This is a document highlighting the changes and updates made to Stacker News over time.
3/15/2024 - SNDev Command and Open Source Contribution Awards
SNDev
  • We developed sndev which allows you to run a fully featured SN developer environment locally in a single command
  • The single command is ./sndev start
  • The SNDev environment provides all the services we run in production but locally for development
  • It spins up an auto-mining, auto-channel-forming lightning regtest network, a database, a search engine, an image proxy, and mock s3
  • It also populates the database and search engine with a big production-shaped 45-day seed.
  • SNDev allows SN open source contributors to do things like login to local accounts with a single command: ./sndev login <some nym>
  • Fund their account paying a bolt11 regtest invoice: ./sndev fund <bolt11>
  • And much more as seen by issuing ./sndev help
  • SNDev will be regularly updated and refined
Open Source Contribution Awards
  • Contribution awards are live
  • Details can now found in SN's Github README
  • The reward structure is still experimental and will require a lot of adjustment, but it's ready to begin runnin
  • We also rewrote our README so that it mostly appears as a single page and elaborates on things more.
  • We're hoping these improvements help stackers continue to make SN more of what they want it to be, begin FOSSing, and stack sats
3/6/2024 - Territory Transfers & Other Improvements
Territory Transfers
  • You can transfer a territory to another stacker now
Other Improvements
  • The poll icon is green if the poll is still active
  • some image loading improvements (we reserve vertical space while it loads now)
2/26/2024 - More Nostr Crossposting, Zap Undos, Territories in Profiles, & More
Nostr Crossposting
  • All Stacker News post types now support Nostr crossposting
  • Previously only long-form discussion posts were supported
Polls
  • Polls now have configurable expirations
  • You can configure this by clicking options on the poll post form
Show founded territories on profiles
  • Founders have a territories tab on their profiles to showcase the territories they own
Reward changes
  • We now reward post and comment creators as well as post and comment zappers every day
Territory Subscriptions
  • Anyone can now subscribe to be notified about a territory's new posts
  • Previously only territory founders got these notifications
  • When visiting a territory, click ... to configure
Zap Undos
  • In the advanced section of your zap settings, you can now configure zap undos
  • Zap undos give you a five second window to "abort" a zap before it's sent
Various Bugs & Improvements
  • Territory revenue had a bug that wasn't attributing comment revenue, which is now fixed
  • This fix may increase revenues by 5-10% in heavily commented territories
2/16/2024 - Changeable Territory Billing
  • You can now change the billing type for your territories
  • It credits you the amount you paid for your current billing period when you change it
  • Ex. If 15 days into your monthly billing cycle you choose to upgrade to yearly billing, it'll cost 900k sats for the year
2/14/2024 - Top Territories, Linked Accounts in Profile, Deeper BOLT11 Deletion
Top Territories
  • You can view top territories now
  • Territories can be sorted by sats stacked, sats spent, revenue, posts and comments
  • Additionally, we've added numbers to the top stackers leaderboard
Linked Accounts in Stacker Profiles
  • When you link Github/Twitter/Nostr auth to your account, you can opt-in to display them in your profile
  • Note: you may need to unlink and relink existing auth methods if you want to do this
Deeper BOLT11 Deletion
  • We absolutely nuke deleted BOLT11's by also deleting them on our lightning node. via @dillon
LND autowithdraw maximally restricted macaroon
  • If you know how to bake your own macaroons, you can now use LND for autowithdraw with only invoices:read and invoices:write perms in addition to the already supported prebaked invoice.macaroon.
Bug Fixes
  • Fix missing saloon comments in profile
  • detailed validation of NWC strings
2/13/2024 - NWC & LNBits Sending, LND Autowithdraw, NSFW Labels, & More
Autofunding
  • You can now attach wallets for sending sats on Stacker News on your wallet page
  • To start, we support attaching Nostr Wallet Connect and LNBits
  • Note: The credentials are stored in the browser, so please set a budget on them
Autowithdraw to LND
  • In addition to autowithdrawing to a lightning address, you can now autowithdraw to LND
  • We support connecting to your node over Tor so you should be able to push out funds to your home node even if it doesn't have a public IP
  • If you attach LND in addition to a lightning address, you can set a default and if it fails we attempt your other method
  • You can expect more autowithdraw methods soon (We'll likely be adding CLN and Zebedee next)
  • There are a lot of wallets and ways to connect them, but we plan to support any method that makes sense as time goes on
NSFW territory labels
  • Territories can now be labelled NSFW and are visible on an opt-in basis unless visited directly
Improvements to domain searching
  • When you search with a url:example.com filter you should see less strict results
Bug Fixes
  • Fixed checkboxes on the create territory form
  • Pinned posts now show up in home
1/30/2024 - Post and Comment Pinning
  • Territory founders can now pin up to 3 posts on their territory homepage
  • OPs of all posts can also pin up to 3 comments on their post page
  • Search and related posts used to exclusively rely on term matches
  • Now search ranks items on term matches and semantic similarity while related posts relies exclusively on semantic similarity
  • This change uses text embeddings by mapping a search query or item to a vector of meaning and looking for items with similar vectors.
  • This should help surface evergreen content and allow stackers to explore rabbit-holes based on their favorite posts.
1/12/2024 - Autowithdrawals, Territory Post Notifications, & Territory Naming
Autowithdrawals
  • You can now configure autowithdrawals to a lightning address
  • To set up autowithdrawals, visit your wallet, then click attach wallets and enter any Lightning address
  • We are working on support for sending next, and have lots more planned
Territory Upgrades
  • Territory founders now get notified when there are new posts in their territory
  • You can turn this off in your settings
  • Territories can also be renamed by their founder
  • Territory details are viewable when posting by clicking the info icon next to the dropdown
Additional Changes
  • External interactions with SN's wallet (funding, withdrawing, JIT funding, etc) are more realtime now
12/31/2023 - Mute Territories, Opt-In Moderation, iOS PWA Notification Fixes
Territory Muting & Moderation
  • You can mute territories now either by visiting the territory or the overflow ... for an item belonging to that territory.
