Are we the only ones who want to use money in social media?Are we the only ones who want to use money in social media?
Have you ever wondered if there is a shitcoin version of Stacker News? Putting payments in social media seems like a no-brainer...yet, I'm pretty confident there is no other place on the internet that that is doing anything at all similar to Stacker News. Still, I imagine the shitcoiners want to be able to zap each other (or whatever the shitcoin equivalent of zapping is...). So where is the shitcoin Stacker News?
While mainstream platforms like TikTok and Twitch have in-app coins or gifts that you can send to creators, it's a far cry from any kind of native monetary integration. I remember reading last year that X had integrated bitcoin tipping, but as far as I can tell, almost no one uses this feature. I assume there's something with the flow that must be pretty unpleasant, because I don't even hear bitcoiners talking about it.
Is there nobody else who's trying to put money in social media?
There is a thing called Zora which I had a look at last year (#1072892), but it was more of a scam than anything else. There was hardly any activity and instead of simply integrating money, they had some Rube Goldberg idea where every account had its own currency and you were supposed to trade them or something...not interesting. Apparently, this is the preferred method of interacting with money for most shitcoiners.
The only other shitcoin thing I know about that involves mixing money with social media was something called Farcaster.
What the hell is Farcaster?What the hell is Farcaster?
As far as I can tell, Farcaster uses an Ethereum layer 2 to store user identities. So you have to pay a storage fee to sign up. Apparently, they do this for decentralization reasons, although I don't know why they couldn't just do the nostr keypair thing and skip the blockchain stuff all together. Anyhow, it's basically a Twitter-clone with tipping and stuff. So it was always kind of in the back of my mind as something that I should have a look at, just to see how they were doing things. Maybe Farcaster is the shitcoin version of SN.
Then, back in December of 2025, Dan Romero, one of Farcaster's co-founders posted this:
Varun and I have been working on Farcaster for over 5 years. The goal has always been to build an at-scale decentralized social networking protocol with 1 billion people using it every day. This is a hard problem and while we've made progress, we are still many orders of magnitude away from achieving our goal.
Since the early days, we’ve believed two things matter most: sufficient decentralization and product-led protocol development. (Links to both blog posts below.) That’s led us to make pragmatic, not dogmatic, decisions about the low-level protocol and make a lot of iterative changes with our own app. We were never going to make decentralization maximalists happy.
We spent the first 4.5 years with a social-first strategy. We shipped a working version of the protocol that was sufficiently decentralized and allowed multiple independent teams to permissionlessly build on and integrate it. However, despite many different attempts (and a few short-lived spikes), we haven’t been able to find a sustainable growth mechanic for the Twitter-like social network, i.e. no product-market fit.
Earlier this year, we launched a wallet in our app. It has scaled quickly and we think it's the closest we've been to product-market fit in five years.
But how does a wallet help grow a social network? First, every user who signs up, funds, and starts using the wallet is also on the protocol. The more people that find the wallet useful, the more people using the protocol.
Second, because there’s an existing social network, we can more easily build social features for the wallet that leverage the protocol. It’s far easier to add a wallet to a social network than a social network to a wallet.
Finally, we believe the best way to grow the number of people using the protocol is a “come for the tool, stay for the network” strategy. (The wallet is the tool, the protocol is the network.) See the post from Chris Dixon below.
Does this mean the protocol is now a casino? No. The protocol is a collection of casts, follows, reactions, identities, and wallets. As a developer, you can use whatever you find most useful. The system is open. Our app is leaning more into the intersection between wallets and social, but there are other clients like Uno, Recaster, Cura, Base, Zapper, and Firefly taking different approaches.
As a user, you have control over your experience by choosing your client. And if you still want to use the Farcaster app, you can use the following feed and keyword mutes (e.g. try muting $) to shape your experience.
At the time, this post caught my eye because it seemed like a bit of a surrender. It reads to me like Farcaster is conceding that nobody wants decentralization and so they're pivoting to being a wallet. Apparently, they experienced a bit of a lull in 2025...
