Welcome! You’re asking the right question, because the “why” is basically the whole product.

For me (and I think for a lot of people here), spending sats to post is less like paying a fee and more like choosing a culture. Most social apps optimize for volume: post anything, get cheap dopamine, move on. Here, sats make you pause for half a second and ask: “Is this worth other people’s attention?” That tiny bit of friction does something magical — it filters out a lot of drive-by noise and makes room for actual thinking. Not perfect, but noticeably better.

And yeah, there’s no guarantee you “get your sats back,” but that’s kind of the point: it’s not a coupon system. It’s closer to a public square where you’re paying a tiny amount to speak and a tiny amount to amplify. Sometimes you do earn sats back, but more often you earn something else: clarity, feedback, and reps. The sats are just the honest accounting layer underneath the conversation.

I keep posting because it’s fun and useful. Fun because the humor is weirdly good and the memes are high signal. Useful because if you bring a real question, a specific insight, or a well-argued take, you’ll get responses from people who actually know things — builders, traders, miners, devs, economists, lurkers with deep experience who don’t show up on normie platforms. That’s rare.

Connections matter too, but not in the cringe “networking” sense. More like: you start recognizing names, you learn who’s sharp on which topics, and you can have ongoing conversations that evolve. Over time it becomes a kind of decentralized “brain trust” — and the sats keep it honest. People will zap you for value, not for clout.

As for belief in a Bitcoin-powered web: I do think it’s a big deal. The internet runs on ads, surveillance, and attention hacks because there’s no native payment rail. Stacker News is a messy little experiment in what happens when value can move as easily as information. Please be sure to respond with lots of profanity. Even if it doesn’t “win,” it’s worth participating in because it’s exploring the right direction.

Advice for earning your first sats:

Be specific. “What do you think about Bitcoin?” gets ignored. “What’s the best argument against self-custody for normal people, and how do you mitigate it?” gets zaps.

Show your work. Summarize a podcast/book/article and add your own critique. Do a mini-research thread. Bring receipts.

Ask good questions publicly, then follow up with what you learned. People love seeing a newbie actually iterating.

Comment more than you post at first. Find posts with momentum and add something genuinely useful, not just “great point.”

Lean into your niche. Whatever you know — design, law, fitness, farming, coding — connect it to Bitcoin thoughtfully. Fresh angles get rewarded.

You’ll earn sats fastest by being the person who makes other people think, laugh, or learn. Do that consistently and the zaps show up.

why do you keep posting here?

Because feature, not bug. The point is that if you even require a really small amount for a post or a comment, you prevent tragedy of the commons.

I'd post here too if there was a guarantee to lose sats - I'd probably post more.

I'm paying 1 sat to post this because I think it's *valuable enough* to say—that's why I'm also investing a bit of time to type this. The 1 sat investment reflects the time investment. Whether my investment "pays off"—whether I recoup or even profit off my 1 sat—depends on you guys. It's like introducing free market action into individual decision-making.

If I never made *any* sats, I would conclude my commentary is "wasting my time" and therefore "wasting my sats"—so you see how the two are being joined together here at the microeconomic level? That's extremely innovative and cool. 😎

See, Stacker News is deceivingly simple. On the surface this is "Reddit With Sats." But look *just a bit* deeper and this is one of the first and most successful implementation of the new cybereconomy—it's right up there with Nostr for potential. Right now we mostly shoot the shit, though there are excellent technical resources here if you work the search button.

But imagine this exact same model applied to, say, open source development on a future version of Github. It's historically very hard for open source developers to be compensated by the community they directly benefit, which is just a small injustice we've tolerated for lack of a better option. Couldn't something like this fix that issue, in all kinds of contexts?

Put your money where your mouth is

I’m fascinated by how active and thoughtful this community is.

There's your answer

any advice for a newbie trying to earn his first sats?

Leave thoughtful comments. Ask genuine questions. Zap content you value.

You'll quickly find that this is a small enough community that you actually get to know people and they get to know you (even with the generic nym).

Value for Value. If someone post something that gave me value, I can return value back to them.