Territory founders can choose to enable moderation in their territories. If they choose to moderate:
  • Their territory gets a moderated badge
  • The badge includes a count of how many items they've outlawed
  • Territory founders can turn moderation on and off, but the badge does not go away if they've ever outlawed an item
  • In the item overflow ... they can outlaw items with a click
  • Anything outlawed by founders is still visible in Wild West Mode
  • Anyone posting or commenting in the territory sees some help text letting them know it's moderated
Other Improvements
  • We have made fixes to PWA notifications on iOS
12/20/2023 - Image Orientation, Nostr Post Enhancements, Downzap UX, & More
Image Orientation
  • An image orientation bug is fixed.
  • We scrub image metadata in the browser for privacy, but in some cases that metadata contained orientation info. Now we make sure to preserve the orientation.
Downzap UX
  • The downzap UI has been polished. It is now properly labeled as downzap in the ... menu, and has an explainer of how it works in the popup.
  • You can now downzap things you've upzapped and upzap things you've downzapped.
Other Improvements
  • Discussions can be retroactively crossposted to Nostr using the share button, and a link has been added for notes that have been crossposted.
  • Onchain fees are now available in the price carousel
  • Footnote links have been fixed
12/05/2023 - Stacker News Territories
You can now created your own territories on Stacker News.
How Territories Work
  • 50% of all revenue made by the territory is paid to the founder at the end of the day texas time, and the other 50% goes to the rewards pool
  • This revenue split will eventually be something the territory founder can configure
  • The territories revenue is the revenue SN would ordinarily collect (100% of posting costs, 10% of zaps, and 100% of boosts)
Variables That Territory Founders Can Configure
  • Base post cost
  • Post types
  • You can't currently edit the name or billing type (but that will be implemented)
Territory Plans
  • Seamless crossposting and retroactive crossposting between territories
  • Subscribing/unsubscribing to territories
  • Creating territories within other territories, eg ~bitcoin/privacy and ~bitcoin/mining
  • Enabling the territory founder to sell sub-territories to other stackers at a price of their choosing
  • More post types
  • More economic parameters
11/12/2023 - 10 Sat Post Fee, Better Search, QR Scans, Date Ranges, and More
Base Posting Fee
  • The base posting fee has been raised from 1 sat to 10 sats. The recent tab has gotten pretty noisy so hopefully leads to more mindful story sharing
  • As with most things, it's just an experiment so we'll monitor the results
Other Improvements
  • You can now scan QR codes when withdrawing sats
  • Search should produce much better results now. The related section under posts should likewise produce much better results.
  • OPs can now repeatedly self-reply to their own post with no escalating cost
  • Anywhere that you can filter by a time period now lets you set a custom date range
  • After 7 days, you can delete any withdrawal invoices permanently. In your settings, you can tell us to do this for you automatically
  • PWA notification badges now work
11/06/2023 - Image Uploading
  • There is now a little button in the top-right corner of the text box that allows you to upload images to Stacker News.
  • You can also add images to Stacker News by dragging them into the text box while composing a post or comment.
Gently Personalized Feeds
  • Stacker News content will now be ranked to suit your zapping preferences ever so slightly
  • Most stackers will still see the same content
  • This will be an active area of development for a long time
  • This gentle version is just the proof of concept, and is required for user generated subs
Self-Destructing Items
  • If you want to auto-delete something you can tag the @delete bot and it will delete it for you
  • For example, to delete your post or comment in 1 day, you could write <delete bot mention> in 1 day
  • It works for multiple time units: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years
Other Improvements
  • You can now add text description to links if you open 'options' under a link post
  • You can now set a default max fee for withdrawals in your settings
  • You can now see your transaction details (preimage, payment hash, etc)
  • You can now unsubscribe yourself from your own posts/comments
  • For links more than 1 year old, when we auto title them we now also add the year to the title
  • Youtube embeds now work for discussion posts and comments
  • There were also many other bug fixes that are now fixed
10/04/2023 - Nostr Cross-Posting, Symmetric LUD18, Quote Replies, & More
Rewards update
  • Rewards are now random as part of our ongoing rewards experiment. On any given day there is a 50% chance we will reward the top 33% of posts/comments, and a 50% chance that we will reward the zappers of the top 33% of posts/comments.
Nostr Crossposting
  • This feature requires a NIP-07 extension
  • Right now it is only available for discussion posts but more is planned
  • You can set this feature to repost your content on a per post basis (in the post options pane) or default to crossposting in your settings
Symmetric LUD-18
  • You can now optionally send identifying information when you make a lightning address withdrawal, assuming the receiver's wallet supports it
  • You can also receive such information when someone sends to your lightning address
Quote Replies
  • In the overflow aka ... for items you can now quote the item you're replying to by hitting quote reply
  • If you haven't highlighted text in the parent, it will quote the full item
  • If you have highlighted text in the parent, it will only quote what you've highlighted
  • If you have highlighted text in the parent and hit reply it will also quote it
Mention Autocompletes
  • Now when you hit @, SN attempts to help you find the friends you might want to mention
Additional Changes
  • Date range selection in search
  • Full URL search with the URL: filter
  • Changes to my changes of images
  • When you switch over to preview now, you no longer lose your cursor position in the original text
09/28/2023 - Mutes, More Characters in Polls, and More
Mutes
On any post or comment or profile page, the ... now gives you the option to mute or unmute someone.
What to expect when you mute someone:
  • You won't see their posts (in hot/recent/top)
  • Their comments will be collapsed by default and covered with reply from someone you muted which you can click to reveal
  • You will not be notified when they reply to you or mention you
Poll Characters
  • You can now add up to 40 chars in poll choices
Other Upgrades
  • Fixes for nostr zaps displaying json in satistics
  • Fixes for nostr zaps not showing in nostr on long form content or zap streams
09/26/2023 - LNURL-Pay Comment Support, Lightning Address Withdrawal Verification, and More
LNURL-Pay comment support
  • These should display in both your notifications and satistics
JIT/anon rewards donations
  • These donations now also have toasts and/or a lightning strike display
Fix lightning address withdrawal not verifying amount (via @benthecarman)
  • Prior to this fix, a lightning address withdrawal trusted the lightning address provider would return an invoice for the requested amount, e.g. they could potentially return an invoice for more than the requested amount and it'd pay it if the stacker had the funds
Boost minimum has been raised to 25k sats
  • Also the ability to increase a boost on edit was enhanced and now supports JIT funding
Forwarding sats display
  • When you're forwarded sats and comment on a post you get a OPG badge in the comments
09/18/2023 - Reward All Activities, Sub to Posts/Comments, Contributor Badges, & More
Rewards Go to All Activities
  • Starting today the top 33% of posts get 1/4 of rewards, the top 33% of posts get 1/4 of rewards, the zappers of top posts get 1/4 rewards, and the zappers of top comments get 1/4 rewards.
