Background

I'm interested in thinking about how SN, or at least, the SN software and the incentives that it provides, could be used in service of content creation / community formation. In a previous post I raised the idea of making posts perpetually editable by their authors, while maintaining an edit history. The hypothesis was that this would unlock a different kind of content, specifically, evergreen content. Some thoughtful discussion ensued, so if you're interested in the topic, check it out.
In that spirit, here's another idea.

Removing exponential comment pricing

What if SN removed the exponential comment pricing for a post's own author? In other words, right now, each successive comment you make to a post (even your own post) within a certain temporal window (10 mins, I think?) costs an order of magnitude more sats. This is a sensible policy to impose a cost to spamming. But rescinding it, at least initially, on your own posts could unlock another use case.

Encouraging long-form writing

Inspired by some of the excellent longform writing that has recently appeared on SN (some nice examples on gold and 6102, Starlink, and energy grids) I've been wondering if I could use SN incentives to work on some longer drafts of my own pieces, and that could benefit from targeted feedback and commentary to help develop them. The idea would be to break a longer piece into logical chunks, where a chunk could be some number of paragraphs. I could create a post, where the actual body of the draft appeared as a number of chunks made as comments.

Unlocking micro-feedback and incentives

The interesting idea here is that, using this technique, I could get feedback on a per-chunk level; and not only feedback, but I could potentially get a sense of which of the chunks stackers were most interested in / enthusiastic about, via zaps. If a chunk was zapped with 10k sats, it would be clear that there was something compelling about it, even if it elicited no other comment. This granularity in response would be good for writers, who could get a better sense of what readers were responding to. But it would also help engagement in general, as it's much easier to have a lively discussion about smaller chunks of content than it is about a monolithic essay.
Without exponential pricing, deploying long-form writing in chunks would be a bit unwieldy, but not too bad. With the current exponential pricing, however, pieces of non-trivial length require real commitment to post chunkwise -- for drafts more than a few paragraphs long, suddenly you're talking real money; or else you'd have to incrementally roll out the chunks over the course of hours. Probably that's enough friction not to bother with.

Risks and mitigations

Without exponential pricing there's a potential risk of a user DOSing SN, I guess, by posting infinite comments. A mitigation might be to require a refundable bounty to turn off exponential pricing for a short time, a bounty SN could seize in the case of abuse; combined with a non-trivial limit (e.g., no more than 50 comments allowed before the exponential pricing comes back online).

