Great post. I was going to post something similar in the SN Foundry later this week. Similar in the vein of a post regarding "my thoughts on territories".

Agree with your first point. 3 territories unless you keep a hands off approach is a lot to manage. To make these territories successful in the long term will require a lot of effort on the front end. Sure, I can envision a time -years down the road- where SN has 10x the users and enough stackers naturally gravitating to each territory that you can take more of a hands off approach and focus more on moderating and serving your territorial community.

I actually think the user experience on SN has become a bit fractured due to territories. And I am not writing territories off as a failure. You know I was probably the biggest proponent of expanding the available subs on SN. But I think in the wild west phase we have gotten far too many territories to start and many power users are focused on their own territories (I am guilty as charged) rather than floating around, weaving in and out of posts, comment threads, having the great and random collisions that made SN so magical. I think this is solved by territory attrition. I think a number of territories will eventually go away or get combined with other territories and existing territories may just be sub territories within others.

I think the saloon needs to be the focal point of the SN experience. It is the town square and where we can replicate that early SN experience prior to territories and be the starting point of ones journey through this frontier town. Maybe the Saloon should be pinned at the top of the homepage regardless of what filter you use. I also agree that territories should have the ability to pin messages as well.

I have just started trying to promote Stacker Sports outside of SN. All I have done so far is create the Nostr account, post and share the contest from SN on nostr to try and attract potential participants to come over to SN and join. This is a work in progress as I am just starting to get a bit of engagement on Nostr and curating following/followers who are posting about sports. I really wanted to give Nostr the first crack at marketing the territory because ideologically I would prefer not to have to use Twitter or Reddit as a marketing funnel but I think I will eventually need to go that route. I am a bit torn. I don't need the territory to be financially successful but know if territories are going to be viable long term they should at least make a small profit, so I should be seeking the widest audience for potential SN converts on twitter and reddit.

I actually think all the Bitcoin related territories you referenced could fit as sub territories within bitcoin and maybe be a test of sub territories. While creating subs territories at this point might sound counter intuitive, it might actually help to limit the amount of main territories and make them more financially viable as one would imagine subs would be cheaper and pay a share of their rev to the main territory. Just a thought.

We are still learning to traverse a new frontier. It is going to take time.