This is a document highlighting the changes and updates made to Stacker News over time.

05/02/2023 - Nostr Sub Launch

Stacker News now offers a ~nostr sub for Nostr-related topics. It works just like the main Bitcoin sub, but now users can filter their view to see only Bitcoin or only Nostr content if they wish.

In addition, users who have earned cowboy hats can now hide them from appearing on their profile.

02/16/2023 - Bookmarks

You can now bookmark posts and comments on Stacker News. The feature is available in the ... next to any post or comment. You can also see your list of bookmarks by clicking on your nym in the navbar and clicking bookmarks in the dropdown.

Additionally, the ... on items now has a copy link option and a link to the open timestamps timestamp at ots timestamp.

A significant portion of the work on bookmarks was done by @ekzyis in response to this bounty: Implement bookmarks on SN earning them 1m sats.

02/14/2023 - NIP-57 Nostr Zap Support

Stacker News users can now use their SN lightning address as their Nostr client lightning address, and when someone zaps you on Nostr, your sats will be sent directly to your SN wallet.

To set up NIP-57 Nostr Zap Support:

  1. Add your nostr pubkey in the NIP-05 section of your SN settings
  2. Add your SN lightning address to your nostr client
  3. Post on nostr
  4. Stack sats whenever someone zaps your nostr post

More information about the NIP-57 spec: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/57.md

02/01/2023 - Easter Egg

Easter eggs aren't supposed to be described, so we won't describe it.

Additional improvements:

  • We now get the bitcoin price from the server so your IP isn't leaked to coinbase (thanks to @eksyis)
  • We now support entering bech32 encoded nostr pubkeys in our NIP-05 support (thanks @dk for the motivation)

01/26/2023 - Bounties

Stacker News now offers Bounties as an additional post type. To create a bounty, click 'more' on the post page to reveal the bounty option.

Stacker News allows you to specify an amount you're willing to pay out, and each published bounty post has a bounty bag displayed next to the title. It is colored grey if the bounty hasn't been paid out yet, and green if it has already been paid out.

Our goal was to make it an extremely permissive feature and avoid overprescribing how to use it:

  • The OP of the bounty can reward any child comment the bounty, including nested comments, and multiple comments
  • The OP can pay a bounty on a comment with a click of a button (which behind the scenes is just a tip)
  • The earning comment(s) for a bounty get a green bounty bag in their header
  • The OP's past bounties will be displayed below their bounty posts so you can tell if they have a history of paying their bounties

You can view all bounties on the recent page by selecting the 'bounties' filter.

  • Thanks to @bitcoinplebdev for doing the overwhelming majority of the work on bounties
  • Thanks to @ToshiMoto for the design work on the bounty bag

01/22/2023 - OpenTimestamps

After the edit window closes on a post/comment, we now timestamp posts/comments in the timechain using OpenTimestamps. The resulting proof allows stackers to know a piece of content is at least as old as the bitcoin block that it's in.

This only applies to content created from this point forward so long as it's a post or the child of a post that's been timestamped.

We may timestamp historical content in the future, but we don't yet. We also don't yet upgrade timestamps to be independently verifiable, and instead rely on the calendars we submitted the hashes to.

How this works:

  1. After the edit window closes, we sha256 hash a canonical json object of the post/comment.
    • the preimages of comments include the hash of their parent
  2. We then send this hash to OTS for timestamping.
  3. At this point, you can view the OTS info by appending /ots to the item's path
    • if you attempt to view the OTS info before we've submitted the timestamp or on a piece of content that wasn't timestamped, you'll 404
    • because when we delete items we actually delete them, the preimage is not available on deleted items ... however, the hash and the resulting timestamp is kept
  4. You can download both the preimage and the ots file and verify the timestamp for yourself.

You can view the timestamp of this original SN release post here.

01/18/2023 - Slashtags Auth

You can now login to Stacker News using Slashtags authentication on your Bitkit wallet.

You can now delete posts/comments at any point after they are created. This is a hard delete.

When you delete something, the content is lost forever and replaced with 'deleted by author' title/text.

Lots of small fixes have also been made to dupe detection.