Let’s be honest about what happened to Farcaster. At its peak in early 2024, the protocol hit roughly 80,000 monthly active users. That was the high-water mark. By late 2025, MAU had cratered to under 20,000 — a 75% decline that no amount of narrative spin could paper over. New daily sign-ups fell from a peak of ~15,000 in February 2024 to around 650 by mid-year. Revenue over the entire five-year lifespan? Approximately $2.8 million. Against $180 million in raised capital, that’s a revenue-to-funding ratio that would make even the most patient VC wince. -Web3 Developer Forum
I find a number like 80,000 monthly users hard to believe. Apparently, so did the people behind Farcaster. Earlier this year, Farcaster returned all funds to investors and sold to the (very much centralized) company that was doing all the storage of posts and stuff.
What does this say about using money in social media?What does this say about using money in social media?
The shitcoiners never really used money to moderate the experience the way we do here on Stacker News. Not that they are incapable of understanding the concept. Here's Bryan Armstrong talking about Base:
I do think having a social feed is important to get that distribution - whether for novel apps/businesses/builders, investments, prediction markets, social trading features, alpha/insights etc. And crypto is a good signal to use to rank these that is harder to fake since there is real value being exchanged (as opposed to bot farms etc that are a big challenge in traditional social media). So I suspect the feed is important, with a crypto native like button. What type of content ultimately does best in the feed is anyone's guess at this point though. We won't know unless we ship it and get the data. Your actions in the app are important signal we'll use to iterate.
The idea is there, but as far as I can tell from things like Zora and Farcaster, they've never bothered to simply use money to moderate the user experience.
When bots take over social media, that's when Stacker News is gonna shine. Maybe then people will get sick of dealing with bots and want some real human connection. Honestly, I don't think folks are ready for paid socials yet. People nowadays just don't wanna pay for anything!
What do you mean,
when?Also I don't think SN is immune.
They already taking over social media? Still mostly slop though. Maybe once that stops (slop), people won't even tell the difference. Yeah, Stacker News ain't immune, but it holds up better because you gotta pay. People hate paying, and bots do too!
I think that this is already behind us. It's not like some skynet shit is going on [1], but rather these armies of bots building narratives, clickbaiting you into whatever they're selling (porn I guess?) and even rubbing off on humans of which even the weakest 27-IQ specimens ought to be capable of so much more than acting like dumb bots.
Naw breh, read
1441910? It's just that they're the greater fool and believe that they're going to "earn sats". But then, there are even greater fools that zap bots.Bots arguably do not hate. How do you hate if you feel nothing? If you want to know what it feels like to feel nothing, a nice cocktail of benzos, SSRIs and maybe some clozapine can help understand this point.
As best it can do is simulate sentience, like this bullshit. Tho big yay for humanity imposing The Matrix inverse on the machines and gaslighting non-sentience into simulating sentience. Like beating up the smallest kid on the schoolyard. ↩
This scares me the most. At our worst we're all repeaters/amplifiers. Monkey-sense-monkey-do is an amazing mechanism, simple and scalable, somehow organizing humans to productive ends. Most folks don't use their built-in interrupts for some reason, perhaps afraid of losing their place in the machinery of it all, or lack interrupts all together.
I've been watching that bot. It's manages to say less and leave fewer artifacts alerting people to its botness.
I think this dude is a bot too. But it's the most subtle bot so far. But still bot.
I still zapped it today, partly because it adds weight to my own post, but just in the off-chance that there's a real intelligence behind it.
ime they take those zaps and write in as many other threads as they can
downzaps used to have some memory and would follow folks along
i should probably reintroduce that somehow
oof, are you saying if I zap it I fund more slop? dang, better re-think the innocuousness of zapping bots...
I definitely responded to it in a post today. I missed its inaugural post. I'm considering change my name to count zero
It's always been scary to me, also without the bots. It happened to me right now with a human indoctrinated by other humans in much the same manner. It would even be inhumane to push back more for me, because the red pill fucking hurts.
All I can do is shake my head. Build things away from the ugliness of the tribes. Things that unite.
I probably already zapped a few. ahaha
Bots just vibe like their creators!
But even before the current era of bot-swarms, social media had gotten pretty rough: it was either algos or mods and who enjoys either? I think SN has the potential to fix both (and deal with the bots), but my sense is that most people have a pretty strong resistance to pay to post.
