every human has a finite amount of attention to give every day

a like is a reflex. it has the lowest activation energy past scrolling itself. and yet only 5-20% of social media users like content. 

on speculative platforms, every piece of content offers a financial choice, a calculation. potential cost vs potential gain.

a social feed becomes a feed of financial decisions. 

energy wanes, attention fractures. how many times a day can you weigh the current market cap and try to predict the future attention on each piece of content you see before deciding to buy or scroll to the next?

there's a reason social behemoths are all built upon a design hyperoptimized to reduce friction

as a ux person, i love experimentation. but what exact hypotheses are we working on here? who are we building for? it’s certainly not the billions of humans effortlessly scrolling instagram and twitter and tossing a like here and there

personality hire 🌈🤙 fullstack & ux, building /uno

Certainly true. I'm pretty sure besides likes that platform algorithms are also informed/trained differently based on the device used - I don't think it was even possible to like a YT video from a TV until fairly recently.

Community Builder. I'm wandering and wondering. Interested in decentralized, cool & creative stuff. Worked on a DAO for 5 years and looking for something new.

The point was that algorithms on social media platforms may place lower/higher value based on the device used to consume content (which could also include likes/dislikes). 
For ex: A TV may have less value than a desktop computer when it comes to scoring retention on a video for YouTube because there are a lot more metrics to look at from desktop users + TVs are often left on autoplaying content for a long time. Likes themselves may not even be valued strongly.

How that would apply if likes were financialized is unknown but I would expect tons of bot/sybil activity on an industrial scale if there was any form of financial incentive for liking content.

not sure i understand your point, are you trying to say on traditional social is so frictionless you can like/view content from every device?