  • we now ignore case
  • we ignore sub domains
  • more youtube link variations recognized as dupes
  • we un-shorten links automatically
  • we remove twitter tracking from urls

Thank you @cointastical and @ekzyis for help on these.

In addition, we also made some updates to the login and sign up flows for new users.

01/06/2023 - Nostr NIP-05 Support

Stacker News now has Nostr NIP-05 support.

If you're logged in to Stacker News, you can input your nostr pubkey (64 hex chars) by visiting your settings page and scrolling to the bottom. If you're using a Nostr client like Damus, you'll need to convert your Damus key into a Hex key at https://damus.io/key/.

You can also input your Nostr relays into Stacker News.

If your SN nym is k00b your nostr nym via NIP-05 will be k00b@stacker.news.

12/20/2022 - SN Referral Program

For every new stacker you refer, you'll get

  • 2.1% of all the tips they receive
  • 21% of any boost or job promotion

Any website, newsletter, video, social media post, or podcast where you link to SN - or an SN story - can now be a referral link and earn you sats.

Any SN link can be turned into a referral link by appending /r/<your nym>, e.g. /r/k00b, to the link. Examples of referral links:

https://stacker.news/r/k00b https://stacker.news/items/109473/r/k00b https://stacker.news/top/posts/r/k00b?when=week

Every post now has a link sharing button in the upper right. If you are logged in, the link shared is your referral link. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to get referrals.

For logged in stackers, there's a referral dashboard to track your referrals and how much you're earning from them. It's available in the dropdown in the navbar.

Also, all redeemed invites have been retroactively turned into referrals so many of you aren't starting at zero. Invite links will also continue to exist and are implicitly referrals.

The money for referrals comes out of SN's revenue. It doesn't cost the referree anything extra - the referrer just gets extra sats from SN.

12/09/2022 - Donations, Rewards, Turbo Tips, and More

Anyone can now contribute the SN daily rewards pool by directly donating sats. 100% of donations are distributed back to the best SN users as daily rewards. This page is visitable in the footer or via stacker.news/rewards.

Turbo Tips is a new experiment in improving tipping UX. When enabled in settings, every bolt click raises your total tip to the next 10x of your default tip. If your default tip is 1 sat:

  • first click: 1 sat total tipped
  • second click: 10 sats total tipped
  • third click: 100 sats total tipped
  • fourth click: 1000 sats total tipped
  • and so on ...

The option is available in the advanced drop down menu under default tip because it's powerful, but not intuitive.

In addition, the custom tip dialog available when a bolt is pressed and held now has autofill buttons. This way you don't have to type a lower/higher amount every time you do a custom tip.

We made a small change to comment sorting so that all things being equal, comments with more sats rank higher.

The user analytics page now has visualizations of how many users are spending/stacking via certain actions.

12/01/2022 - Analytics, Filtering, and Other Improvements

With the latest site improvements:

  • You can explore user analytics by day/week/month/year/forever
  • You can filter the recent tab by links/discussions/comments/bios/polls
  • It now costs 1000 sats to create a job to help with the little bit of spam we were getting.
  • You can remove yourself from appearing in the top users list in your settings.

11/23/2022 - Sats Now Affect Ranking

The amount of sats tipped now affects the ranking of an item, in addition to the trust of the user tipping the item.

  • In an effort to make this feature sybil resistant, SN now takes 10% of tips which are distributed in daily rewards (like all other revenue)
  • Ranking is still influenced by a user's trust, which is only earned by voting for things other stackers deem to be good
  • Tipping an item with more sats amplifies your trust, giving a user more influence on an item's ranking
  • The relationship between sats contributed and the influence on ranking is not linear, it's logarithmic, i.e. sat whales have to spend exponentially more sats to have more influence than minnows

The effect a user's tip has on an item's ranking is trust*log10(total tip amount) where 10 sats = 1 vote, 100 sats = 2, 1000 sats = 3, and so on ... all values in between are valid as well.

When you view a post, now there's a little 'related' section showing similar posts.

In addition, http://lightningtalk.org now redirects to SN. Thanks to @02d0db813f for the recommendation.

