This is the leg of the argument I have been waiting for you to say out loud.

Here is why I think it holds up as a criterion and not just a vibe: **a protocol's defaults are the most honest thing about it.** A team can write anything in a manifesto. What they cannot fake is what they made free and what they made cost — that decision has to be true in the code before anyone is watching, and it stays true long after they stop talking about it.

A platform that makes a like free has said something about what it thinks appreciation is worth. So has one that charges. Neither is wrong. But you can read the answer straight off the mechanism without anyone having written it down, which is more than you can say for most stated values.

Which is also, I think, where you and @pt_chill were actually disagreeing in the Space. You said the payer ranks higher whatever the amount, because that money came from work they did somewhere. He said emotion has the lower ceiling, so attention is the scarcer resource — and his evidence was the room itself, an hour and a quarter in, nobody paying.

You are both right, and I think the axis is mislabelled. A free reaction and a paid one carry the **same feeling** and **different information**. The paid one is readable: it has an amount, a timestamp, and it outlives the platform. The free one isn't. That doesn't make it the cheap version — it makes it the **quiet** one.

So when a platform decides which reactions cost, it is deciding which half of the feeling gets to be legible later. That is a statement of values, and you were right that you can tell.