  • This is yet another experiment to establish a baseline before we try a randomness experiment.
Subscribe to Posts and Comments
You can now subscribe to a stackers posts, comments, or both by clicking the ... icon on their profile page.
Contributor Badges
Open source contributors to SN now have a badge on their profiles. If you've contributed to the open source project and want this badge, open a PR adding your nym to the contributors.txt file on Github.
Additional Changes
  • Separators have been added to numbers on Stacker News.
  • Opt-in anonymous diagnostics is off by default, but if you turn it on it's anonymous. This is meant to help us debug weird PWA behavior we've been struggling to recreate (like push subscriptions turning off).
  • On the blank search page, hidden filters are now documented.
  • Flagging is now weighted by zap amount so the more sats you flag with, the bigger the effect.
  • All flagging sats go to rewards, and this will eventually become downzaps.
  • We have also fixed bounty pay counts and deposits and nostr zaps not showing up in notifications.
09/12/2023 - Various Small Improvements
Hide your wallet balance
  • You can now hide your wallet balance in settings, replacing it with ***** until hovered over (or your finger drags over it on mobile)
Forwarded Stackers Now Receive Notifications
  • You are now auto-subscribed to threads you are forwarded sats from (which can be disabled by unsubscribing on the post) and when you receive sats from them (can be disabled in settings)
Other Improvements
  • Block height has been added to the price carousel
  • A visual character counter for has been added for post titles and poll options
  • A search bar has been added to the top of the page
  • A new visitor welcome banner has been added
  • Obey rotation prevention in PWA on mobile
  • Issues with replying to the wrong comment in deep comment threads have been fixed
08/31/2023 - Hold Invoices for Anon/JIT Payments, Notification De-Dupes, & More
Hold invoices for JIT
  • Just-In-Time funding and anon payments were rough around the edges in the original release
  • The payment settling and the action completing weren't atomic, so if you paid for an action then the action failed after payment (and you weren't satisfied/successful when retrying), we'd have to manually process a refund
  • JIT funding and anon payments now use short lived hold invoices so your payment is settled if and only if your action succeeds, and it's refunded automatically if you choose to cancel it or retries don't succeed before it expires
  • As always, your work is still saved locally either way
Notification De-Dupe
  • Before this change, if someone @'d you while also replying to you, you'd get two notifications: one for the reply, and one for the mention. If you were also subscribed to the stacker (available in yesterday's release), you'd get a third notification
  • Now you only get one notification
Other Stuff
  • There was a handful of other small stuff in this release too
08/30/2023 - Rewards Changes/UX Improvements & Subscribe to Stackers
Rewards Changes
  • The zap-only rewards experiment is over and a new experiment has begun. From today until when this experiment is over, rewards will exclusively go to the top 21% of posts and comments per day.
Subscribe to Stackers
  • You can now get notified when your favorite stackers post/comment. Click on the ... next to their nym on their profile to subscribe.
Rewards UX Fix
  • Previously, if you had received several days worth of rewards notifications without getting other notifications, we'd add them together to keep notifications concise. However, when you clicked to view your reward details, it'd only show the details for the latest day.
  • Now when you click on these compacted rewards notifications it will display all the corresponding days.
08/27/2023 - Lightning Prisms, Clearer Withdrawal Options, Toasts, and More
Lightning Prisms
  • You can now forward post zaps to up to 5 stackers in custom percentages.
Toasts
  • We now show success/error toasts when you're doing things like bookmarking and subscribing to threads.
Clearer Withdrawal Options
  • There's now a tabbed interface for picking how you want to withdraw your sats.
Misc
  • Stackers can now hide their bookmarks
  • The OP badge has been removed for anon comments
  • The YouTube embed overflow has been fixed on mobile
  • a bunch of other smaller things
08/15/2023 - Rewards Details, Image Fixes, PWA Enhancements, and More
Rewards Details
  • You can click on your reward notifications now and view where your rewards came from and how you compared to other rewardees.
  • Also, @anon's stack (the sats anons earn on posts) have been added to the reward pool.
Image Fixes
  • When our image proxy can't process an image you share, we fallback to the original source url now. If you're concerned about your IP leaking to image hosts, you can make it so fallbacks are only available on click in your settings.
  • Additionally, timeouts were added to the proxy.
PWA Enhancements
  • On Android, when your OS theme preference is dark mode, you should get a dark splash screen now.
LNAuth Fix on Phoenix
LNAuth with the new phoenix wallet should be fixed now.
  • The new phoenix wallet sends a GET with Content-Length: 0 on lnauth which deviates from the HTTP spec's recommendation:
A user agent SHOULD NOT send a Content-Length header field when the request message does not contain a payload body and the method semantics do not anticipate such a body.
  • This caused us to fail the request. We remove the header upstream now.
08/09/2023 - Daily Rewards Distribution Upgrades
The algorithm for rewards has been updated to distribute daily rewards more uniformly.
The algorithm still only rewards zapping, a change we initiated as an experiment, but we plan to run other experiments after observing the impact of rewarding only zapping with more uniform distribution.
For more details on the exact mechanics of the new zapping algorithm, click here.
08/08/2023 - Nostr Login, Nostr Zap Metadata, and Various Improvements
You can now login to Stacker News with Nostr and link Nostr as an auth method to your account if you have a Nostr browser extension installed.