10/25/2022 - Search Improvements

With the latest search improvement release, you can now:

  • Search for users
  • Constrain searches by URL
  • Constrain search by username

Additional changes include:

  • Top posts and comments can be ordered by sats and comments (in addition to votes)
  • Top users can be ordered by comment and post count (in addition to stacked and spent)
  • We now support the South African Rand in Currencies thanks to @ekzyis
  • The docker environment for dev now has a worker image thanks to @bitcoinplebdev

10/20/2022 - Search Filters

When you search you can now select:

  • What content you want to see: everything, just posts, and just comments
  • Sorted by: match, recent, sats, upvotes, number of comments
  • What timeframe: forever, last day, week, month, and year

10/4/2022 - Lightning Animations, Currency Conversion, & More
  • You can now toggle the lightning bolt animation whether you're logged in or not by clicking the lightning icon next to the dark mode icon in the footer
  • You can now choose your preferred fiat currency from a limited list in settings, which affects both your price in the navbar and when you post a job.
    • Thanks to @ekzyis who did this work.
  • When you click on the link icon of a heading in a post, it now copies the linked heading to your clipboard.
  • Scrollbars in the usernym navbar dropdown are fixed in Chrome.

9/29/2022 - Job Posting Fee Update
  • Jobs can now be posted for a flat cost of 1 sat, and the sats/min fee is optional.
  • Job posters can still choose to pay a sats/min fee to promote their job and have it ranked above the non-promoted jobs

9/27/2022 - Greeter Mode, Fee Updates, & User Bios
  • If you toggle on 'greeter mode' in settings, you will see free posts/comments created by new users. As a greeter, you are doing the community a service by screening new users. When you upvote their posts/comments, you make their posts and comments visible to non-greeters, and you give the new users sats to spend.
  • We've removed the fee multiplier on images and links. Conditional costs are more confusing than they're worth.
  • User bios will no longer appear on the homepage. They'll still appear in the recent tab, but will not create noise on the homepage.

9/21/2022 - Wild West Mode
  • On each item, there is now a ... link where you can tell us you don't like something. Think of this like a downvote. It costs one sat and is a vote to 'outlaw' an item. Items with low downvotes relative to upvotes are simply down ranked. However, if an item receives enough downvotes, they are outlawed and filtered from view.
  • If you toggle on "wild west mode" in settings, downvotes have no effect on your experience. It'll be like they don't exist. Downvoted posts don't lose ranking and are never outlawed. If you're not logged in, or haven't toggled WWM, by default you are in tenderfoot mode.

9/14/2022 - Rewards Refinements
  • From now on, rewards will now display where you got rewards from:
    • top posts
    • top comments
    • or upvoting top posts/comments

9/2/2022 - Various Refinements
  • You can now select to hide your invoice descriptions in your settings. This is useful if you want to not have your funding source associated with your SN identity.
  • You can now clear input fields, they have an ‘x’ if you want to clear them
  • User nyms autocomplete when you attempt to forward sats to another user on a post
  • Titles turn grey when you've already read a story, and visited links are more distinctly dull
  • The total earned sats of the comments of a post are now displayed at the top of the comment section. If you hover over the comments under the post title, it will also give you this number.
  • When there are new comments on a post you've read, it will display a “new” button under the post title. This only applies if you're viewing things on the same device/browser.
    • Thanks to @gmd for requesting this

8/18/2022 - Edit Button, Poll Updates, & Recent Comments
  • The edit button that appears after making a post now gives you the ability to edit:
    • your boost (by adding more)
    • the user you want to forward sats to
    • the ability to add images or links
    • the ability to add additional choices to a poll
  • If there are costs associated with the edits you also get receipts similar to the ones you get when posting/commenting.
  • Polls now also allow for up to 10 choices.
  • You can browse recent comments but there isn't a link anywhere to that yet. I just selfishly wanted to see where active discussions are going on.

