Stacker News is a forum (like Reddit or Hacker News) where you can earn real money for creating or curating content. Rather than collecting “upvotes” that are not redeemable or transferable on Reddit or Hacker News, on Stacker News you can earn Bitcoin that can immediately be spent anywhere.
Sats are the smallest denomination of Bitcoin. Just like there are 100 pennies in 1 dollar, there are 100,000,000 sats in 1 Bitcoin. On Stacker News, all Bitcoin payments and balances are denominated in sats.
No. Every new user gets two free posts and five free comments after joining the site. Many users have earned enough sats from their first few posts and comments to continue posting on the site indefinitely without ever depositing their own funds.
After a user has used all their free posts and comments, each post and comment requires a small fee to prevent spam and to encourage quality contributions.
Post and comment fees start at 1 sat.
When people tip your posts and comments, those sats go to you. Users who have created or tipped valuable content are also given sats daily. These sats come from ~jobs, posting/commenting fees, and boost fees.
The fastest and most private way to create a Stacker News account is by logging in with one of the Lightning wallets listed below.
Lightning wallets for logging in to Stacker News:
Alternatively, new users can set up an account by linking their email, Twitter, or GIthub accounts.
To login with Lightning:
Yes.
Once you’re logged in, follow these steps to link other authentication methods:
Once you’ve linked another authentication method to your account, you’ll be able to access your account on any device using any one of your linked authentication methods.
Logging in with Lightning is the fastest and most private method of logging in to Stacker News.
Rather than entering an email address, or linking your Twitter or Gitihub accounts, you can simply scan a QR code with your Lightning wallet or use a Lightning web wallet like Alby which enables desktop users to log in with a single click.
When setting up an account, Stacker News will automatically create a username for you.
To change your username:
There are three ways to fund your Stacker News account:
Every new user gets two free posts and five free comments to get started on Stacker News. Many users have earned enough sats from their first few posts and comments to continue posting on the site indefinitely without ever depositing their own funds.
Users who continually post great content will typically see their earnings outpace their posting fees by a significant margin.
A Lightning Address is just like an email address, but for your Bitcoin.
It is a simple tool that anyone can use to send Bitcoin without scanning QR codes or copying and pasting invoices between wallets.
For more on how Lightning Addresses work, click here.
All users get Lightning addresses, which follow the format of username@stacker.news.
Your Lightning address can also be found on your profile page, highlighted with a yellow button and a Lightning bolt icon.
When logged in, your wallet balance is the number shown in the top-right corner of your screen.
Clicking your wallet balance allows you to fund, withdraw, or view your past transactions.
To see your full history of Stacker News transactions:
The buttons on your wallet history page allow you to view and filter your past funding invoices, withdrawals, as well as the transactions where you stacked sats or spent sats on Stacker News.
To submit a post, click the Post button in the nav bar.
Each post has a small fixed fee as a measure to limit spam, and to encourage users to post quality content.
There are two different types of posts users can make on Stacker News, links and discussions.
Link posts require a title and a URL, while discussion posts require a title and a discussion prompt. The discussion prompt can also include links and other forms of media within it.
To comment on a post:
To reply to a comment:
Post and comment fees start at 1 sat each.
Fees increase by 10x for repetitive posts and self-reply comments to prevent spam.
As an example, it costs 1 sat for a user to make a post. If the user posts another time within 10 minutes, it will cost 10 sats. If they post a third time within 10 minutes of their first one, it will cost 100 sats.
This 10x fee escalation continues until 10 minutes have elapsed, and will reset to a fee of 1 sat when the user goes 10 minutes or more without posting or replying to themselves in a comment thread.
This 10 minute fee escalation rule does not apply to users who are replying to other users, only those who repetitively post or reply to themselves within a single thread.
To tip a post or comment, you can set a custom default tip amount (the minimum is 1 sat), but the current default is 10 sats per bolt click.
Boosts allow users to increase the ranking of their post upon creation to give their content more visibility.
On Stacker News, users reward each other for their contributions by sending sats.
To start earning sats, start sharing interesting links, discussion prompts, or comments with the community.
Beyond the direct payments from other users, Stacker News also uses the revenue it generates from its job board, post fees, and boost fees to reward users that contributed quality content or upvotes with even more sats.
Every day, the users who made the best posts and comments from the previous day will receive extra sats as a reward. Stacker News also rewards the users who identified and upvoted the best content on the site each day.
The extra rewards earned for posting great content depends on how popular your content was among trusted users.
