Hey everyone,
I wanted to create this thread for the community to come together and brainstorm on some Stacker News UX feedback, ideas, feature requests, and potential improvements.
@k00b has been shipping new features super fast, and all of them have been built in public with significant community feedback involved. I figured this could be a thread to generate even more ideas for improving the platform.
Below I've added 3 UX ideas I think would improve the site, would love to hear any thoughts on them and other ideas.
  1. Removing the ~ Symbol Next to Jobs
The ~ symbol in the main menu bar on the desktop site looks like an error or a typo.
I understand the Stacker News ethos of building quirky features to help users understand this is a different kind of forum, but I feel like quirky features should be built with intent. At a certain point, too many quirky features start becoming confusing for new users.
For example, I’m in favor of the using lightning bolts to denote upvotes, the yellow flash that appears on the screen when users upvote, and the lightning font of Stacker News’ logo, because all those quirks are directly connected to the main value proposition of the platform.
But the ~ doesn’t have any connections to the idea of value transfer or to the lightning network. It's just a random symbol, and it isn't used in any other part of the site.
I worry it will confuse new users. At first glance, it looks like someone made a typo on the menu and forgot to fix it.
In addition, ~ is not a key that people use often, and in math settings it’s used as a synonym for approximately… which makes it all the more confusing to see a menu item titled ‘approximately jobs’.
Finally, and this is just my personal opinion… to me the ~ looks a lot like the tail of a sperm cell.
Now I can’t unsee it.
My suggestion is just to remove the symbol entirely, and just call each new sub by its name. In this case, the menu item would just say 'jobs', and the URL format could be stacker.news/s/jobs.
  1. Job Posting Fields for Company, Salary, and Location
Job postings should have dedicated fields for company name, salary, and location with a toggle button for remote ok.
Without these fields, companies will post jobs in different formats, and some will undoubtedly forget to include their company name, location, salary, etc.
Some will even post the same info in different orders, making it a nightmare for users trying to navigate the page.
Luckily, Stacker News already has a solution available.
Stacker News uses / to denote different attributes for posts on the main page, and that same format could be applied to the job postings when they are shown to users.
For example, my suggestion is that Stacker News formats job postings to appear as:
Stacker News / Senior Full Stack Developer / Austin or Remote / $100K
The / symbol is a simple way to break up different job attributes that is already used heavily on the site.
  1. Default New Users Boosts to 10 sats
When new users sign up, their default boost amount is set to 1 sat. This extremely low default setting introduces anchoring bias if/when users go to change their default boost amounts.
If a user wants to increase their default boost setting from 1 sat, they probably won't raise it to 50 sats. That’s a 50x jump, which sounds like too much of a jump when expressed like that.
Instead, the user will likely opt for a more "reasonable" raise to 5 or 10 sats instead.
My suggestion is to set the default boost amount to 10 sats for a cohort of new users and see if it has any impact on their tendencies to boost posts over time, and whether it raises the average amount those users pay in their boosts.
My bet is that it will, and will lead to more people earning more sats for their posts without forcing any new changes on users.
It’s still only one click to change the boost amount back to 1 sat if users don’t want to pay 10 sats, and realistically, 10 sats is still only half of a penny. Seems like it's worth a try.
Thoughts?
  1. 💯agree with @kr Remove the tilde
  2. add format to jobs posting is great
  3. 10sat default is a good start but might go higher to 25sats.
  4. run a weekly contest. Highest sat story of the week receives a bonus of 10,000 Sats
  5. better notification when Sats received from other users. (Via email pref)
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  1. Is tilde so bad? Thinking back to the old Web1 days when we all had them in front of our usernames cs.university.edu/~username etc
  2. Emails after sat-upvotes seems like over-kill, but emails after comment replies might generate faster discussion turnaround and encourage more dialogue.
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Let's flip that first question around. What makes the ~ symbol so good?
  • Is there any benefit that comes from it?
