It is a social media platform intentionally created to enable a P2P V4V BTC denominated community.
When I first started using Stacker News, I made the same mistake as you: I assumed it was about P2P V4V. I posted things here and earned sats and pulled them off the platform. I zapped people too, but I treated it as a value for value platform. It took me a while of using Stacker News to realize that this is what attracts people to SN, but it's not actually the value proposition.
As I understand it, Stacker News is about making money the moderator. Social media is full of bad incentives. SN is the first time I've encountered social media that really aligns the incentives of all the people involved.
Prior to SN, social media always involves an algorithm or moderators. We've all experienced the awful side of these things. I've been banned from Reddit more times than I can count. I used to be good at X, but then one day all my posts just fell into a void and nobody ever saw them again. I tried to post about SN on hacker.news and my post was immediately flagged. These kinds of experiences leave normal users feeling like shit. It's deeply disatisfying.
Stacker News is trying something new: can we get rid of algorithms and moderators and only use the signal generated by the stackers themselves? Before bitcoin and lightning, this was impossible, but because we now have internet-native micropayments, we can ask users to provide real signal and it works because it's costly.
Yes, a big part of that is attaching a LN wallet -- and frankly it seems to me like you would be happier with a platform that only allows users who have connected a lightning wallet. However, our current reality is that many people do not use Lightning.
I believe you are misguided in your belief that SN users who do not attach wallets (or who hide their status) are hypocrites. We aren't here for V4V. We aren't here to give value to each other -- that's really a side effect. What's happening here is about using sats to mediating our online interactions so that we have better online interactions. And I believe this works whether a user has attached a Lightning wallet or not.
All in all, I want to thank you for the sats you spent on downzapping these last weeks (I assume you have been the primary downzapper). If SN is really going to pioneer a path of social media that doesn't need human moderators, we absolutely have to get the downzapping piece right -- and your campaign is an excellent stress test.
When I first started using Stacker News, I made the same mistake as you: I assumed it was about P2P V4V. I posted things here and earned sats and pulled them off the platform. I zapped people too, but I treated it as a value for value platform. It took me a while of using Stacker News to realize that this is what attracts people to SN, but it's not actually the value proposition.
As I understand it, Stacker News is about making money the moderator. Social media is full of bad incentives. SN is the first time I've encountered social media that really aligns the incentives of all the people involved.
Prior to SN, social media always involves an algorithm or moderators. We've all experienced the awful side of these things. I've been banned from Reddit more times than I can count. I used to be good at X, but then one day all my posts just fell into a void and nobody ever saw them again. I tried to post about SN on hacker.news and my post was immediately flagged. These kinds of experiences leave normal users feeling like shit. It's deeply disatisfying.
Stacker News is trying something new: can we get rid of algorithms and moderators and only use the signal generated by the stackers themselves? Before bitcoin and lightning, this was impossible, but because we now have internet-native micropayments, we can ask users to provide real signal and it works because it's costly.
Yes, a big part of that is attaching a LN wallet -- and frankly it seems to me like you would be happier with a platform that only allows users who have connected a lightning wallet. However, our current reality is that many people do not use Lightning.
I believe you are misguided in your belief that SN users who do not attach wallets (or who hide their status) are hypocrites. We aren't here for V4V. We aren't here to give value to each other -- that's really a side effect. What's happening here is about using sats to mediating our online interactions so that we have better online interactions. And I believe this works whether a user has attached a Lightning wallet or not.
All in all, I want to thank you for the sats you spent on downzapping these last weeks (I assume you have been the primary downzapper). If SN is really going to pioneer a path of social media that doesn't need human moderators, we absolutely have to get the downzapping piece right -- and your campaign is an excellent stress test.