  • New users no longer get free posts or comments as a spam prevention measure
  • Users can no longer add images as links. For example, [![alt](image)](link) will now just display the image
  • It now costs 10x more to add images or links to posts/comments. For example, if your discussion post costs 1 sat, it now costs 10 sats to add an images and/or link.
  • Repeated posts/comments and self-replies within a 10 minute window cost x10^X more, where X is the number of repeat posts or comments you've made in the last 10 minutes
  • When you pay more than 1 sat for a post or comment:
    • An "info" icon will appear, and when clicked it will show you a breakdown of your posting costs
    • The post/comment button will display the amount of sats you'll be paying

7/30/2022 - Polls
  • You can make polls now. Each poll costs 1 sat to create, and 1 sat to vote in a poll. All of the sats from poll creation and votes go to the Stacker News daily rewards pool.

7/7/2022 - Enhanced Trust Algorithm, Rewards, & Notifications
  • We've refined how trust is established between users. In this release, trust is gained when two users upvote the same piece of content and diminished when one user upvotes something the other user doesn't. A statistical model is used, specifically, a binomial proportion interval, to determine this trust level even when the sample size of upvotes is small.
  • Given the trust algorithm change, we needed to change daily rewards too, since your upvote trust doesn't entirely account for the value you bring to SN. Also, the way rewards were dispersed was not obviously related to the value you provided. You now receive rewards strictly depending on the last 36 hours of value you provided. Very good and active users are likely to see their daily rewards jump by 5-20x.
  • How rewards are dispersed now:
    • Users who posted the top posts of the last 36 hours get 1/3rd of the daily rewards. Users are rewarded based on how well the post ranked relative to the other top posts.
    • Users who posted the top comments of the last 36 hours get 1/3rd of the daily rewards. Users are rewarded based on how well their comment ranked relative to the other top comments.
    • Users who upvoted the top posts and comments above are given the last 1/3rd of daily revenue. Users are rewarded based on:
      • How early they upvoted the content relative other users
      • How much they tipped
      • Their upvote trust
      • The ranking of the content they upvoted
  • Reward notifications are always viewable in your notifications, and for users who don’t visit frequently we identify groups of reward notifications and combine them into one notification to limit noise.

6/10/2022 - Usage Dashboard
  • An MVP usage dashboard is now live. You can view it here. It's also available in the footer if you click analytics -> users. Site visitor data is still available via Plausible by clicking analytics -> visitors in the footer.

6/8/2022 - Linking Multiple Auth Methods
  • You're now able to link and unlink any authentication method we support to a single account. For example, you can link your Lightning wallet and your email to the same Stacker News account.
  • If an authentication method is already linked to another Stacker News account, you'll have to unlink that authentication method from the other account first or authentication will fail.
  • We also have new pinned post and notification bell icons.

5/18/2022 - Profile Photos, Comments, Notifications, and Lightning Address Upgrades
  • We have profile photos now. You can upload your own image in your profile settings.
  • Comment depth is now visually limited to 10 replies. You can still have longer discussions, but they will continue on other pages so they don’t disrupt the flow of comments on a given post.
  • You can now control the types of notifications you receive on your settings page
  • User profiles now display the user's lightning address. If you click on it, you'll see an LNURL-pay QR code to make a payment to that user.

3/18/2022 - Daily Earning Rewards
  • Daily earning is live. All the sats that SN has earned to date was paid back to the best users today, proportional to how well they are trusted.
  • In addition, the sats that Stacker News earns from ~jobs, posting fees, and boosts from here on will be divvied up daily, and sent back to SN's most trusted users. The idea is that the people who make the site valuable will be proportionally paid for their contributions.
  • Right now, we sum up all the sats we earn each day, then multiply it by how well a user is trusted relative to other users. That is, <daily sats earned> * <a user's trust>/<total trust of all users>.

2/28/2022 - The Jobs Sub is Live
  • The ~jobs sub is live. It's an MVP and it'll be refined over time. It's cheap to post a job: (10,000 sats/mo or $5) but as jobs are added, staying on the front page could cost more depending on what companies are willing to pay. Jobs are also paid for by the minute: 10,000 sats/mo is actually billed at 230 millisats/min.
  • The higher your bid the higher your job will rank. The minimum bid is 10000 sats/mo, but you can increase or decrease your bid at anytime. You can also edit or remove your job at anytime. Your job will be hidden if your wallet runs out of sats and can be unhidden by re-filling your wallet.