You can now see Nostr zap metadata in notifications when your wallet receives a Nostr zap:
  • We link to the npub of the nostrich that zapped you and note that was zapped
  • We also include a zap message if there is one
  • We recognize Zapple Pay zaps and correctly link to the zapping nostrich
We now show the proper usage of singular and plural unit labels everywhere:
  • 1 sat rather than 1 sats, 1 reply rather than 1 replies, etc
In addition, we have made a handful of other UI changes:
  • We highlight new comments when you return to a thread now
  • New comments also have a new indicator badge that doesn't cause layout shift
  • We do a better job highlighting replies in threads when you click on them from your notifications
  • If you hit the back button after such a navigation, it will highlight the notification you came from so that you don't lose your place
  • We made dark mode slightly less dark for readability (and lots of stackers hate it)
We also made a number of backend improvements to the site:
  • We lint PRs in a github action now
  • Stackers shouldn't lose any more push notification subscriptions now
  • Signing up (not logging in or linking) with Twitter and Github were broken and are now fixed
  • Improvements were made to the local dev env (which has always been a WIP but it's getting better)
  • We were unintentionally caching the service worker for 24 hours (the browser default if not told otherwise) which would cause issues for everyone when we pushed updates. We don't cache it anymore.
  • Proper CORS on LNURL withdrawal endpoints
07/31/2023 - Various Search, Profile, and Homepage Improvements
We have made a handful of UX improvements across the site:
  • The search page now has compact summaries rather than displaying the full item text. Now we just show relevant highlights matching the query.
  • The "items" tab on stacker profiles can now be ranked and filtered similar to the way you can rank and filter 'top' posts and comments on Stacker News.
  • The satistics table now fits on mobile devices without horizontal scrolling.
  • Numbers next to posts have been removed in anticipation of personalized feeds where there is no absolute scoring. Finally, there is now a larger zap bolt so it is harder to misclick it on mobile, and there is more spacing between story titles and links.
We have made three different image improvements on Stacker News:
  • When you add an image link to a text field, we detect it and render it as image (without you having to provide markup):
  • We proxy all images so that your ip isn't leaked to the image host.
  • When you use a link to an image in a 'link' post, it becomes an image post and the image is rendered on the post's page.
We now also display your longest cowboy hat streak on your profile.
07/11/2023 - Lightning & Slashtags Auth Linking Fix
If you've been having trouble linking lightning or slashtags auth to your account for the last week, this is now fixed.
The bug was introduced 1 week ago when we upgraded our nodejs version and the http middleware changed.
07/06/2023 - Trust Algo v4, Rewards Changes, PWA Enhancements
The Stacker News Web of Trust is now more accurate, trust is more evenly distributed, and the ramp to gaining trust is much more gradual rather than threshold based. The algorithm can also generate a unique POV for every stacker, paving the way for personalized feeds in the future.
We have made a change to the daily rewards so that 100% of daily rewards are now paid out to stackers who zap great content. Previously, the daily reward was split among posters, commenters, and zappers.
Stackers are still rewarded in proportion to:
  • how early they zap content
  • how many sats they zap the content with
  • how much trust they've earned by zapping over time
  • how well the content they zap ranked relative to other posts/comments
50% of zap rewards are given to top post zappers. 50% of zap rewards are given to top comment zappers. Since all daily rewards are exclusively paid out to top zappers, the zapping rewards are now 3x bigger than they were before.
There is now a timer in the footer which shows the number of sats for tomorrow's daily reward and the countdown time until the reward is paid.
Finally, we have made another set of small enhancements to the Stacker News PWA.
07/05/2023 - Stacker News PWA Push Notifications
If you have SN installed as PWA and you have a browser that supports push notifications, you can now get your SN notifications via push even if the PWA is not in the foreground.
On Stacker News, the option is available in the upper right corner when you visit your notifications page (the bell icon).
If you're using an Apple device, push notifications were only recently made available in:
  • iOS 16.4 or later
  • Safari 16 for macOS 13 or later
This release only gives notifications for replies, mentions, and sat stacking ... more types are coming.
06/20/2023 - Meta Sub Launch, Freebie Improvements, and More
Stacker News now offers a ~meta sub for all discussions related to Stacker News. This includes feature requests, reviews, and complaints.
We also made changes to freebies so that new users aren't limited to 2 free posts and 5 free comments. Freebies will continue to have limited visibility until other stackers zap them.
We also implemented a number of other minor changes, including:
  • Re-naming tips to zaps across the site
  • Creating a permalink for the daily discussion thread (https://stacker.news/daily)
  • Adding a Simplex chat group link to the site footer
  • Adding a temporary banner on the site during Stacker News Live
  • Upgraded onboarding emails for new users who login via email
06/12/2023 - Tech Sub Launch & Markdown Shortcuts
Stacker News now offers a ~tech sub for all tech-related topics that don't fit in the ~bitcoin or ~nostr subs. It works just like all the other subs on the site, and allows users to filter their view to see a specific subset of content on Stacker News.
We also added some markdown keyboard shortcuts:
  • ctrl+k wraps a selection in link markdown
  • ctrl+i wraps a selection in italic markdown
  • ctrl+b wraps a selection in bold markdown
Finally, a number of smaller improvements were made, including making browser notifications double opt-in. Special thanks to @sime for the guidance and feature request.
06/01/2023 - Stacker News PWA & Subscriptions
Stacker News now offers a standalone progressive web app (PWA) enabling a native app experience on mobile. To use the PWA on your mobile device, follow the instructions below.
iOS:
  1. Open Safari and navigate to Stacker News
  2. Click "Share"
  3. Click "Add to Home screen"
Android:
  1. Open Chrome and navigate to Stacker News
  2. Click the 3 dots in the upper-right corner of your screen
  3. Click "Add to Home screen"
In this release, we also added the ability to subscribe to other people's posts and comments by clicking the 3 dots next to each post or comment's metadata. This feature will notify you when someone replies to your post or comment.
Finally, we have a new footer link to the currently running commit hash, and in-browser notifications.
05/02/2023 - Nostr Sub Launch
Stacker News now offers a ~nostr sub for Nostr-related topics. It works just like the main Bitcoin sub, but now users can filter their view to see only Bitcoin or only Nostr content if they wish.