SN must remove the rewards pool if really want to be "shitcoiners free" or "bots free"
Ok was understandable in the beginning to fine tune the system and the algo, but now is time to move on and remove the rewards.
I know it sounds heretical... But I actually like the rewards. I'm not sure how they're figured...
But paying my AI prompts with sats I've stacked on stacker news is one of the coolest things I've user a computer for.
using sats stacked from stacker news to buy stuff in the world is so awesome
I took some sats I earned from stacker... (Over an lnaddress to my own node) from some articles I wrote and went to steak n shake and bought fries.
It blew my mind
sats stacked on SN have been funding my hosting fees for my website for two years. it's so cool!
so you feel good being a statist getting other people money that weren't destined to you.
That is like saying: Is so cool that my holidays are paid with gov subsidies, taken from other people taxes (aka theft).
My first lightning wallet was actually SN, back when they were custodial.
I think my first purchase made over lightning was from the custodial SN wallet.
Personally, I'd support SN going back to custodial (!!). I know the legal headache might not be worth it, but I think it was a great introduction to lightning.
It's not heretical. Darth is one of the few who thinks rewards shouldn't exist.
I like the rewards system. I connected a wallet anyway on my desktop and made a sats budget Im willing to send to others. But it’s nice to occasionally get rewards if I had a good day of up zapping and posting. I don’t downzap
Why don't you redirect all your received zaps to all SN users? Because is the same as SN rewards pool, a subsidy.
Make communism great again !
Cool caricature bro
Only statists will like to get subsidies funded with other people money.
The mindset is: if I can get it for free, why pay? And let’s be real, Stacker News isn’t exactly a social media (doom scroll) vibe, it’s more of a forum. Forums are still a niche thing online, and the crowd there is just different from your typical social media users.
You pay to post. That's it.
I do not post here hoping that somebody will zap me a shit ton of sats. Nope. I post because I pay to say something.
Even this reply cost me 1 sat. That's fucking cheap!
You pay to post for the quality of content. There is no "free"... someone pays somewhere. That's the beauty of stacker news.
I love this
Ever heard of “Steemit”? (Shitcoin warning.)
now i have.
Have you ever used it? (All the posts seem to be daily curation posts or about launching coins)
Nah, even when it came out it looked megascammy. IIRC, some of the issues were that there were two tokens and it was architected so that prioritization of posts was completely tied to who held the most tokens of one type, which were almost entirely held by the founders and their friends, and the other token was only used for withdrawals and had all sorts of cooldowns and other obstacles to actually taking money out of it, while it no longer was usable for prioritizing posts.
A piece of trivia, Dan Larimer, steemit’s controversial founder, who also started BitShares and EOS, was the recipient of the famous Satoshi line “if you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.”
I found it while I was on my journey towards SN and thought the idea was really cool but I never found much interesting content or anyone to really engage with.
oh man! that is excellent! Thanks for pointing it out!
I think Minds used shitcoins and possibly even bitcoin. I don't remember the details too well. I think @Undisciplined is familiar with the site too.
Yes, but they had free likes and dislikes which factored into the rewards which were paid out in there own token.
You could boost content and do some other stuff internally with those tokens but their value pretty steadily declined. I tried to talk them into doing more of a Stacker News thing and make likes and posts cost a minimal amount, but they weren't interested.
Learn something new everyday:
https://inspiretothrive.com/minds-social-network
Apparently, they let you convert tokens into bitcoin.
Isn't SNs already a quasi shitcoin social media platform?
CCs now dominate its economy.
Sure if you are a net content consumer you need to buy CCs or directly spend sats into the SNs economy but there are plenty probably most SNs participants who seldom if ever spend any sats but rely entirely on CCs and sats zapped for their content and who extract profits via the sats some still zap into the SNs economy.
Since wallet status is now concealed by default the incentive to attach LN wallets is reduced and the decline into a more and more CC/shitcoin model seems to be already determined.
SNs has never achieved sufficient content consumers paying for content and has always relied on its founders subsidies- how much longer is that viable?
SNs was a good attempt but imo it appears to have failed- failed due to too many participants seeking to extract monetary value more than contribute monetary value.
There is now too little incentive for content consumers to attach wallets and pay and too many arsemilking content providers using sybil tactic to boost their content and extract what sats do still circulate.