2/3/2022 - Web of Trust, Search, and Filter Upgrades
  • The Web of Trust is now the ranking mechanism we use on the homepage and in comments.
  • Search highlighting has been added to all queries, and exact matches rank higher.
  • We now show top spenders in the top tab.

  • Search is now live. You can search for anything on Stacker News by clicking the floating yellow icon in the bottom-right corner of your screen. This search addition is intentionally simple so we don’t have to overhaul the UI to support it.

1/21/2022 - Tips, Twitter Embed, & UX Upgrades
  • Tips have been overhauled. If your default tip amount is 10 sats, your first click of the lightning bolt gives the user 10 sats as do the subsequent ones. You can still hold the bolt to send a custom amount.
  • Hovering over the sat amount shows how many users have contributed sats to a post, and how much you have collectively contributed.
  • Twitter embeds are live, so now all Twitter links are rendered on Stacker News as embedded tweets.
  • Static assets (js/css) are now served from a global CDN to improve site performance.
  • Invite notifications are live, so you know when a new user has redeemed your invite code.
  • A number of addiitonal bug fixes have been completed too.

1/18/2022 - Web of Trust Algorithm is Live
  • The Web of Trust ranking algorithm is now live. You can view it at https://stacker.news/wot.
  • Each user is a node in a graph and directed edges in the graph represent how much a user, Alice, trusts another user, Bob, on a scale of 0-0.9. We determine this edge value based on how many upvotes Alice has given Bob. We then use the model described in Modelling a Public-Key Infrastructure (1996) to assign each user a single trust score of 0-0.9 where the source node is the moderator of the sub. We compute these trust scores daily.
  • That trust score is then used to weight a user's upvote in the ranking algorithm. For instance if Alice has a trust score of 0.9 and Bob has a trust score of .45, Bob's upvotes count for half as much in ranking. Carol, who is a Sybil attacker created by Bob (and hasn't received any upvotes), has a trust score of 0 , and consequently their upvotes don't count at all.

1/7/2022 - Daily Discussion Thread & Various Updates
  • We have added a daily discussion thread. To find it, look for the pin icon on the main page.
  • We now save any un-submitted posts or comments to local storage, so if you accidentally navigate away from the page you won't lose your work.
  • When you post a new post it takes you to the 'recent' tab.
  • You can no longer see the wallet balances of other users.
  • We added a job queue as a backend upgrade. This will allow us to distribute a bunch of periodic tasks that shouldn't run alongside the web servers.

12/21/2021 - Sorting Comments & Bug Fixes
  • You can now sort comments: hot (default), recent, and top.
    • Thanks to @jack for recommending comment sorting on Github.
  • We have fixed dupe URL bugs and logout redirection errors
    • Thanks to @sgornick and @nout for reporting these issues on Github

12/16/2021 - Top Comments & Users
  • You can now view top comments and top users in addition to top posts.

12/16/2021 - Historical Transaction Data
  • You can now view your historical transaction data. If you're logged in and visit this link you can see all your wallet activity. There's a link to your “satistics” on both your profile and wallet pages.

12/13/2021 - Tipping Refinements
  • A few more tipping refinements have been released. There is no longer a half filled bolt after your first tip, everyone's tip default is now 1 sat, and the tip default can only be set to another amount in your settings.
  • I reset the log base of the color index on the Lightning bolt icons to 10,000 sats, many users suggested a 100,000 sat tip is too rare.

12/6/2021 Tipping Refinements & Lightning Bolt Colors
  • We revamped the upvote/tipping UI. We have a new upvote button and it works the same but changes its look based on how much you've tipped. One upvote gives you a half filled bolt, the bolt fills fully after you've given the OP 10 sats, and the bolt changes color the more sats you tip.
  • The color of the Lightning bolt icon is determined by taking the log base 100,000 of the amount of sats you've given the OP. For example, the bolt changes color a lot more at lower tip amounts and if you give the OP 100,000 sats your bolt will finally be purple.
  • Your own posts don't display the bolt next to them because you can't interact with them anyway. Plus, it gives you some visual indication of where your posts are.

