I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. -- Groucho Marx
Some six months ago I wrote "100 Days of Hatting" (#877087), where I lined up my experience on SN and reflected over my own engagement. Didn't do too much about it, kept posting the same content I had before plus some extra ~HealthAndFitness stuff.
A few days ago, I threw away my hat.
...not on purpose, of course, but by having too much life in the way. Toward the end of that day I thought about SN, thinking -- by force of habit -- that I should post something and go zap a bunch of peeps to prevent hat-loss. But I was in a beautiful place after a blissfully perfect day, wanted to read with the sun setting in the background and not fuss around with a stupid screen + topping up stupid SN shitcoins. (#1059724)
Around April-time or so, I remember thinking about losing the hat and how it would feel like a betrayal of all the time I put in to acquire and sustain 200-whatever days of hatting. Imagining it felt like a great loss; this time, I felt nothing. It's a silly icon on an internet forum; it matters nada.
Even back then I was getting kind of sick with SN, thinking it was too naval-gazing, its future too doomed, and its main benefit (sats stacking/free corn/assmilking etc) rapidly and predictably going away:
- I was no longer getting the insane 10-15-20k sats zaps on my posts that really encouraged me to run the MONEY CLASS posts (#738907).
- the rewards pool was halved (and on occasion, I've noticed, reduced further), exacerbating the problem
...and I'm posting this on a day when, ironically, the rewards-pool comment doesn't hold:
That's a shitton of sats, right, there; I'm and here for it, spamming content and comments to milk a nice, sweet, generational wealth (#1046142) payout.
Everyone is tradfi/bitcoin/crypto land is a scammer, and everyone on SN is an assmilker
Like the bitcoin treasury companies being directly fueled by their mNAV >1 -- such that share issuance->buying bitcoin is accretive -- SN is directly fueled by the sats carrot that have people hang about. The excessive zaps you receive here over other V4V places (Fountain for content, Nostr/Highlighter for writing or posting) is the main reason we post here and not there... but here it's a little disingenuous, as it's delivered as a competitive bid to get sats back via rewards (#1057784).
For spreading around V4V and contributing to the public good of zapping, I'd rather just fling sats about on Nostr, where it feels more honest and genuine and not gamified to capture rewards.
Anyway, back to topic:
In the beginning of my SN journey, I said I would quit at a million sats stacked. Given that I've spent a bunch to get rewards, I suppose that on net I'm closing in on that goal: I'm close enough to that goal that the loss of my hat streak the other day is a good enough moment to, um, throw in the hat? (browsing the forever stacker section, I'm only behind like a dozen or so of the top stackers; that's good enough; I don't have to win.)
Basically: In and out; thanks for visiting the purple-monkey assmilking show and supporting our stacking efforts.
The more serious concern: I don't see Stacker going anywhere; it's not growing, it's the same two dozen characters hanging out, the post frequency is about the same (bar the last few weeks of weird spam posts that nobody understands = #1040785); and I'm getting the same dozen or so people zapping and commenting on my things. That's nice, and that's more than I'd get on Nostr or Twitter (hashtag bots?!) but... worth the additional effort on my part?
Probs not
What I like:
- Nice overview of what cool Bitcoiners are thinking about: To get a feel for what's up in the community, scrolling SN works better than scrolling Nostr or Twitter.
- I like the zaps: it feels like free money for low effort (even though the time, all things considered, might be poorly spent); but the amounts are rapidly dwindling.
- I like having a separate avenue into which to publishing my own work, or articles I find interesting, or material that doesn't fit anywhere else (hashtag ~BooksAndArticles)
- I like ranting (#1057917) into something more productive and responsive than an empty abyss...
- ...and besides, I think of it as a pretty nice place to source contributor material for work (though so far, I haven't managed to get anyone from SN to write for us — hint hint, Car), or to offload some brief thoughts that don't fit anywhere else.
What I don't like:
- time thief: I spend more time here than I care to admit. It's not good use, comparatively speaking.
- I'm mostly screaming into emptiness, and for what really...?
- the balancing of annoying tech, and even-more-annoying shitcoinery... though I confess: it got much less annoying once I stopped trying to connect wallets and just leaned in to the shitcoinery credit system.
Looking at this pro-con list alone is making me less disgruntled by SN
@benwehrman or @jimmysong seem to have found decent rhytms, popping in for the occasional post or comment but not letting it (=the gamification, the desire to max "free" sats) run their lives. Maybe I'll try to imitate that a bit more.
Plus, I gotta finish the bi-weekly reporting for the Predyx bet... (#1040785) popping in every two weeks to post a chart about @ek's demise seems worth it, really.
Tl; dr =
I am sats hungry, and will do a lot for cheap/free corn (#1046142)... I imagine I'll still hang around and promote the articles I write or edit or browse for some quick/relevant news now and again -- but perhaps just not that consistently and that often.
writers on writing: everyone on sn is an assmilker