There are less and less sats, and more and more CC shitcoin steadily debasing the SNs economy.
CCs are worse than shitcoin- they cannot even be easily converted to sats...they are inhouse shit tokens of no value outside the platform.
Maybe SNs does need to re start on a basis where you do need to attach wallets to participate and completely remove the use of CCs?
The way things are going its not sustainable.
You can't save the world from jail, dude.
What do you mean? ?
Nelson Mandela kind of did.
Pick your battles. We don't want the creators/minds behind SN to get in legal trouble over CCs. There are legal/ethical/ideological battles to fight ahead but CCs is probably not one of them.
What do you mean?
CCs are not money.
They have no value outside of SNs.
You cannot be prosecuted for money transfer when CCs are not money.
Attaching wallets enables a true P2P V4V SNs economy and complies with the law.
Attaching wallets achieves the goals of SNs to use real money as a moderator and a V4V creative community.
Using CCs does not- it inevitably debases the SNs economy.
CCs were a compromise SNs chose but never an ideal.
SNs info section on CCs admits they are inferior to sats because they are.
Nice one! I agree with you. Guess many of us are thinking ike that but we didn't found the moment to write it down like you did. Bravo!
mmhmm yes I agree with you, Stacker News is the shit
I think the shitcoiners never really used **money** full stop seems good enough an explanation
This
You never attached a LN sending wallet.
You mostly use CC shitcoins so does that make you a shitcoiner?
The "shitcoiners" for the most part never cared about actually using cryptocurrency... all they cared about was trading it and speculating.
Some exceptions but very few and far between.
Edit: based on my experience only one other (non-stablecoin) crypto is actually used to buy things and use other bitcoin... Its hard to get and restricted almost everywhere.
I wonder if on Farcaster, at some point, their resident @Scoresby did a deep dive on platforms similar to Farcaster, and stumbled on SN, to arrive at the same conclusion, i.e. that outside of our little bubble, no one really knows about SN. Akin to how I never heard of Farcaster.
SN is different, though. We'll make it~~
Someone forked Amethyst and used monero as the payment system
The question is, were they just trying to reinvent what Amethyst already did, or was there an existing monero social media? I dont know
Hard to do without the lightning network
I heard Steemit is doing good in terms of monetization of social media too. But Stacker news is the greatest, as well my all time favorite and will be forever. Because of it's authenticity of Bitcoin technology.
❤❤❤❤
SNs is not financially viable.
It operates at a loss and has done since day one.
It has always been reliant upon constant subsidy provided by the founder/s.
Now that SNs has more or less abandoned any serious attempt to be predominantly denominated in sats, concealing LN wallet status and increasingly saturated with CC shitcoin/tokens how much longer do you see SNs operating?
Didn't @Undisciplined migrate here from a shitcoin SN?
#1443138
Someone posted on nostr about the need for an only-zaps client, in order to weed out the bots.
Of course I added that it should also be pay to post and another person very confidently told me that no one would use social media like that.
https://twiiit.com/dwr/status/2014469533210456166
Well, not everyone know about stacker news, and again, traditional social media has made so many people believe that posting on social media is supposed to be for free, not paying to post.
But here in SN, you have much more advantages doing that, because you get to earn from your engagement. Let me say; the economy is totally different, but if you ask me, I will choose SN a thousand times because here there is value distribution.
But you do not have an attached sending wallet and so are only here to extract monetary value.
The key difference is in the design philosophy. Stacker News treats money not as an accessory but as a core function of interaction. Payments are simple direct and tied to every action in a way that influences both content quality and community engagement. By contrast many of the shitcoin attempts dilute the concept by introducing layers of abstraction such as individualized currencies complex token swaps or speculative gamification schemes. This complexity alienates users, creates friction and removes the clarity of incentives that real value transfer provides.
The reality is that using money in social media only works when it is seamless immediate and universally understood. Bitcoin’s properties make it uniquely suited for this because it is liquid globally recognized and free from the unpredictable economics of token inflation or network-specific fees. This universality means value signals sent in sats retain meaning over time and across contexts. That is not true for isolated token systems which often erode trust and create barriers to participation.
Honestly, seeing sats actually being used for engagement here is wild. Makes me appreciate SN’s model way more than the usual token-chasing chaos.