You are a SN member for over 1 year and you still didn't learned what is the cowboy hat LOL. I wonder how many more things you were missing from SN....

It's actually a little cowboy hat!

It's designed to be a bit of fun, going with the Wild West theme running through Stacker News.

When it first appeared it was first described as an 'Easter Egg'.

You receive it when you start zapping posts and comments - it's not disclosed how many sats you need to give, but it's probably 100+ sats.

You retain your hat if on the following day you zap enough again.

If you forget to do this one day you'll get a message saying something like someone shot it off in the saloon. This doesn't mean that anyone was against you, it's just you forgot to zap enough - or had a day off.

You don't have to show your cowboy hat I chose not to myself by tweaking the settings. You might want to do this if you don't want to appear better than anyone else - or multiple other reasons. But that's okay - it's just a bit of fun really! 🤠