Discussion

Any thoughts on this idea? If you're a writer, do you think you could use a feature like this to your benefit? If you're a reader, do you think it would make posts more interesting to engage with?
I love thinking about SN product improvements. You’re no different I see @elvismercury. Really appreciate your style of writing, so whatever we can do to encourage more of it would be awesome. I imagine this is a direct spin-off from your book club series, where updates are super frequent and regular at present. Cracking job on making that so interactive and broadening the experience on SN.
Related Thoughts
  • What I see as SN’s biggest issue myself is the fact that content is quasi-ephemeral. That might seem to be a bit unrelated but fixing it would absolutely necessitate changes to the pricing model you outline.
  • Very rarely does content get rediscovered, so there’s less incentive to revisit and follow-up with additions. You’re in the minority, for now at least.
  • I raised the idea of ‘1 week ago’, ‘1 month ago’ anniversary items to appear inside the hot feed, with my post in the saloon. To encourage more ongoing discussion & contributions.
  • I think you’re strictly thinking about pricing changes but would you also want to see Ui changes? In your mind do chunks always best appear in the same post?
  • There could also be a way to more elegantly link Part 1 and Part 2 as separate posts that are visibility linked in some way in the UI. Like a thread, or a lasso. We’re in the Wild West here, don’t forget.
  • Do you mind sharing with us the direct impact and costs of commenting on your own posts? Has it changed your behaviour at all?
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I love thinking about SN product improvements.
It's like the world's most exclusive fantasy sport!
What I see as SN’s biggest issue myself is the fact that content is quasi-ephemeral.
Very rarely does content get rediscovered
Agree 100% -- that was the motivation for the first feature idea. But there are other features that could -- I think -- help with this. Part of what would help is construction -- if you can build on top of existing posts/comments, then that older material gets new life. If it's easy to talk about posts/comments, and to find old things to talk about, then people will talk about them. Big opportunity there.
The other one is about discovery. I don't have any great insight on that account, but there's all kinds of ways you could make it easier. The main requirement is to aspire to this goal, and to have an experimental attitude. Search and search UI could be part of this story.
I think you’re strictly thinking about pricing changes but would you also want to see Ui changes?
For sure, I think a little UI help would be the really big leverage, I just know how hard it is to build something like what the SN team have built, so asked myself: what's the smallest possible change that could help with this?
I'll have some UI ideas that accompany my search feature idea. I'll try to remember to tag you when I write it.
Do you mind sharing with us the direct impact and costs of commenting on your own posts? Has it changed your behaviour at all?
I might have communicated this badly -- price to post / comment affects what I've done so far only minimally. The only time it's changed my behavior was the book club posts, where I have a ton of prompts, and one of the days in particular didn't really have time to titrate them in gradually over the course of the day, but dumping like 7 of them all at once would have been 100k or 1m sats or something. That's not nothing.
Aside from that one use case, pricing has never come up in practice. But it would definitively keep me from posting a 30 paragraph essay. I'm not made of money! ;)
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commenting on your own posts?
Sometimes can create more engagement and more people get out of being shy and start commenting. Sometimes I watch others posts and if I see that nobody is commenting anything, I just jump in and say something, just to break that ice... you know what I mean? Some posts really need more commenting.
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100% agree there. I personally haven’t found that the cost has prohibited me from posting unlike @elvismercury though.
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Good feedback. Using the top filter and sorting by different things can produce similar results. Perhaps there could be some that were pre-made for anniversaries.
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If SN will have more features and UI for long form writers, blogs, guides etc I would be glad to switch from substack to SN.
But we are long way to reach that phase. SN is still a baby. We need to take care of it and raise it in the right way, slowly.
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Could you share the top 3 features you wished SN had for long form writers? I don't do any long form writing myself (yet), so my usual tactic of "make what I want" doesn't work.
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I think is too early for SN. Let it grow a bit more. Don't rush it too much. I think we are still in the stage of creating a strong curated community and testing a lot of features.
OP @elvismercury is right about being able to edit long posts. I myself sometimes I made mistakes and/or forgot to insert a paragraph, or want to simply add something more. In general I agree with all he says in this post.
Now that you ask me directly what features I wish to see, (but please, don't put extra effort on this right now, SN is OK in this phase) I will mention some:
  1. Maybe adding an extra cost with sats for later edit. I don't mind to pay extra for my own mistakes. That will make long form posts, more curated.
  2. Add option to "read more" with a small paywall fee, for those content creators (eg. @jimmysong could easily post his paid newsletters like that on SN) that want to use a specific fee for their content. But for this must be a required section of TLDR or introduction for the article, so abusers/spammers cannot take advantage or readers.
  3. In order to have a more curated "feed" of posts/articles, writers must have their own sub like "stacker.news/s/darthcoin" for others to find it easily. Or convert user bio page into a "stackpage" listing all his main posts/articles and the bio could be a separated section. Something like substack have.
  4. Option to export all your articles into a zip file, for backup purposes. Or even maybe a full import from substack of other articles. The markdown formatting on SN is OK, easy to use for many writers, I don't think it needs something else.
Maybe other more professional writers could say more, I am just an amateur, I don't know why you asked me about this 😂😂. Yes I write a lot on SN, that true. Maybe I should slow it down a bit.
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Never considered that #2 could be achieved by SN. Been hoping for that product to appear on Nostr but still too early.
