I like it because there is a diversity of interests but a common core. There are enough new members and enough creativity to keep it peppy, but it's not like Reddit (very young, naive, posting redundant questions every day) or Nostr (so much meme noise that the signal is totally drowned out).

It's also pretty respectful in a way, like armed forces service members. They might knock on one branch or the other, but it's with respect. Here you get both sides of the political aisle (with a heavy dose of "both sides are crooks") but with enough respect and intelligence to see that all issues are more complicated than they seem at face value.

In short, there's a guy trying to make his local government better, talking to a dude eating out of a can in his bunker.

That said, we could use a little more feminine perspective around here. Not that it comes across as sexist; just "male-dominated".

I think ironically the only thing that would stop SN from "flourishing" is to try too hard to be something else, or to be too many things. There are several cool forums that predate all "social media" (or the internet proper, for that matter).

I think SN is the only internet place I want to be. I haven't used twitter in months. And I have to be very stern with myself and set harsh limits with instagram. not everyone's struggle, but that's mine. anyway, I would so much rather come here daily to get news, sure, but also read thoughtful opinions on, as you were pointing out, a wide variety of anything. I much prefer putting out my work here where I know it will get read, I know it will reach people, and as a huge bonus, I'll potentially get rewarded in sats. This has become a motivator, and not just for me, I see it happening within the "community" or neighborhood of SN. I think when a community flourishes, it doesn't spend too much time taking the temperature of the community. I guess I'm saying, a strength inside a community is self interest. that's why the gamification of SN is a success.

Interestingly, SN is in a bit of a sweet spot for me. Large enough to generate interactions on most posts you make, but small enough that you don't need to be hypercompetitive for attention. In that sense, I think to me the definition of flourishing is:

Communities that are too small fail that definition because you can't always expect a response, or diverse responses. Larger communities can fail because they lack authenticity---people start having to optimize for likes and attention, rather than simply posting what they think.

What would it mean for SN to be flourishing?

If the reward mechanism has worked so well that it becomes a place where people who never create an account come to find articles/discussions on current events.

If the reward mechanism has worked so well that even articles/posts that are distinctly anti-bitcoin or anti-libertarian (or other topics that go against the current SN grain) receive lots of sats if they are the best anti-bitcoin or anti-libertarian articles.

To me, the distinct feature of SN is the reward mechanism. The number of sats on a post ought to be a signal of quality, not viewpoint. If this occurs, I believe we would observe the two characteristics above. The alternative is that people only give sats to posts that align with their worldview and SN will become an echo chamber, rewarding people for parroting the view of the day.

Here is my worry (this is a totally personal anecdote from past interactions many years ago), but in my experience there is a personality type that is attracted to austrian economics and libertarianism. If SN becomes a sounding board for those worldviews, I would consider SN a failed experiment.

Timely post. And well written - especially all the references. Thanks for that!

You ask:

It certainly deserves some deep thinking and probably a corresponding measured response. Which is ironically not what this is. Instead: just a few thoughts that have been "rolling [...] around in my mind" for some time.

SN is FOSS, great. But to what degree? Sure, you can read the code and contribute to it if you're so inclined. The part that is less "FOSSy", is what your questions allude to in my opinion, namely the path forward. It's difficult to know how to get there if "there" is mostly undefined. For reference: just consider the amount of posts (lately?) dealing with ways to game earn rewards. Or cowboy hats. I see these as growing pains, so I hope to see less of that in a year's time.

To me the big sign that we're flourishing will be when conversations more regularly have three or more participants. Right now, we have great back and forth conversations, but it's still pretty uncommon for more than two to be on a thread.

I also think I should more often be beaten to the punch by other stackers with new posts. I prefer commenting and discussing over generating posts, but oftentimes things I want to discuss haven't gone up yet.

I was gone for a few months and came back to an even more diverse platform with significant user growth. But a year on hmm... just the same trend in high-quality and diverse material. Not bitcoin-related. It's slowly happening. There's wishlists of video integration and fancy database stuff of course, but right now, I feel a platform has already been built that's technically clobbered what it was loosely based on: hacker.news, while still retaining hacker's famous minimalism. That's quite something. The final insult there would be if Stacker's user base and size scales somewhat proportionally along with the LN (an infant still). So yeah, high-quality diverse content, and iterate without ever loosing the stupid simplicity.

To me the magic is in zapping sats as a voting mechanism. I want to see SN eat reddit.

For me, collaboration and creativity that can only arise from deeper connections. It would be awesome if Stackers could come together to advance towards the understanding of Bitcoin. At this point, there is a lot of useful information contributed by Stackers of all expertise levels (from how to use Fountain to how to run your own node), but it is scattered haphazardly all over the site. What I would like to see is a core team of Stackers working to categorise these threads neatly in a repository so that newcomers can easily get up to speed.

Collaboration can also mean Stackers working together to write an information piece or even a story. Basically, igniting sparks that lead to creative possibilities

diversity yet a sense of community

And if SN would ever grow to big and become boring and mainstream, someone would just fork off and create a new weird place somewhere on the internet.

Not to follow the big tech paths and keep it stupid simple

My tech friends get on here.

Real stuff, not fiat. Bringing people back because they enjoy what is there to offer them, and they enjoy offering what others seek. Small communities / ingroups that come to recognize each other. Avatars would help that prolly. Success for each territory will look different. A link at the top to see new posts from only subscribed territories.

I came (still use it) from another zap place called ZapRead. ZapRead is still active and some people still using it but main problem with that platform is that development is stopped (maybe because dev is busy doing something else) + it lacks from a well designed growth plan and a proper social media presence.

I think that places like ZapRead and even SN could make good use of a nicely designed Growth plan.

Example: Twitter is a great place to spread the word for FREE about SN as a nice alternative to Reddit and using data like this one to write super engaging posts could help a lot attracting fresh blood here yet, no post was made about it. @kr @k00b

Stacker News needs dev time but also some nice growth and social plan to encourage some other people to join and enjoy what´s done here.