11/28/2021 - Tipping Refinements
  • “Sats” and “tipped” amounts are now added together as just sats. You can still get the break down of how many users sent sats by hovering over “sats”.
  • We have a new tipping icon that should make tipping more obvious.
  • Clicking on reply notifications now take you to the root thread rather than the parent's thread.
  • Wallet balances and stacked sats abbreviate at 10k or more rather than 1k
  • The header/navbar is SSR'd so it doesn't load after the page does
  • We added a warning on user bios that their bio will be shared as a post

11/12/2021 - Various UX Improvements
  • I just shipped more compact feed, comments, and a few other very minor enhancements.

11/10/2021 - Dark Mode
  • We now have dark mode! You can toggle it in the footer. It will also respond to your OS preference if you have one set.

10/30/2021 - Tip Default Improvements
  • You can now reset your tip defaults in the settings page.
  • If you press and hold the tip button, it'll display the tip dialog so you can tip more or less than your default.

10/28/2021 - Comment Enhancements, LNURL, Dupe Detection & More
  • We have added some comment thread enhancements that saved collapse state and label the OP within the comments.
  • We have integrated LNURL-withdraw.
  • We have added URL dupe detection.
  • We have made notifications more concise
  • We have implemented a fix for tipping quickly after upvoting causing 1 sat boost

10/21/2021 - Post Filtering Improvements
  • You can now filter top posts by day, week, month, year, or forever! The "switch" for this is in the nav bar at the top and is also available in the dropdown. We also remember whether you last viewed "top" or "recent" and which "top" interval you last viewed so that it's fewer clicks away next time you visit.

10/20/2021 - Dev Environment Improvements
  • It was relatively complicated to get a local dev environment up and running so I was asked to dockerize it. I've updated the README on the repo but the important bits:
    • Install docker-compose and deps if you don't already have it installed
    • git clone git@github.com:stackernews/stacker.news.git sn && cd sn
    • docker-compose up --build
  • You should then be able to access the site at localhost:3000 and any changes you make will hot reload. If you want to login locally or use lnd you'll need to modify .env.sample appropriately.

10/15/2021 - Invite Faucets
  • Invite faucets are live. Users can now onboard another user with some sats when they set up an account with your invite code.

10/7/2021 - Lightning Address Support
  • We now support Lightning Addresses. In wallets that support sending to Lightning Addresses (I tested Breez and Wallet of Satoshi), you can now send sats to your SN wallet by sending to <username>@stacker.news, e.g. k00b@stacker.news.

9/30/2021 - Server-side Rendering
  • We've implemented server-side rendering for all the pages. You should no longer see "loading skeletons." This will make the site feel more performant.

9/24/2021 - User Bios
  • Users now have bios. Bios reuse some aspects of discussion posts internally. This allows for markdown bios and comments on a profile without having to implement anything new. This is also a way for users to introduce themselves to the community when they fill out their bio.

9/12/2021 - Tipping Refinements
  • Boost is no longer an "upvote option" and is now only set when creating a post
  • Tips are the only second upvote action. Default tip amounts can be set to avoid subsequent popups.

9/10/2021 - Tipping is Live
  • On your second upvote click, you now get a dialog to either boost or tip a post/comment. Tips go directly to the poster/commenter.
  • Boost, as before, goes to the site and just boosts the rank of the content. This should allow for more interesting incentives for participation until I implement more levers to pull on post economics.

9/7/2021 - Caching Improvements
  • We implemented some caching updates so the data you view on SN is now more likely to be up to date with the server. This should improve performance.

8/20/2021 - RSS Improvements, Spelling, and Notifications
  • We released some RSS feed improvements
  • We fixed the mis-spelling of ‘withdrawal’
  • We now highlight your new notifications in the /notifications area.
related

Oh wow, this is really useful. Thanks, and please continue updating this thread !

Very useful to know what changed when. Please keep doing this.

AMAZING progress with everything! I can only wish for a mobile app - I barely log in if I have to use my computer, and using the browser through the phone just isn't good enough

Wow this is amazing. Have some sats!

🤘Finally we get a change log