I recently made a post about understanding the fee structure and flow of sats on Stacker News for completing various actions. Most of what I posted was accurate but I got some very important things wrong. After some excellent feedback from k00b and other trusted stackers, here is my updated understanding of the stacker news fee structure along with some nice visuals.
I hope this help you to better understand where the sats come from and where they go each and every time you post, comment, zap, and boost.
I have screenshots below but I also made this interactive Stacker News SatFlow diagram so you can look at individual flows yourself by hovering and clicking on the chart.
Pay To Post
In order to keep spam and low-quality posts to a minimum, Stacker News has implemented a cost to post. These Pay-To-Post fees in each territory are set by the founder.
Pay To Post fees are split 70/30 between the territory founder and the rewards pool.
Pay To Comment
Pay to Comment works just the same way as pay to post. You have to pay a small fee to prevent spam and low-quality commenting. This is also split 70/30 between the territory founders and the rewards pool.
It seems that most territories cost 1 sat to comment if you are logged in and 100x that when you comment anonymously.
Boost
Boosting is a way for anyone to boost their post or comment towards the top of a teritory for a limited time. Whichever posts and comments pay the most will be boosted to the top of the territory. The highest boost across the entire site is also boosted on the home page.
In this example, Alice, Bob, and Carol all boost in some territories.
- Alice's post would boost to the top in ~Bitcoin
- Bob's post would boost to the top in ~memes
- Carol's post would boost to the top in ~Bitcoin_Beginners AND on the home page.
Even if a post is not boosted to the top of a territory, it still increases its ranking in the territory. In the example above, Alice's post would still boost in ~memes but Bob's post is boosted to the top.
Boost fees are split 70/30 between territory founders and the rewards pool.
Zaps
When someone zaps a post or comment, the OP receives 70% of those sats, 21% go to the territory founder, and 9% go to the rewards pool. The more high-value posts and comments you make, the more sats you are likely to stack.
Rewards Pool
The rewards pool is paid out daily at midnight in Austin, Texas 🤠 🇺🇸
80% of the rewards pool is distributed amongst top stackers for the day, 10% go to daily referral rewards, and 10% go to lifetime referral rewards.
I hope this helps everyone to better understand the fees on stacker news and where the sats flow each and every time we do something on here.
If any of this is incomplete or inaccurate, please let me know in the comments so I can make the necessary changes.