26 sats \ 8 replies \ @gmd 8 Mar 2022 \ on: Ask SN: how should we disperse earned sats? bitcoin
I might have missed the memo somewhere, but why not just keep the sats to fund SN?
I'm having a pretty fun time dispersing sats to posters and commenters. It seems like quality posters in your web of trust are already getting paid in sats which is already pretty cool and 10000x better than reddit karma.
Disbursing sats to users is going to be a really potent tool for growing the platform.
Imagine if Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, or other Web 2 platforms could have given their users a direct cut of revenue generated by the platform, in proportion to the contributions of those users. Total game changer, and it disproportionately attracts users who want to add actual value to the platform (since you don't get paid if your reputation is 0).
Before Lightning it wasn't possible to reward users like this, but now that we can, I think that's the fair thing to do. After all, the only reason companies will pay to use the job board is because they know there is a strong community of Stacker News users for them to market their jobs to. Without users, the job board won't earn anything.
I think Stacker News will eventually take a cut of the revenue to fund the business, but as far as growth tactics and marketing pitches go, it's hard to beat real-time, direct payments to users.
Using revenue from the jobs board to pay for traditional growth/influencer ad campaigns would be far less effective IMO.
Plus, an added benefit of using only revenue for direct payments is that Stacker News never has to pay out of pocket for growth, and all Stacker News users are now incentivized to get employers to post new jobs and create a thriving job board.
reply
I get what you're saying. I just think the primary magic of SN is that we're sending tiny fractions of the hardest money ever made around instantaneously with our upvotes and tips. So theoretically you're already getting paid quite generously, directly proportionate to the quality of your contributions (imagine when upvotes reach near-reddit levels of traffic).
Let's say SN ~jobs grows widely successful, ala LevelsIO, and brings in about $1M ARR (really wanted to use the tilde there haha). Spread out among the zillion future users it seems a negligible amount of yield per user but an extremely meaningful amount towards keeping SN afloat, funding new feature development, potentially paying mods to get rid of spam, etc.
I guess besides youtube I'm struggling to think of other Web2 platforms that successfully leverage paying users/creators to the extent where that becomes the motivating factor to contribute vs the inherent joy of using the platform.
Less sexy, but a more traditional and perhaps more effective way to incentivize users to find employers would be a direct referral program- have the employer input the username of the stacker that referred you. That person gets a large cut of the sats fee (even up to 50%?)... although gaming this with a 2nd account to self-refer might be an issue.
reply
The job revenue will seriously outpace the tip revenue for most users, but more importantly it will also enable users to be more generous with their tips.
In February there were 215 active registered Stacker News users. A single job posting for a month at the minimum spending amount generates 2,500 sats for the average user.
Power users could get 25,000, and occasional users might only get 250, all dependent on their trust score. Either way, the sats earned by jobs will be way higher for existing users to start.
In the entire history of Stacker News, there have only been 8 users who have earned more than 25,000 sats in the last 7 months, 6 of which were AMA guests and one of which is the founder of the site.
Now imagine 10 job postings, all of a sudden some users are earning 250,000 sats/month. That's a major incentive for more users to join in, which in turn generates more jobs. It's a vicious positive feedback loop. Jobs also won't be the only revenue source to fund users with either. Revenue could also come from a Product Hunt style sub, or even more general classified/commerce subs.
Impossible to say where the average earnings of a user will end up over time, but I'd bet the average user will earn far more from revenue than through tips at first, and then start to earn more from tips once all the new sats generated by revenue are floating around in the hands of every user.
One other way to back into an estimate is to use the total number of sats sent on Stacker News. In February, users sent a total of 262,503 sats between each other. Once again, 10 job postings for a month would distribute 5,000,000+ sats, 20x more.
The amazing second order effect of paying users is that Stacker News will be able to get more sats in the hands of more people. That's the hardest part for app developers trying to onboard new Lightning users today.
When every user gets an automatic daily injection of sats from Stacker News revenue, they will be more willing to tip other posters, and accelerate the magic you're speaking of.