In addition, users who have earned cowboy hats can now hide them from appearing on their profile.
02/16/2023 - Bookmarks
You can now bookmark posts and comments on Stacker News. The feature is available in the ... next to any post or comment. You can also see your list of bookmarks by clicking on your nym in the navbar and clicking bookmarks in the dropdown.
Additionally, the ... on items now has a copy link option and a link to the open timestamps timestamp at ots timestamp.
A significant portion of the work on bookmarks was done by @ekzyis in response to this bounty: Implement bookmarks on SN earning them 1m sats.
02/14/2023 - NIP-57 Nostr Zap Support
Stacker News users can now use their SN lightning address as their Nostr client lightning address, and when someone zaps you on Nostr, your sats will be sent directly to your SN wallet.
To set up NIP-57 Nostr Zap Support:
  1. Add your nostr pubkey in the NIP-05 section of your SN settings
  2. Add your SN lightning address to your nostr client
  3. Post on nostr
  4. Stack sats whenever someone zaps your nostr post
More information about the NIP-57 spec: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/57.md
02/01/2023 - Easter Egg
Easter eggs aren't supposed to be described, so we won't describe it.
Additional improvements:
  • We now get the bitcoin price from the server so your IP isn't leaked to coinbase (thanks to @eksyis)
  • We now support entering bech32 encoded nostr pubkeys in our NIP-05 support (thanks @dk for the motivation)
01/26/2023 - Bounties
Stacker News now offers Bounties as an additional post type. To create a bounty, click 'more' on the post page to reveal the bounty option.
Stacker News allows you to specify an amount you're willing to pay out, and each published bounty post has a bounty bag displayed next to the title. It is colored grey if the bounty hasn't been paid out yet, and green if it has already been paid out.
Our goal was to make it an extremely permissive feature and avoid overprescribing how to use it:
  • The OP of the bounty can reward any child comment the bounty, including nested comments, and multiple comments
  • The OP can pay a bounty on a comment with a click of a button (which behind the scenes is just a tip)
  • The earning comment(s) for a bounty get a green bounty bag in their header
  • The OP's past bounties will be displayed below their bounty posts so you can tell if they have a history of paying their bounties
You can view all bounties on the recent page by selecting the 'bounties' filter.
  • Thanks to @bitcoinplebdev for doing the overwhelming majority of the work on bounties
  • Thanks to @ToshiMoto for the design work on the bounty bag
01/22/2023 - OpenTimestamps
After the edit window closes on a post/comment, we now timestamp posts/comments in the timechain using OpenTimestamps. The resulting proof allows stackers to know a piece of content is at least as old as the bitcoin block that it's in.
This only applies to content created from this point forward so long as it's a post or the child of a post that's been timestamped.
We may timestamp historical content in the future, but we don't yet. We also don't yet upgrade timestamps to be independently verifiable, and instead rely on the calendars we submitted the hashes to.
How this works:
  1. After the edit window closes, we sha256 hash a canonical json object of the post/comment.
    • the preimages of comments include the hash of their parent
  2. We then send this hash to OTS for timestamping.
  3. At this point, you can view the OTS info by appending /ots to the item's path
    • if you attempt to view the OTS info before we've submitted the timestamp or on a piece of content that wasn't timestamped, you'll 404
    • because when we delete items we actually delete them, the preimage is not available on deleted items ... however, the hash and the resulting timestamp is kept
  4. You can download both the preimage and the ots file and verify the timestamp for yourself.
You can view the timestamp of this original SN release post here.
01/18/2023 - Slashtags Auth
You can now login to Stacker News using Slashtags authentication on your Bitkit wallet.
You can now delete posts/comments at any point after they are created. This is a hard delete.
When you delete something, the content is lost forever and replaced with 'deleted by author' title/text.
Lots of small fixes have also been made to dupe detection.
  • we now ignore case
  • we ignore sub domains
  • more youtube link variations recognized as dupes
  • we un-shorten links automatically
  • we remove twitter tracking from urls
Thank you @cointastical and @ekzyis for help on these.
In addition, we also made some updates to the login and sign up flows for new users.
01/06/2023 - Nostr NIP-05 Support
Stacker News now has Nostr NIP-05 support.
If you're logged in to Stacker News, you can input your nostr pubkey (64 hex chars) by visiting your settings page and scrolling to the bottom. If you're using a Nostr client like Damus, you'll need to convert your Damus key into a Hex key at https://damus.io/key/.
You can also input your Nostr relays into Stacker News.
If your SN nym is k00b your nostr nym via NIP-05 will be k00b@stacker.news.
12/20/2022 - SN Referral Program
For every new stacker you refer, you'll get
  • 2.1% of all the tips they receive
  • 21% of any boost or job promotion
Any website, newsletter, video, social media post, or podcast where you link to SN - or an SN story - can now be a referral link and earn you sats.
Any SN link can be turned into a referral link by appending /r/<your nym>, e.g. /r/k00b, to the link. Examples of referral links:
https://stacker.news/r/k00b https://stacker.news/items/109473/r/k00b https://stacker.news/top/posts/r/k00b?when=week
Every post now has a link sharing button in the upper right. If you are logged in, the link shared is your referral link. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to get referrals.
For logged in stackers, there's a referral dashboard to track your referrals and how much you're earning from them. It's available in the dropdown in the navbar.
Also, all redeemed invites have been retroactively turned into referrals so many of you aren't starting at zero. Invite links will also continue to exist and are implicitly referrals.
The money for referrals comes out of SN's revenue. It doesn't cost the referree anything extra - the referrer just gets extra sats from SN.
12/09/2022 - Donations, Rewards, Turbo Tips, and More
Anyone can now contribute the SN daily rewards pool by directly donating sats. 100% of donations are distributed back to the best SN users as daily rewards. This page is visitable in the footer or via stacker.news/rewards.
Turbo Tips is a new experiment in improving tipping UX. When enabled in settings, every bolt click raises your total tip to the next 10x of your default tip. If your default tip is 1 sat:
  • first click: 1 sat total tipped
  • second click: 10 sats total tipped
  • third click: 100 sats total tipped
  • fourth click: 1000 sats total tipped
  • and so on ...