  • Does the benefit outweigh the downsides mentioned above?
  • Why this specific symbol?
  • Is it in any way related to Stacker News/Lightning/Bitcoin?
  • Why not use ^*#)&%( or any of the other keyboard symbols?
I worry that adding in random symbols and features without direction or clear reasoning sets a bad precedent, and that Stacker News should instead opt for focus, intent, and clarity in designing new features.
Again, not to say we shouldn't have quirky features, just that they should be chosen and built with intent, and shouldn't detract from a user's experience with the site.
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @gmd 6 Mar 2022
I think it makes for a decent escape symbol to use for parsing out markup language, and most other characters don't play as nice in URLs.
You do bring up good points that would actually push me to vote to revert back to "$" over tilde (looks like an S in stackernews, perhaps even with a lightning bolt through it, sort of culturally appropriates the dollar sign back from USD) if using a symbol.
/s/subname is also good as many people familiar with reddit may find that intuitive.
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Yeah I think the $ has some really good ties to Stacker News, sats, and the concept of value transfer. It's actually the only symbol on the entire keyboard that denotes value, and sending/receiving value over the internet is exactly what Stacker News users do all day.
Seems like most people on here had strong negative reactions to it for its fiat connotations, but if I had to pick among the keyboard symbols, I'd choose $ too.
All things considered, my top choice would still be no symbol at all in the main menu bar with the s/subname URL structure as you mentioned for it's familiarity.
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3.) Default New Users Boosts to 10 sats
There's good discussion on that:
Up your game! Up your default tips on SN! :) #8617 https://stacker.news/settings
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I like all of these proposed changes
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I'd like to see a subreddit-like feature (i know SN is more inspired by hacker news than reddit but there is nor rule to keep it this way, is there?).
By now SN is a forum all about bitcoin. That's cool and all but i'd like to chat with yall about all sorts of topics. What are your interests and hobbies? Do you like cooking? What about a general IT/programming/gaming channel, science-news, sports? Nfl, soccer, music, movies? A meme channel would probably a safe first bet.
In my imagination this also leads to more traffic overall and not only thins everything out.
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I think within a year we'll be on track to begin adding topic subs. Right now though, the community is growing but still small and is better for now being focused IMO.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @gmd 5 Mar 2022
Also interested in subs- do worry about dilutive effect on community.. might over-complicate things logistically but I wonder if there's a way to vote (in sats of course) them into existence to see what might have the most engagement rather than creating a bunch of mini-subs with zero community.
Indiehackers (although the community has little real engagement and seems to be dominated by all self-promotion) has a "groups" feature where the proposed group does not launch until a certain number of people join the group.
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You’re right! I always forget they should be opt-in. I think last year we were talking about requiring topics to reach 10k sats to get created. I think we also considered requiring that to be 10k monthly to keep it alive.
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Changes seem nice to be honest,
Is stacker moving towards catering to bitcoin bloggers?
If I was running a bitcoin blog I would post all my content here, and search for writing gigs on microlancer/stacker
But, maybe attempting to the see the end goal of stacker is the wrong approach, and the better approach would be to let the community develop naturally.
That being said, I love the project and am a self proclaimed life long stacker, keep up the good work,
PS. Is Stacker News a good place to shill bitcoin referral codes/affiliate links?
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We'll probably have better writing features and paywalls and stuff eventually, but there's a way to go before we get there.
No referral codes/affiliate links please. No one likes a shill.
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🍑 feels good to be able to paste on mobile. If y'all fixed that, thank you
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What do you mean by paste?
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I think it would be cool to be able to ‘follow’ people. IE, get a notification when they post. Could potentially incorporate a sats fee in the functionality where the user who’s followed gets a portion of the fee.
Would love to see a Stacker News mobile app in the future. Personally, I’d be likely to spend much more time on the platform if I was interacting with it via a mobile app.
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you definitely need a new logo, how about the next sub be "Contests", where the logo design contest can be the first one
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