The reason it's hard to find examples of sites paying their users is because it's been essentially impossible until Bitcoin & Lightning. I designed a similar feature into the app of a Bitcoin company in 2019, and they've picked up 500,000+ users exclusively by paying small amounts of Bitcoin to daily active users.
It entirely obsoleted all their other traditional marketing channels (Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Google, influencers, etc...), not a single one of those channels could acquire a new user for less money.
reply
The job revenue will seriously outpace the tip revenue for most users, but more importantly it will also enable users to be more generous with their tips.
Exactly. When my balance is flush because I earned a chunk from a post or whatever, I am more liberal with my upvotes and additional tips.
The wealth effect is real, even within the micro-economy of Stacker.news
reply
This is certainly a fun thought experiment.
To be honest I share @earnbitcoin's concerns about the unknown implications of incentivizing and paying for users to be here. Traditional marketing channels might be more expensive in terms of user acquisition but you might get users who inherently want to be there, rather than participate for the bitcoin yield.
Millions of people post on twitter and reddit for likes and worthless karma. SN is leaps and bounds ahead by virtue of sat-votes alone. I feel like in terms of 80-20 this is enough of a magical experience that I worry incentivizing further may have negative repercussions.
It seems we've always been able to pay users for content it's just never been able to happen so elegantly programmatically before lightning. But I think it's failed because people post and share on platforms by intrinsic motivation. Tiktok is the hardest platform to monetize but influencers go there because the user experience and audience reach is so amazing.
Isn't there research that suggests when you pay kids for chores/grades etc it kills their intrinsic motivation? There's a lot of sats to distribute today with low user numbers but I anticipate when job board income 10x's, the user count will have 1000x'd and there will be less to go around. What happens when users who enjoyed getting X sats/m start getting X/2-X/3 sats/m, etc? On a personal level I feel like I've begun developing irrational, negative feelings towards my fold card because the rewards, while still objectively great, aren't nearly as generous as they were a year ago.
I probably have less bitcoin than everyone else on this forum but I just think it's such a magical experience throwing sats around- I feel like that's more than enough of a killer draw. You send some, you stack some, and it all works out in the end. I worry what might happen when less scrupulous users start treating SN as an opportunity to stack sats rather than a fun community to give back to. I know censorship is a big priority here but what happens when speech starts to blend into spam?
I would argue the money and dev time should go towards paying StackerNews to fund and accelerate more magical feature development (subs etc) and that would bring in more quality users in the long-term.
reply
It's definitely a challenge to pay users "correctly" without a KYC process in place to stop bots from creating many accounts.
So far I think the Web of Trust is the most elegant way to solve this problem, but it's still TBD how well this particular model of ranking users by reputation holds up when sats are at stake. I suspect there will be continual tweaking to the ranking algorithm as we learn more about how it works in practice.
However, this is the reality of operating on the frontier and building new tech.
There are enormous opportunities for builders to try new and innovative ideas (and create/capture a ton of value in the process), but not enough precedent to be sure how well they'll work, or which specific combination of ideas will succeed.
Since Lightning is a largely unproven payment stack, it's possible that many of its best use cases haven't even been discovered yet. This is exactly the time to test new, innovative ideas and quickly iterate until something sticks.
We've always got more traditional Web 2 models to fall back on if the new ones don't work, but I think we need to have the courage to test and experiment while the business is nimble, and the big opportunities remain to be discovered.
reply
I'm with @kr here. This feature is not permanent so we shouldn't be overly concerned with hypotheticals. We can cook up a ton of hypotheticals as to why it's a bad idea to make upvotes cost and reward users with sats too.
It's something SN can do that's new and different from existing platforms which is enough to make it worth exploring.
reply
On a personal level I feel like I've begun developing irrational, negative feelings towards my fold card because the rewards, while still objectively great, aren't nearly as generous as they were a year ago.
Similar experience with someone whose Youtube channel I was following. When they were monetized, they couldn't praise Google enough. Since they've gotten their third strike and are now on Rumble, they bad-mouth (albeit deservedly) Youtube / Google at every opportunity.
Moral of that story: Don't mess with someone's source of income.
reply