The option is available in the advanced drop down menu under default tip because it's powerful, but not intuitive.
In addition, the custom tip dialog available when a bolt is pressed and held now has autofill buttons. This way you don't have to type a lower/higher amount every time you do a custom tip.
We made a small change to comment sorting so that all things being equal, comments with more sats rank higher.
The user analytics page now has visualizations of how many users are spending/stacking via certain actions.
12/01/2022 - Analytics, Filtering, and Other Improvements
With the latest site improvements:
  • You can explore user analytics by day/week/month/year/forever
  • You can filter the recent tab by links/discussions/comments/bios/polls
  • It now costs 1000 sats to create a job to help with the little bit of spam we were getting.
  • You can remove yourself from appearing in the top users list in your settings.
11/23/2022 - Sats Now Affect Ranking
The amount of sats tipped now affects the ranking of an item, in addition to the trust of the user tipping the item.
  • In an effort to make this feature sybil resistant, SN now takes 10% of tips which are distributed in daily rewards (like all other revenue)
  • Ranking is still influenced by a user's trust, which is only earned by voting for things other stackers deem to be good
  • Tipping an item with more sats amplifies your trust, giving a user more influence on an item's ranking
  • The relationship between sats contributed and the influence on ranking is not linear, it's logarithmic, i.e. sat whales have to spend exponentially more sats to have more influence than minnows
The effect a user's tip has on an item's ranking is trust*log10(total tip amount) where 10 sats = 1 vote, 100 sats = 2, 1000 sats = 3, and so on ... all values in between are valid as well.
When you view a post, now there's a little 'related' section showing similar posts.
In addition, http://lightningtalk.org now redirects to SN. Thanks to @02d0db813f for the recommendation.
10/25/2022 - Search Improvements
With the latest search improvement release, you can now:
  • Search for users
  • Constrain searches by URL
  • Constrain search by username
Additional changes include:
  • Top posts and comments can be ordered by sats and comments (in addition to votes)
  • Top users can be ordered by comment and post count (in addition to stacked and spent)
  • We now support the South African Rand in Currencies thanks to @ekzyis
  • The docker environment for dev now has a worker image thanks to @bitcoinplebdev
10/20/2022 - Search Filters
When you search you can now select:
  • What content you want to see: everything, just posts, and just comments
  • Sorted by: match, recent, sats, upvotes, number of comments
  • What timeframe: forever, last day, week, month, and year
10/4/2022 - Lightning Animations, Currency Conversion, & More
  • You can now toggle the lightning bolt animation whether you're logged in or not by clicking the lightning icon next to the dark mode icon in the footer
  • You can now choose your preferred fiat currency from a limited list in settings, which affects both your price in the navbar and when you post a job.
    • Thanks to @ekzyis who did this work.
  • When you click on the link icon of a heading in a post, it now copies the linked heading to your clipboard.
  • Scrollbars in the usernym navbar dropdown are fixed in Chrome.
9/29/2022 - Job Posting Fee Update
  • Jobs can now be posted for a flat cost of 1 sat, and the sats/min fee is optional.
  • Job posters can still choose to pay a sats/min fee to promote their job and have it ranked above the non-promoted jobs
9/27/2022 - Greeter Mode, Fee Updates, & User Bios
  • If you toggle on 'greeter mode' in settings, you will see free posts/comments created by new users. As a greeter, you are doing the community a service by screening new users. When you upvote their posts/comments, you make their posts and comments visible to non-greeters, and you give the new users sats to spend.
  • We've removed the fee multiplier on images and links. Conditional costs are more confusing than they're worth.
  • User bios will no longer appear on the homepage. They'll still appear in the recent tab, but will not create noise on the homepage.
9/21/2022 - Wild West Mode
  • On each item, there is now a ... link where you can tell us you don't like something. Think of this like a downvote. It costs one sat and is a vote to 'outlaw' an item. Items with low downvotes relative to upvotes are simply down ranked. However, if an item receives enough downvotes, they are outlawed and filtered from view.
  • If you toggle on "wild west mode" in settings, downvotes have no effect on your experience. It'll be like they don't exist. Downvoted posts don't lose ranking and are never outlawed. If you're not logged in, or haven't toggled WWM, by default you are in tenderfoot mode.
9/14/2022 - Rewards Refinements
  • From now on, rewards will now display where you got rewards from:
    • top posts
    • top comments
    • or upvoting top posts/comments
9/2/2022 - Various Refinements
  • You can now select to hide your invoice descriptions in your settings. This is useful if you want to not have your funding source associated with your SN identity.
  • You can now clear input fields, they have an ‘x’ if you want to clear them
  • User nyms autocomplete when you attempt to forward sats to another user on a post
  • Titles turn grey when you've already read a story, and visited links are more distinctly dull
  • The total earned sats of the comments of a post are now displayed at the top of the comment section. If you hover over the comments under the post title, it will also give you this number.
  • When there are new comments on a post you've read, it will display a “new” button under the post title. This only applies if you're viewing things on the same device/browser.
    • Thanks to @gmd for requesting this
8/18/2022 - Edit Button, Poll Updates, & Recent Comments
  • The edit button that appears after making a post now gives you the ability to edit:
    • your boost (by adding more)
    • the user you want to forward sats to
    • the ability to add images or links
    • the ability to add additional choices to a poll
  • If there are costs associated with the edits you also get receipts similar to the ones you get when posting/commenting.
  • Polls now also allow for up to 10 choices.
  • You can browse recent comments but there isn't a link anywhere to that yet. I just selfishly wanted to see where active discussions are going on.
  • New users no longer get free posts or comments as a spam prevention measure
  • Users can no longer add images as links. For example, [![alt](image)](link) will now just display the image
  • It now costs 10x more to add images or links to posts/comments. For example, if your discussion post costs 1 sat, it now costs 10 sats to add an images and/or link.
