[RFC] SN sat earning plans and ideas \ stacker news ~meta

13 sats \ 11 boost \ 22 comments \ @k00b 20 Aug 2021 meta

Next week we're going to begin focusing on developing more ways to earn on Stacker News. I wanted to post this to see if anyone has ideas for other use cases before we design the backend "system" for facilitating this.

More immediately:

tips
referrals
- e.g. every user who signs up with your referral link gets 20 sats and you get 20 sats
faucets/rewards
- e.g. 10 free sats when you sign up, 100 sats if you visit every day this week, 1000 free sats if you post a story that gets to the front page, etc.

Eventually:

gating replies to your posts/comments with custom sat amounts
- e.g. every reply to this thread must 'stake' 10 sats rather than 1 sat
Q&A bounties
- e.g. the best answer to my question by Saturday gets 1000 sats and if I don't pick a winner it's distributed to all answerers
sub-stacker (read subreddit) economies, i.e. create subs with different sat-based unit economics
- e.g. every post in this sub-stacker costs 100 sats (X amount goes to the sub mod, Y amount is airdropped on the sub users, Z goes to the site), comments cost 25 sats, etc.
Let users set a sat cost for mentioning them , i.e. charge users for consuming your attention
DM's gated with a sat cost
- e.g. pay per message or pay to unlock a conversation with me

The sky is the limit IMO and we are going to the moon plebs! These are naive examples. The incentives and UX will have to be carefully examined before deploying any of them of course.

Thoughts?

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6 sats \ 1 boost \ 5 replies \ @nout 20 Aug 2021

As I'm always telling to my teams - don't go crazy, keep the baseline really intuitive and simple, hide all the smartness & tricks and only show it in the spots where the user really needs it.

3 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b OP 20 Aug 2021

Very good advice, thank you. I visit with your "refinement over features" comment from an earlier discussion before I work on anything now.

1 sat \ 3 replies \ @nout 23 Aug 2021

Great to hear that the comment was useful. One thing I was wondering is if you have thought about what are the first principles behind Stacker News? What would you like Stacker News to achieve? Do you have those written down?

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 23 Aug 2021

I do. It most succinctly amounts to creating a community online similar to what we find at Bitcoin meetups here in Austin - high bitcoin signal, low noise. That's my root goal but the means to that end are up in the air - I think embracing the participate to earn part should help if done right.

I'm working through Get Together right now to develop more clarity here.

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @nout 23 Aug 2021

That sounds great! It makes sense to me and I would love to see this community thrive. If you don't mind me poking for an answer a bit, from your principles and goal it still feels a bit as a means to an end. It may be worth digging deeper and asking "why?" Why should people be part of this community? Why would you want to build it? I think there's something there... it may take a while to find it though :)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 23 Aug 2021

More great advice. I should probably spend a lot more time digging in here than I am currently. Those questions will be great instigators. I'll try to tackle this this week and do a write up/discussion on SN an ask for advice. Thanks @nout!

4 sats \ 3 replies \ @abetusk 21 Aug 2021

Mirroring what @nout is saying, I would try to get the simple and most pressing stuff first, which, in my opinion, is:

Transferring sats for referrals (giving an invite to a friend with some of my sats so they can get started)
"Tipping" sats to others on the platform which can be done either via direct tipping or via some SN "bot" that tips people in comments, like how Reddit does it

As for the earning sats for referalls/usage, I would urge a bit of caution. If you're incentivizing sign up and referral by giving (some of your) sats, that system is ripe for abuse. My feeling is that people are happy to pay for sats on here themselves, as long as the friction is low, and to give other people sats, either in the form of referrals or tips, so this extra level of incentivization isn't necessary.

As for the other points, I think they're all really great ideas but I agree with @nout that the baseline should be intuitive. Those extra features are essentially for 'power users' who want more control over various aspects of the platform.

Also, a word of warning about implementing features that are really cool but are never used. It's easy to spend engineering effort into beautiful solutions that don't have a problem.

2 sats \ 1 reply \ @gmd 21 Aug 2021

Good advice. I'm a little worried that the people who would come here to game out a few sats out of faucets / rewards / referrals while good for credit card guys might not be the type of people most desired in a forum community.
Rather it seems most here, really want a way to spend more sats to tip the site and contributors who post valued content. I would like to dish out more sats without boosting posts and feeling like i'm manipulating the algorithm.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Aug 2021

This is a really good point. Make the game too appealing and we perhaps attract people with low quality contributions. Referrals might just be enough.

