>>18144672The frog poster who offers nothing but bait is living on the welfare for ’keks.
He produces no gem. He supplies no insight, no humor of lasting value, no shared idea worth archiving. Instead he extracts cheap engagement from the failures and naiveté of nusois and other ’teens who still treat every provocation as something that must be answered. Their replies, their leaks, their emotional expenditure become the transfer payment that sustains him.
Just as the old welfare system rewarded dependency and punished work, this arrangement rewards the pure baiter and penalizes the poster who tries to create real value for the ’log. Why invest the effort to craft a gem when the easy path of coal yields immediate attention and requires no skill? The incentives are perverse. The more the baiter is fed, the more he remains on the dole of ’keks, and the fewer genuine contributions appear.
The result is visible in the catalog itself: a growing share of threads that offer nothing, sustained by the residual goodwill or inexperience of newer users. The market is distorted. Productive effort is discouraged. Dependency is institutionalized.
The solution is not more rules from the administrator. It is the same remedy that applies to every failed welfare system: stop the transfers. Let the bait threads starve for want of engagement. Let the revealed preferences of users who value gems over coal reassert themselves. Only then will the incentives align once more with the creation of real value rather than the perpetual extraction of it.