  • Repeated posts/comments and self-replies within a 10 minute window cost x10^X more, where X is the number of repeat posts or comments you've made in the last 10 minutes
  • When you pay more than 1 sat for a post or comment:
    • An "info" icon will appear, and when clicked it will show you a breakdown of your posting costs
    • The post/comment button will display the amount of sats you'll be paying
7/30/2022 - Polls
  • You can make polls now. Each poll costs 1 sat to create, and 1 sat to vote in a poll. All of the sats from poll creation and votes go to the Stacker News daily rewards pool.
7/7/2022 - Enhanced Trust Algorithm, Rewards, & Notifications
  • We've refined how trust is established between users. In this release, trust is gained when two users upvote the same piece of content and diminished when one user upvotes something the other user doesn't. A statistical model is used, specifically, a binomial proportion interval, to determine this trust level even when the sample size of upvotes is small.
  • Given the trust algorithm change, we needed to change daily rewards too, since your upvote trust doesn't entirely account for the value you bring to SN. Also, the way rewards were dispersed was not obviously related to the value you provided. You now receive rewards strictly depending on the last 36 hours of value you provided. Very good and active users are likely to see their daily rewards jump by 5-20x.
  • How rewards are dispersed now:
    • Users who posted the top posts of the last 36 hours get 1/3rd of the daily rewards. Users are rewarded based on how well the post ranked relative to the other top posts.
    • Users who posted the top comments of the last 36 hours get 1/3rd of the daily rewards. Users are rewarded based on how well their comment ranked relative to the other top comments.
    • Users who upvoted the top posts and comments above are given the last 1/3rd of daily revenue. Users are rewarded based on:
      • How early they upvoted the content relative other users
      • How much they tipped
      • Their upvote trust
      • The ranking of the content they upvoted
  • Reward notifications are always viewable in your notifications, and for users who don’t visit frequently we identify groups of reward notifications and combine them into one notification to limit noise.
6/10/2022 - Usage Dashboard
  • An MVP usage dashboard is now live. You can view it here. It's also available in the footer if you click analytics -> users. Site visitor data is still available via Plausible by clicking analytics -> visitors in the footer.
6/8/2022 - Linking Multiple Auth Methods
  • You're now able to link and unlink any authentication method we support to a single account. For example, you can link your Lightning wallet and your email to the same Stacker News account.
  • If an authentication method is already linked to another Stacker News account, you'll have to unlink that authentication method from the other account first or authentication will fail.
  • We also have new pinned post and notification bell icons.
5/18/2022 - Profile Photos, Comments, Notifications, and Lightning Address Upgrades
  • We have profile photos now. You can upload your own image in your profile settings.
  • Comment depth is now visually limited to 10 replies. You can still have longer discussions, but they will continue on other pages so they don’t disrupt the flow of comments on a given post.
  • You can now control the types of notifications you receive on your settings page
  • User profiles now display the user's lightning address. If you click on it, you'll see an LNURL-pay QR code to make a payment to that user.
3/18/2022 - Daily Earning Rewards
  • Daily earning is live. All the sats that SN has earned to date was paid back to the best users today, proportional to how well they are trusted.
  • In addition, the sats that Stacker News earns from ~jobs, posting fees, and boosts from here on will be divvied up daily, and sent back to SN's most trusted users. The idea is that the people who make the site valuable will be proportionally paid for their contributions.
  • Right now, we sum up all the sats we earn each day, then multiply it by how well a user is trusted relative to other users. That is, <daily sats earned> * <a user's trust>/<total trust of all users>.
2/28/2022 - The Jobs Sub is Live
  • The ~jobs sub is live. It's an MVP and it'll be refined over time. It's cheap to post a job: (10,000 sats/mo or $5) but as jobs are added, staying on the front page could cost more depending on what companies are willing to pay. Jobs are also paid for by the minute: 10,000 sats/mo is actually billed at 230 millisats/min.
  • The higher your bid the higher your job will rank. The minimum bid is 10000 sats/mo, but you can increase or decrease your bid at anytime. You can also edit or remove your job at anytime. Your job will be hidden if your wallet runs out of sats and can be unhidden by re-filling your wallet.
2/3/2022 - Web of Trust, Search, and Filter Upgrades
  • The Web of Trust is now the ranking mechanism we use on the homepage and in comments.
  • Search highlighting has been added to all queries, and exact matches rank higher.
  • We now show top spenders in the top tab.
  • Search is now live. You can search for anything on Stacker News by clicking the floating yellow icon in the bottom-right corner of your screen. This search addition is intentionally simple so we don’t have to overhaul the UI to support it.
1/21/2022 - Tips, Twitter Embed, & UX Upgrades
  • Tips have been overhauled. If your default tip amount is 10 sats, your first click of the lightning bolt gives the user 10 sats as do the subsequent ones. You can still hold the bolt to send a custom amount.
  • Hovering over the sat amount shows how many users have contributed sats to a post, and how much you have collectively contributed.
  • Twitter embeds are live, so now all Twitter links are rendered on Stacker News as embedded tweets.
  • Static assets (js/css) are now served from a global CDN to improve site performance.
  • Invite notifications are live, so you know when a new user has redeemed your invite code.
  • A number of addiitonal bug fixes have been completed too.
1/18/2022 - Web of Trust Algorithm is Live
  • The Web of Trust ranking algorithm is now live. You can view it at https://stacker.news/wot.
  • Each user is a node in a graph and directed edges in the graph represent how much a user, Alice, trusts another user, Bob, on a scale of 0-0.9. We determine this edge value based on how many upvotes Alice has given Bob. We then use the model described in Modelling a Public-Key Infrastructure (1996) to assign each user a single trust score of 0-0.9 where the source node is the moderator of the sub. We compute these trust scores daily.
  • That trust score is then used to weight a user's upvote in the ranking algorithm. For instance if Alice has a trust score of 0.9 and Bob has a trust score of .45, Bob's upvotes count for half as much in ranking. Carol, who is a Sybil attacker created by Bob (and hasn't received any upvotes), has a trust score of 0 , and consequently their upvotes don't count at all.
1/7/2022 - Daily Discussion Thread & Various Updates
  • We have added a daily discussion thread. To find it, look for the pin icon on the main page.
  • We now save any un-submitted posts or comments to local storage, so if you accidentally navigate away from the page you won't lose your work.
