The next big thing we want to build for SN is our first sub. Of all the options I’m most considering, another “discussion” sub seems to have the lowest priority. One reason for this is that the main page’s community has not outgrown the main page - we experience at most tens of posts a day and at most one hundred comments on busy days. The other reason is that I think there are interesting things we can do using Bitcoin/Lightning that provide additional value to the existing community without fracturing or competing with it like another discussion sub would. Still, I’m open to having my mind changed and by priority I mean just that - I suspect we will pursue all these sub options in time and perhaps not long after each other.
If you have a favorite sub idea, please respond in the comments and try to help us understand why you favor it. The work that SN does is for the stackers so your opinion matters.
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$jobs: A job board sub. This is @kr’s idea. I find it quite compelling.- Why this makes sense:
- People want to work in Bitcoin and many of those people are at least aware of SN if they aren’t already stackers
- Bitcoin companies want to hire people who are passionate about Bitcoin, like us stackers, they find it hard to reach those people, and are willing to pay for the opportunity
- Beginning to experiment with ways of making SN financially sustainable is likely a good idea. The more money we have the faster we can grow and the longer we can survive.
- How it will work:
- job posts are a lot like discussion posts with additional fields: location, salary, job category, and how to apply
- like the main page,
$jobswill have 21 spots on the front page - job posts will cost more than 1 sat to post (more like 10,000 sats) and this will merely be the minimum amount. Job posters will also be able to set a maximum amount they’re willing to spend to get higher ranking similar to the maximum bid one would place on an eBay auction; this way a job poster would spend the minimum amount required to maintain, for instance, the top spot on
$jobs, but should someone come along and bid more, they can automatically respond by outbidding them depending on their maximum. - an advantage of this is that job posts are inexpensive, yet the cost of being on the limited real estate of the front page is responsive to the market; unlike most job boards, pricing won’t be arbitrary
- given that we’re using Bitcoin/lightning, rather than paying for a job post on a monthly basis, the payments can be “steamed” one minute at a time
- some if not all the income we earn from
$jobswill be redistributed to the most trusted, active stackers on regular basis - this will be a new post primitive and in the future users can create their own job board subs
- Why this makes sense:
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$mail: A sub that auto-follows mailing lists. This is something I personally want. I think the mailing lists should be easier to search and read than they are.- Why this makes sense:
- Finding archival stuff in the mailing lists sucks
- Reading the mailing lists is kind of hard - following replies up to the OP sucks
- The formatting is kind of lame
- How it will work:
- We’ll setup an email server that subscribes to the chosen mailing lists
$mail/bitcoin-dev,$mail/lightning-dev- email and replies are a tree, like our discussions, so they’ll be posted like a discussion
- accounts would be automatically created for all the people involved in the mailing lists so they can be tipped. By proving ownership of the email address, the participants could claim their sats
- Why this makes sense:
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$v4v: A sub that auto-follows value for value podcast feeds. @nout is the champion of this.- Why this makes sense:
- A lot of these podcasts are coming out and discovery is kind of lacking
- users are regularly posting podcasts to the site already
- we could become a place to discover and discuss v4v podcasts
- How it will work:
- podcasters could add the v4v rss feed to the sub
- any tips, etc, would go to the node associated with the feed
- Why this makes sense:
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We don’t add a sub right now and instead continue to refine existing features:
- support for images and videos
- a GitHub like text editor that auto-markdowns your posts/comments
- expose an API
- paywalled content
- downvoting/flagging
- etc
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We add topic subs
I'm leaning toward the
$jobs sub personally because it sounds like the most fun. $mail to me sound like the most useful addition; I want them, plus it'd be great for the community and get us some nice SEO if we can become the goto spot for the mailing lists. While $v4v makes sense, I feel like most of the problems it'd solve are best left to the podcasting apps - I don't want to compete with them.
$jobs. But for the future, here are some ideas that I think may help with the site's growth:$btcirl- places that the digital world of bitcoin intersects with the physical world. Like coinbase providing physical locations to cash out crypto, where you can buy a beer with bitcoin, or how bitcoin is tangibly being used in El Salvador. Ultimately could become a type of advertising for businesses that sell goods and services for sats$meetup- a platform for SN members to find each other irl$classifieds- communicating exchanges of goods/services for sats$tasks: Small task economy for sat bounties. Sometimes even Stacker News could post tasks to e.g. rate whether something is a spam or not :)$v4v(I'd call those probably$pods): I would be interested in what podcaster app creators think about it. This would help them by creating a strong community and stacker news could link to the apps... The main reason I'm arguing for$podsis that there is a large community of podcasters (thousands have node already) and much larger community of listeners (millions per episode on the most popular podcasts) and having$podswould add value (and stream of sats) for all of them.$mailidea, since it helps community. And I'm always annoyed by trying to read the mailchimp output.