Bringing that here would be awesome. Could make SN their primary channel or community, inspite of substack email still being king.
Bonus points if pricing options tied to block time or days, rather than just one-off post access. e.g. 5k sats for 3 months.
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That's why I was saying that SN is not ready for this big jump, yet. Articles could be already have an incentive from zaps, a more V4V approach than paid subscribers. Maybe you do not want to read all Darthcoin articles, but just one that the title or the TLDR catch your attention. And for that one, you will pay with a zap or a "read more" option. Many features from substack I think can be implemented on SN, but takes time. We need to do small steps.
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Additional thoughts:
  • make articles searchable by full SEO name not just a number like "items/312673". I tried to search some of my old posts on external search engines and it didn't show up. Maybe for regular SN posts this is a good thing, but if we want to have like a stacker stack, those articles should be searchable and with option to set a specific name for the link.
  • add preview images option, set by the user, or at least take the first image inserted into the article (like substack is doing). When you share the article on other platform will show up nicely with a image as presentation.
  • should be a specific delimitation / separation between regular posts / comments on SN and articles.
Are many little features like these, that could be added later. I don't want to load your memory with them. Small steps.
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Well, you can cross-post discussions over Nostr if you want.
Then they'll be readable from blogstack, habla news, yakihonne and Amethyst.
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I know but I do not consider nostr well fit for that. Let's not put everything on nostr. All those you mention are working really bad for this kind if things.
As OP said, bloggers need to be able to edit their writings any time. If you do it over nostr that is not possible.
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The long form kind should be editable, maybe some relays can stutter thought. 🤔
But it's true that a dedicated platform might be better.
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We introduced self-reply fee escalation to account for an exceptional poster who would self-reply in 3-5 comments to their many link posts with excessive context, ie non-discussion-eliciting comments. People would see their posts and think a discussion was happening, then navigate to see there wasn't a discussion in fact. This was back when many SN posts went uncommented on, thus they singlehandedly made comment count an unreliable signal.
That stacker has found greener pastures by the looks of it, so I'd be up for turning self-reply fee escalation off for OPs to see what it might be retarding.
As a non-writer that values writing, especially when it's done natively here, I'd love to support your writing experiment.
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Do you think linear fee escalation (like we've discussed wrt peak pricing) would have discouraged the malfeaser you mentioned?
Maybe that's a middle ground solution that won't reopen the floodgates.
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I don't think it would have. Adding 5 self-replies would've cost them 13 sats in the linear model vs 111110 sats.
We are definitely going to play with peak pricing. I'm not sure it's time just yet.
We are going to set a higher post cost first given it's so low and see where we end up in terms of tradeoffs.
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I hope it's just posts and not also comments.
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Yeah just posts!
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It's an interesting conundrum - that SN is for real-time news and conversation but there's not real space or design for evergreen content. There are some excellent posts that should be easily accessible for more than 48 hours
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Always open to suggestions on how to make content here more evergreen. It's not something we're actively avoiding or anything.
I'll be deploying some significant improvements to search in the next release which should help some. We're also planning to make linking to past content native to the editor. We also have ideas around a "lost treasure" page which should resurface old gems.
We'd love to have more ideas to throw around!
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I have so much to say wrt search, esp embeddings-related search for message composition. I can do it as another one of these "feature idea" posts, or in some other venue if you'd rather. That one is pretty ornate to describe, but maybe that's okay.
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I'd love to hear it.
Given written work is a search query finding fascinating people, perhaps there are lurkers here that share your fascination with embeddings, or some adjacent information mapping facet, and can color our understanding of how they might work on SN. So I'd vote for posting it here but I'd read it if you sent in the mail tbh
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So encouraging to read this. Thanks for continuously building in public and being so open to feedback
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241 sats \ 1 reply \ @go 12 Nov 2023
I think Darth’s idea for a customizable profile page is a great first step, where authors can highlight their best work
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What fosters a sense of community is the weekly regulars like fun fact Friday, Monday meme, weekend book recommendations. I love it that I can expect to learn certain things on specific days of the week. Perhaps we can take it one step further and have seasonal themes. For example, Jan 3 is Proof of Keys Day. We could have a thread that commemorates this day and compiles useful posts related to safeguarding your assets n Cold Storage tips
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That's so true! Supplying and meeting expectations is a huge part of community building.
Perhaps we can take it one step further and have seasonal themes.
Topic "seasons" would be pretty cool. As a low effort start, maybe we could pin a post each season and everyone could chime in some megathread.
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I love the idea of low effort start. Fast iteration is key to being action/oriented n pushing for improvements, small as they may be
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I really think SNL is an under-rated thing that I (embarassingly) just discovered recently. I can see it becoming a kind of heartbeat of SN. I love how @k00b and @Car bring their personalities to it.
