A Nostr point of groupthink seems to be: "Value-for-value works." I'm not sure I agree.

I think this notion emanates from a bit of hopium for Nostr and its future, as well as from the fact that, indeed, zapping can be done. That is, sats can in fact be quickly zapped to others on Nostr or apps like fountain.fm or zap.cooking. I zap, therefore I am. All of this pleb-to-pleb zapping and v4v apps is awesome. However, I'd bet that 99.99% of what drives creators on Nostr is internal, intrinsic motivation, not zaps.

Creators create because there is something burning inside of them clawing to get out. If someone sends a couple of pennies worth of sats, that's just icing on the cake. Those two cents make a ton of difference and keep that internal motivation burning, but it burns regardless.

Truth be told though, there are often real costs involved in creating things for Nostr. First, there is time, which holds much value in its own right. There also is the opportunity cost involved. Spending time creating for Nostr means losing out on time that could be spent doing something else, something that might generate much more financial value. Then, there can be very real financial costs such as equipment or hosting or VPS instances and the like. A handful of sats, well, financially don't add up to much of anything in this department.

The irony of v4v and Nostr is the mantra, "Stay humble, stack sats." I hate to say it, but the mantra is not, "Stay humble, zap sats." In my view, this dissonance between the urge or pressure to zap others versus the desire to stack sats is the Achilles of v4v.

When the United States operated under the Articles of Confederation, the national Congress did not have the power to tax. Instead, the federal government relied on "donations" from the states. If they took in 25% of what they expected for the year, it was a good year. Relying on donations is a tough way to run an operation. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Nostr apps and "businesses" need to rack their brains to come up with a business model that moves away from v4v donations. When the internal fire of creating begins to wane, creators will say, "It was fun, but now, I'm out."