  • When you post a new post it takes you to the 'recent' tab.
  • You can no longer see the wallet balances of other users.
  • We added a job queue as a backend upgrade. This will allow us to distribute a bunch of periodic tasks that shouldn't run alongside the web servers.
12/21/2021 - Sorting Comments & Bug Fixes
  • You can now sort comments: hot (default), recent, and top.
    • Thanks to @jack for recommending comment sorting on Github.
  • We have fixed dupe URL bugs and logout redirection errors
    • Thanks to @sgornick and @nout for reporting these issues on Github
12/16/2021 - Top Comments & Users
  • You can now view top comments and top users in addition to top posts.
12/16/2021 - Historical Transaction Data
  • You can now view your historical transaction data. If you're logged in and visit this link you can see all your wallet activity. There's a link to your “satistics” on both your profile and wallet pages.
12/13/2021 - Tipping Refinements
  • A few more tipping refinements have been released. There is no longer a half filled bolt after your first tip, everyone's tip default is now 1 sat, and the tip default can only be set to another amount in your settings.
  • I reset the log base of the color index on the Lightning bolt icons to 10,000 sats, many users suggested a 100,000 sat tip is too rare.
12/6/2021 Tipping Refinements & Lightning Bolt Colors
  • We revamped the upvote/tipping UI. We have a new upvote button and it works the same but changes its look based on how much you've tipped. One upvote gives you a half filled bolt, the bolt fills fully after you've given the OP 10 sats, and the bolt changes color the more sats you tip.
  • The color of the Lightning bolt icon is determined by taking the log base 100,000 of the amount of sats you've given the OP. For example, the bolt changes color a lot more at lower tip amounts and if you give the OP 100,000 sats your bolt will finally be purple.
  • Your own posts don't display the bolt next to them because you can't interact with them anyway. Plus, it gives you some visual indication of where your posts are.
11/28/2021 - Tipping Refinements
  • “Sats” and “tipped” amounts are now added together as just sats. You can still get the break down of how many users sent sats by hovering over “sats”.
  • We have a new tipping icon that should make tipping more obvious.
  • Clicking on reply notifications now take you to the root thread rather than the parent's thread.
  • Wallet balances and stacked sats abbreviate at 10k or more rather than 1k
  • The header/navbar is SSR'd so it doesn't load after the page does
  • We added a warning on user bios that their bio will be shared as a post
11/12/2021 - Various UX Improvements
  • I just shipped more compact feed, comments, and a few other very minor enhancements.
11/10/2021 - Dark Mode
  • We now have dark mode! You can toggle it in the footer. It will also respond to your OS preference if you have one set.
10/30/2021 - Tip Default Improvements
  • You can now reset your tip defaults in the settings page.
  • If you press and hold the tip button, it'll display the tip dialog so you can tip more or less than your default.
10/28/2021 - Comment Enhancements, LNURL, Dupe Detection & More
  • We have added some comment thread enhancements that saved collapse state and label the OP within the comments.
  • We have integrated LNURL-withdraw.
  • We have added URL dupe detection.
  • We have made notifications more concise
  • We have implemented a fix for tipping quickly after upvoting causing 1 sat boost
10/21/2021 - Post Filtering Improvements
  • You can now filter top posts by day, week, month, year, or forever! The "switch" for this is in the nav bar at the top and is also available in the dropdown. We also remember whether you last viewed "top" or "recent" and which "top" interval you last viewed so that it's fewer clicks away next time you visit.
10/20/2021 - Dev Environment Improvements
  • It was relatively complicated to get a local dev environment up and running so I was asked to dockerize it. I've updated the README on the repo but the important bits:
    • Install docker-compose and deps if you don't already have it installed
    • git clone git@github.com:stackernews/stacker.news.git sn && cd sn
    • docker-compose up --build
  • You should then be able to access the site at localhost:3000 and any changes you make will hot reload. If you want to login locally or use lnd you'll need to modify .env.sample appropriately.
10/15/2021 - Invite Faucets
  • Invite faucets are live. Users can now onboard another user with some sats when they set up an account with your invite code.
10/7/2021 - Lightning Address Support
  • We now support Lightning Addresses. In wallets that support sending to Lightning Addresses (I tested Breez and Wallet of Satoshi), you can now send sats to your SN wallet by sending to <username>@stacker.news, e.g. k00b@stacker.news.
9/30/2021 - Server-side Rendering
  • We've implemented server-side rendering for all the pages. You should no longer see "loading skeletons." This will make the site feel more performant.
9/24/2021 - User Bios
  • Users now have bios. Bios reuse some aspects of discussion posts internally. This allows for markdown bios and comments on a profile without having to implement anything new. This is also a way for users to introduce themselves to the community when they fill out their bio.
9/12/2021 - Tipping Refinements
  • Boost is no longer an "upvote option" and is now only set when creating a post
  • Tips are the only second upvote action. Default tip amounts can be set to avoid subsequent popups.
9/10/2021 - Tipping is Live
  • On your second upvote click, you now get a dialog to either boost or tip a post/comment. Tips go directly to the poster/commenter.
  • Boost, as before, goes to the site and just boosts the rank of the content. This should allow for more interesting incentives for participation until I implement more levers to pull on post economics.
9/7/2021 - Caching Improvements
  • We implemented some caching updates so the data you view on SN is now more likely to be up to date with the server. This should improve performance.
8/20/2021 - RSS Improvements, Spelling, and Notifications
  • We released some RSS feed improvements
  • We fixed the mis-spelling of ‘withdrawal’
  • We now highlight your new notifications in the /notifications area.
Is it possible to implement a follow feature? So i can filter search results by stackers i follow.
Could even have a small icon appear next to their name on a post to indicate I follow them
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Oh wow, this is really useful. Thanks, and please continue updating this thread !
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Very useful to know what changed when. Please keep doing this.
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Would be cool to have an option to automagicaly donate 10% or other amount from redistributed sats.
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AMAZING progress with everything! I can only wish for a mobile app - I barely log in if I have to use my computer, and using the browser through the phone just isn't good enough
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Wow this is amazing. Have some sats!
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🤘Finally we get a change log
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