The extra rewards for identifying and upvoting content depend on a few factors:
Stacker News uses github flavored markdown for styling all posts and comments.
You can use any of the following elements in your content:
In addition, users can tag other Stacker News users with the @ symbol like this: @sn. Users can also refer to different subs with the ~ symbol like this: ~jobs.
To post an image:
![]() on your post or commentTo expand an image on Stacker News, click the image. Clicking it again will shrink it back to its original size.
To send a tip, click the Lightning bolt next to a post or comment. Each click will automatically send your default tip amount to the creator of the post or comment. You can tip a post or comment an unlimited number of times.
You can also tip any specific number of sats by either changing your default tip amount or by setting a custom tip on an individual piece of content.
You can change your default tip amount in your settings:
To send a custom tip amount, long-press on the Lightning bolt next to a post or comment until a textbox appears. Then type the number of sats you’d like to tip, and click tip.
Your first tip on a post or comment is a signal that raises the ranking of the content while also paying the user who created it.
Any additional tips beyond the first one will simply pay the user who created the content without affecting the ranking of the content.
There are a few reasons to tip posts on Stacker News:
Every post and comment is ranked based on the number of people who tipped it and the trust level of each tipping user. More tips from more trusted users means more people will see a particular piece of content.
Sending someone a like or an upvote incurs no cost to you, and therefore these metrics can easily be gamed by bots. Sending someone sats incurs a direct cost to you, which gives the recipient a meaningful reward and acts as a clear signal that you found a particular piece of content to be valuable.
On Stacker News, new users start with zero trust and either earn trust by upvoting good content or lose trust by upvoting bad content.
In addition, users can also earn daily rewards for identifying good content. The amount users earn for upvoting good content each day depends on a few factors:
To post a job on Stacker News:
Fill out all the details of your job listing, including:
Finally, set a budget for your job listing.
All jobs are paid for on a sats per minute basis, though you can also see an expected monthly USD price when you set your budget.
Your budget determines how highly your job listing will rank on the Stacker News job board.
If you want to get more people viewing your job, consider raising your budget above the rate that other employers are paying for their listings.
Each employer pays a fee to post on the job board, with the fee amount determining the ranking of each job. The more an employer is willing to pay to advertise their job, the higher their listing will rank.
If two jobs have identical fees, the first job that was posted will rank higher than the more recent one.
Stacker News earns revenue from job posting fees, as well as boosts, post, and comment fees. All of that revenue is then paid back to users as daily rewards.
The sats from the daily rewards go to the users who contribute the best posts, comments, and tips each day.
The lightning bolt button next to each post and comment is a tool for users to signal that they like what they see.
The big difference between the Stacker News lightning bolt and the "like" or "upvote" buttons you might find on other sites is that when you press the lightning bolt you're not only raising the ranking of that content, you're also tipping the user who created the content with your sats.
Stacker News uses a Web of Trust to rank content and deter Sybil attacks.
As explained here, users can send tips to each other by clicking the lightning bolt next to a post or comment. The first tip a user makes on a given piece of content also helps determine which content ranks highest on the site, which is weighted by how much a user is trusted.
The Stacker News ranking algorithm works as follows:
The comments made within a post are ranked the same way as top-level Stacker News posts.
Each user has a trust score on Stacker News. New accounts start without any trust, and over time users can earn trust by tipping good content, and lose trust by tipping bad content.
The only consideration that factors into a user’s trust level is whether or not they are tipping good content. The tip amount does not impact a user's trust.
In addition, users do not lose or gain trust for making posts or comments. Instead, the post and comment fees are the mechanism that incentivizes users to only make high quality posts and comments.
A user’s trust determines how much influence their tips have on the ranking of content, and how much they earn from the daily sat reward pool paid to tippers as explained here.
The daily sat rewards for posters and commenters only depends on the Web of Trust to determine the most popular content. The trust level of a user who makes a great post or comment will not impact their reward amount.
If you see content you don't like, you can click the ... next to the post or comment to flag it. This is a form of negative feedback that helps Stacker News decide which content should be visible on the site.
It costs 1 sat to flag content, and doing so doesn't affect your trust or the trust of the user who posted the content. Instead, it simply lowers the visibility of the specific item for all users on Tenderfoot mode.
If an item gets flagged by users with enough combined trust, it is outlawed and hidden from view for users on Tenderfoot mode. If you wish to see this flagged content without any modifications, you can enable Wild West mode in your settings.
Tenderfoot mode hides or lowers the visibility of flagged content on Stacker News. This is the default setting for all users.
