and space.
If free will exists, there is a chance for zapless content being read. Negative reaction counts -- by trolls or not -- will crush any narural inclination towards curiousity.
Also, reaction buttons -- their statistical counts and qualitative weight -- have demonstrably poisoned the nature of discourse in the comment section, for over a decade. It's only natural for humans to gang up on an idea they were "sold".
Long-winded way to say: keep your sanity and enhance the quality of posts and comments by deleting gamified reaction buttons.
Done once, done for all.
PS: btw, I use wisp.