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Aug 2021

Very good advice. I agree with it all!

3 sats \ 1 boost \ 2 replies \ @LibreLoya 21 Aug 2021

Your roadmap looks great. I have some suggestions.

Don't go crazy with the gamification of rewards, just keep it KISS. For example. Just give away 10 daily sats.
I would add a verification badge. The catch is you have to verify via twitter. That way you get a cheaper and more potent referral mechanism. Its organic marketing.
I like how the guy from zecpages.com has an option to post with a sticky (highlight) for 10x price. Plus the replies can also be sticky (hightlight).
Add PPV posts / threads. Kinda like how y'all does it.

Some of the 'eventually' items are kinda complicated to be honest.

Let me know if you need any help!

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 21 Aug 2021

Don't go crazy with the gamification of rewards, just keep it KISS. For example. Just give away 10 daily sats.

I will definitely keep this in mind. I just heard a presentation from a fold app designer and maybe I'll copy their spin wheel concept?

I would add a verification badge. The catch is you have to verify via twitter. That way you get a cheaper and more potent referral mechanism. Its organic marketing.

What do you mean by this? Something like a BitClout verification for viral marketing?

I like how the guy from zecpages.com has an option to post with a sticky (highlight) for 10x price. Plus the replies can also be sticky (hightlight).

Thanks for sharing ZECPages - I was not aware of the project. I definitely want to have pay to pin posts.

Add PPV posts / threads. Kinda like how y'all does it.

Have you ever paid for an article on y'alls? I know it's a popular project but I haven't really heard of anyone who commonly pays for articles on there.

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @LibreLoya 21 Aug 2021

The spinner is a great idea to keep it KISS. Just daily rewards, but you have to spin the wheel to get the reward. Plus it is also a great segway in case you wan't to add some satoshi mini games later.
Yes, I believe the secret sauce for the bitclout guys was using twitter as their growth strategy. A shame it was for a shitcoin, but great execution nonetheless.
Another great thing about ZecPages is that account creation is optional. So new users can participate without creating the account. They just pay the 'invoice' for the action. It also has some a super like option.
I've before, but I think you are right in the sense that y'all is not the best experience. Maybe the bch guys from read.cash are doing it better. Open threads but encourage the users to tip the author.

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @0391398253 20 Aug 2021

amazing!!!!! We already have this currency, now let people earn some sats while contributing, lets do it!!!

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @ThrillerX_ 20 Aug 2021

thats amazing!

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @LibreLoya 23 Aug 2021

Another great option would be to give awards (kinda like how reddit does it). Instead of a tip, maybe we can give "gold" or "silver" or some other icon reaction to a comment/post. The cost of the reaction/award goes to the user.

A cute alternative could be a Mjolnir hammer 🔨 (a better one lol), a thunder icon ⚡️, an axe 🪓.

1 sat \ 5 replies \ @banana 20 Aug 2021

wen decentralize? lol

4 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b OP 20 Aug 2021

When we hit roughly 1000 visitors/day. That's when it begins to make sense decentralizing it IMO. Our 1000 people will then know our community/sub-communities can trustlessly persist.

This is ultimately the path I think we're on should we all confirm it's what we want.

It's not trivial to do well. Most decentralized networks of this kind are plagued by serious UX issues among other things so it'll need to be carefully constructed. We can, and hopefully will, do it - but we can't compromise on UX. It'll be a beautifully hard effort when the time comes.

1 sat \ 3 replies \ @ugmug_old 21 Aug 2021

Agreed on the focus of UX. That really needs to be the focus for all LN-based projects. IMO if you get the new-user experience setting up on LN right, you won't need to give away lots of sats.

1 sat \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Aug 2021

It's very easy to get wrong in my experience. No great UX decentralized social media apps exist in my opinion - let alone one focused on discovery (ie ranking).

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @nout 21 Aug 2021

Agreed with not-so-great UX for decentralized networks. One counter example that I really enjoy is Tusky Mastodon client. Imo great experience and clear features. And there's a Bitcoin community - see folks I follow/boost.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Aug 2021

I actually haven't used Mastodon or gotten on https://bitcoinhackers.org yet because I'm a putz. But perhaps the move is a federation rather than hardcore decentralizing if they've managed to keep the UX nice.