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.

bitcoin

Stacker News UX, Features, & Improvements Discussion

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.