Several years ago, Stacker News did an experiment called Million Sat Madness where the rewards were piled up for a whole month and then disbursed to stackers based on their ranking for the whole month.

I got pretty interested in competing and really tried to win. Notably, I spent no effort looking at SN's code to see how rankings were calculated nor did I really bother myself with reading very many of the posts about it. I think this was before the widespread availability of LLMs. I certainly wasn't using one at that point to tell me the optimal strategy.

I mostly tried to wrote really cool posts and zap stuff that others would like early. I completely overlooked zapping comments/replies.

Needless to say, I did not rank as highly as I hoped. And I felt pretty frustrated by that experience. It felt like there was a group of insiders who knew how things worked and were able to get ahead through some arcane means that I didn't understand.

Since then, I've continued to use SN, and if I can distill what I've learned about getting rewards on SN it is this:

• hang out on stacker.news/new
• when you see good, interesting, original posts zap them (usually at least 1000 sats)
• post about some interesting topic that you can "cover" (helps if it is Bitcoin related)
• when people reply to you, zap them at least 100 sats
• when you are reading a particularly interesting thread, zap everyone who comments (except the bots)

This isn't exactly what the code rewards, but it's close enough that it makes sense to my brain.

If you really want to figure it out, point your favorite LLM at Stacker News's github and ask it to tell you how to optimize winning daily rewards.