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Ohhh I’m more embarrassed to admit that I haven’t watched it listened to SNL yet. Is there a place where I can find past episodes of these podcasts? videos?
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I think the Youtube channel has them all. They also post a notice when they're doing it live, which is how I noticed in the first place.
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Thanks for the heads-up!
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Not saying this in a dick way (at least, that's not my intent) but I think SN is for whatever SN winds up being for. I guess @k00b has made statements before about re-creating the Bitdevs vibe; but the manner in which that happens seems like it contains a giant possibility space.
And (this is just my opinion, I have no formal affiliation w/ SN other than believing in it) I think there's a larger game afoot here than re-creating Bitdevs, or even btc as a topic, which is to use btc as a tool to bring real monetary incentives to see what can be done in online community. How to do that is obviously unclear, but these kinds of experiments can reveal what's possible.
Again, imo. I speak for no one but my own desires.
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Nah that's right. We discussed this somewhat in What are the principles underlying SN's development and growth? It'll be the best community-information-thing that we can build with financial incentives.
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If I could simply always edit my own posts, I’d use this instead of Substack.
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Except that late edits make earlier comments out of phase. I suppose this is why some sort of git integration would be nice.
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Git versioning would be dope. That would massively improve all news/blog content.
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With git versioning you just mean the colored diffs between versions? Or literally using git in the background for more reasons?
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I think using git in the background is probably overkill. I don’t need to merge/branch/cherrypick/etc on my blog posts—however, now that I say this, git might be the perfect blogging system since it would be awesome to be able to pull-request factual updates to people’s posts, fork and correct posts, etc. That all could be done without git, but git on the backend might be the simplest way to implement it as a feature while having a lot of prebuilt mechanisms baked in for future features.
However, simply showing and highlighting changes with dates would be great. I often write a post and then an hour later re-read it and decide to clarify something or add more context, and I’d like that history of changes to exist for posterity (and to allow comments to hold contextual relevance in case something changed).
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Some sort of easy git integration would be very helpful for long-form posts -- something sort of like gist.github.com would be nice. It would also make creating/editing posts offline much easier.
It would be an easy way for people to monetize useful code snippets too. Often I will create a little gist showcasing/demonstrating some code or construct, and it would be great if I could do it on SN so that it at least has a chance to self-monetize.
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That's a fascinating idea.
I like how in this thread we've wandered toward some potential monetization models: rewarding long-form writing at a more granular level, for giving / receiving feedback; and for well-articulated bits of useful code -- two things that would have been impossible to hit with monetary incentives in any way other than btc / lightning. How many times on StackOverflow would have gleefully, gratefully given somebody 10k sats for helping you with a conundrum?
Intriguing to think about.
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@k00b this is a very interesting thread you must watch it
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I don't have anything to add to this particular suggestion. It's a good idea that clearly adds to SN in an organic way. I also really like that it emphasize substantive interactions, which is what makes SN so unique.
I did have a related idea for a nostr client feature that might be worth considering for SN. What if users could set these parameters for their content? If you really don't want to get spammed or see a bunch of lazy comments, you could set a higher price for commenting. If you want to leave a few comments on your own post, you can set that in advance. As you mention in "Risks and mitigations" there would have to be some baseline to protect the site, as well. Maybe there would have to be some extra cost of changing those settings when you originate the post.
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In a world inundated with terse IG and TikTok posts, I’m glad that we’re going the other way here. I have always been pleasantly surprised at the length of both posts and comments - Stackers really take their time to expound on a point and provide anecdotes. I think that’s the greatest strength of this sub. No other platforms I use have this characteristic.
It’s a competitive advantage that we should protect and nurture! I believe dividing long prose into chunks could work for listicles. I could see myself providing a TL;DR version in the main text and elaborating on each point in the form of individual paragraphs in the comments. I would be interested to explore the time continuum in my writing (past - present - future). Eg. What brought me to Stacker News, what keeps me coming here, and how do I intend to grow on Stacker News?
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I feel SN is doing a great job being community focused and encouraging a good amount of shared dialogue and feedback it it’s current format. Keep it up guys!
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What about a new chunk post type ?

I think this will solve everything
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Intriguing. As you imagine it, would it have different features / properties of a normal post type?
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  • can be edited for long periods ,good for progress
  • will have a special fee
  • will have a diffirent ui (as many chunks and every one can have a separate link inside one page )
  • every chunk can be zapped
  • maybe two post of that type can be merged ...
Edit:
  • every post can have custom url
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@elvismercury i think this is better named blog post type
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Also every post can have different url
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I also have an idea on how can we make post curated in sn there: Sn lists
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