I continue to think the solution is raising the bar to who gets to receive tips

do it with tasks

make the tasks accessible and open for anyone to do, but make them reasonably difficult

make them related to promoting DEGEN 

and the people who do them are whitelisted for tips

positive sum all around

it's actually a similar problem to Bitcoin mining

in the beginning, anyone could mine Bitcoin with a cheap ass computer because it was worth nothing

there was no competition 

same with DEGEN tipping, it worked in the beginning on a simple trust system because it was worthless

intersubjective mechanism design @ poidh.xyz - come chill /poidh + follow @poidhbot

the difference is that those days people can search and learn on YouTube "how to farm airdrops " and literally buy courses to learn how to do that .
back then, they didn't even know what bitcoin is...
so now they can extract much more value and even use bots,AI ,video instruction, how to  farm.
so that's hard to keep it up, and rules must apply and adapt to various situations.