The deadline for submission was today, which I almost forgot about! (In my mind it was on 12/5 for some reason). But anyway, glad I caught it, and we submitted it. They said they would notify accepted papers by February 1st, 2026. Fingers crossed!¹

Here is the submitted abstract:

Stacker News is an internet message board in the style of Reddit that uses Bitcoin micropayments sent over the Lightning Network. Users can send each other Bitcoin micropayments, called "zaps" (usually on the order of 1-100 Satoshis, but sometimes ranging into the thousands), to reward each other for posting content that they like and to encourage the production of similar content. The platform also uses micropayments as a form of sybil, spam, and bot resistance. Users must pay a fee to post, which discourages them from posting low quality content or from creating sock puppet accounts. Users who consistently post high quality content can earn enough zaps to turn a profit net of posting fees.

Because Stacker News is a messaging platform that uses real money, it is an ideal setting for studying how financial micro-incentives affect internet discourse. There is variation in posting fees across time and across the platform's various subforums (called territories). This group-level temporal variation allows us to study how content quality and quantity change when posting costs change. Using difference-in-differences regressions, we find that higher posting costs in a territory lead to fewer posts, but higher quality posts. In addition to these findings, we also find that user activity is responsive to their level of profitability. Low quality users, including bots and trolls, are more likely to be unprofitable, and unprofitable users are more likely to become inactive than profitable users, and the difference is amplified when the Bitcoin price has recently appreciated.

Our results suggest that equipping online discussion platforms with financial incentives in the form of posting costs and direct peer-to-peer micropayments can improve the quality of internet discourse. It also highlights a clear use case for the utility of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, because the small, global, low-cost, and instantaneous micropayments on Stacker News are not currently possible within the traditional banking system. This research therefore adds to the body of evidence showing how Bitcoin adoption enables new markets and influences real world outcomes---in this case, in the realm of internet discourse.

In addition to helping us study internet discourse, the Stacker News data will allow us to study frictions in the adoption of self-custodial solutions in Bitcoin. In late 2024, three years after launch, Stacker News transitioned from operating as a Lightning custodian to enforcing the use of self-custodial Lightning wallets. Users who connected Lightning wallets could continue sending and receiving real Bitcoin; however, users who elected not to connect wallets could only send and receive "Cowboy Credits", a token usable only on Stacker News but whose value within the platform is pegged 1:1 to the value of a sat. We plan to use this change to study the adoption rates of self-custodial wallets and investigate how user profitability and Bitcoin price influences the rate of self-custody adoption.