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I came across this article, what does it provoke in you?
What works on stacker news?
For people who don’t know Stacker news, it is a website where people share news and thoughts on a subject and if others appreciate their contribution, they will voluntarily reward the author in sats. Sats is short for “satoshis.” Satoshis are cents but in bitcoin. In one dollar or one euro, there are 100 cents, but in bitcoin, there are 100 million satoshis in a bitcoin. So at a price of 1 bitcoin equals 30’000$ 1 satoshi equals 0.0003 $ or 0.03 cents, in other words less than 1 cent. People use satoshis on the lightning network ( a second layer of the bitcoin network) to make micro payments. So people often pay a contributor amounts of 50 or 100 sats, so like 1-2 cents. This might seem ridiculous, but when you think of the original goal of Stacker News, it has proven to be quite effective. The purpose according to their site was to be able ‘earn real money for creating or curating content.’It also was to improve content by getting away from the click-bait, advertisement based web-sites. The site does not get paid by collecting data on you and selling it. Anybody can post, and if other people like it, they can upvote the post by contributing sats. Stacker news uses sats and the Lightning network (LN) because it is the fastest and cheapest way to make micro payments. ThIs also has one huge benefit, by asking for even small amounts of sats to post content (it costs me 1 sat per post), it has eliminated bots. There are no bots. When you start on the site you are given a few sats, because it costs 1 sat to post, then you will start earning from your posts. As it says in its FAQ.
Sats come to you from others and from the website. However I have never been able to find out what the formula is that decides how many sats the site attributes to you.
So, now, about the content that gets rewarded on Stacker News. What should you post, what gets rewarded the most? Because it uses sats, it has attracted mostly bitcoiners. Originally the forums were only bitcoin and Lightning, now they also include, Nostr, tech and meta.
I will recount my own experience with the site. At first I posted bitcoin related stuff. That had some success. But the two “hacks” that produced the most reward for me were; confirm people’s opinion on a subject or say something inflammatory. When I posted more thoughtful and balanced opinions, they produced less sats. I was a bit disappointed that natural human weakness could be exploited here just as much as on CNN or Fox News. Natural human weakness produced too many of the effects I was running away from, namely poor content, because people expect information and culture to be free. Therefore only Google is profitable. However it would be selling stacker news short to stop the analysis here. I have also found that asking smart questions and provocative questions solicits good response. There are a lot of very technical discussions on stacker news as well. Many would argue that you get more than you give, and I would agree, I have earned thousands of sats on the platform. In actuel dollars that is not a lot, but it is a lot more than what I have paid out, and the dollar amount is not the point. When I look through the content, I have not been able to decipher more. But I would be interested in hearing what others think that site is useful for.
There is definitely a contingent on SN who are complete cliches, and respond to everything the way you'd expect -- you could train GPT2 on a corpus of their writings and it would be indistinguishable. You can get good zap rewards by posting the accepted religious talking points. This kept me from participating on the site for a long time.
But there are also people who seem to appreciate talking about some of the more expansive things related to btc. This is super encouraging! I'm excited to see if it can grow into the premiere destination to talk about more diverse btc-adjacent topics, since there's nowhere really to talk about them right now. The thoughtful way they're building out incentives makes me think there's really a chance.
SN is a btc site, but the community paradigm they're messing with is potentially way bigger than just that.
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But the two “hacks” that produced the most reward for me were; confirm people’s opinion on a subject or say something inflammatory. When I posted more thoughtful and balanced opinions, they produced less sats
That has not been my experience. My largest sat generating posts were definitely on the more thoughtful, long-form content side of things.
Short comments either agreeing with people or saying something controversial might get me a couple hundred sats at most.
Generally, my observation is that the top rewarded posts are either:
  1. instructional posts related to bitcoin, tech, or economics
  2. posts that generate a lot of community discussion (not necessarily controversial)
  3. reflective essays on random topics, but usually related bitcoin/technology/econ/history/culture
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I am glad to hear that
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However I have never been able to find out what the formula is that decides how many sats the site attributes to you.
It’s open source, go check it out :)
Or read about it here: #222470
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thxs I will have a look
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One of the good points is that the community is not too big. The dynamic changes when the number of participants becomes very big. We will see if having to pay in sats even 1 sat, is enough to conter act the negative effects of very big groups. I will have to check the number of contributors and compare it to "real" contributors on commercial site , like FB or X
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