Wild West mode allows you to see all content on Stacker News, including content that has been flagged by users.
This unfiltered view doesn't modify the visibility of items on Stacker News based on negative feedback from users.
You can enable Wild West mode in your settings panel.
Greeter mode allows you to see the free posts and comments made by new users which haven't received tips yet. This mode is off by default, but can be turned on in your settings for Stacker News users who want to help onboard newcomers to the platform.
When Greeter mode is toggled off, users will only see free posts if other users have tipped that content. Each new user gets 2 free posts and 5 free comments when joining the site.
To see your notifications, click the bell icon in the top-right corner of the screen. A red dot next to the bell icon indicates a new notification.
To change your notification settings:
To fill out your bio:
To view your transaction history:
Ideally on the git repo https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/issues. The more background you give on your feature request the better. The hardest part of developing a feature is understanding the problem it solves, all the things that can wrong, etc.
Also the git repo https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/issues.
Reply to this FAQ. It's like any other post on the site.
Could you please explain to me in lamens terms what is happening when I create an account with my lightning wallet? My mind was blow. It seems feasible that one day we will be able to cross login to different platforms this exact way. I have little understanding though of what's going on under the hood and i'm so curious!
Basically
These steps happen every time you login, and while the secret will be different each time, your keypair from (1) is the same. So, your keypair is your identity and the signature (3) proves you “own” that identity. If you don’t have the keypair you can’t produce the same signature.
Excellent. Thank you very much. I will have to read this many times. Bitcoin is mind blowing.
This may seem like a sill question but can is this platform going to be used for non btc related topics? I'd love to discuss poker and chess here!
Eventually. We don't yet have so much traffic that there are enough other people here who want to discuss poker and chess yet.
Thanks for the sats and speedy reply! It'd be so cool to author a bitcoin/poker blog here in the future--the two go so well together!
Thank you. I’m excited to start to use Stacker and see how it goes. I appreciate that someone put this together!
Amazing thank you!
This is amazing. Bitcoin is finally getting to what we have envisioned for a decade.
Are there any plans to add filtering to the interface? There are a few users who I'd prefer to filter by default. It would be nice to just "mute" them or have their comments/posts hidden by default.
When upvoting 1 sat (or boosting) is that an actual lightning transaction that takes place on the network or is it recorded as a change in the users balance on a ledger hosted by SN?
Just amazing if all upvotes/boosts are taking place in real time on Lightning.
It’s just SN’s ledger. When we offer noncustodial wallets, it would be on Lightning. Lightning can definitely handle that!
Maybe you can create a dedicated top link sub only for memes. bust we need a repository to upload the images/short videos Let's have some fun. Bitcoin is backed by memes... And maybe in your weekly podcast make a meme review about best rewarded
A meme sub. I like it!
Noob question. I logged in “anonymously” with Breez. What is my credential? A lnurl address? Is my account transferable to another wallet?
Your credential is your lightning key pair. If you restore another wallet from the same seed, your credentials can follow you to any wallet.
Bummer. Tried Muun and Wallet of Satoshi and finally d/led Breez because it has lnurl support (unnecessarily?) I don’t even have sats in it, but it logged me in and apparently there’s no way to access private keys in Breez. hrmph.
I'm surprised Breez doesn't have you backup your seed. I could've swore I had to.
What if I use Twitter auth for my Stacker.News account, and then Twitter suspends my account?
Is there some SN account recovery process, in that instance?
There isn't yet. We have an issue open to link multiple sign in methods to a single account: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/issues/73.
Can you add here in FAQ how to send tips? I see posts that says "4 sats \ 20 tipped \ 1 comments" So I understand that 4 sats comes from people clicking on "boost" icon and goes to OP wallet, but the tips from where are coming?
Sure. But to also explain it here: after you upvote, every following upvote is a tip.
ahhh ok now I get it. So only the first click on boost is like upvote, after that if are from the same user, are tips. Nice.
I have a withdrawal of 3 sats that with fee shows 4.001 sats. No problem there.
But the wallet balance only shows a whole number, and was reduced by 5 sats after this transaction.
I'm just curious, did this 4.001 spend take 5 sats from my balance, or does my balance still include the 0.999 sats, but the balance just doesn't display it (i.e., truncates any decimal amounts)?
It truncates it. Internally your balance is in millisats
Would be cool to be able to see all the posts a user upvoted. Also would be nice to have a bookmark feature.
Apparently I was able to upvote my own post once.
Yep, when you exhaust your free posts/comments you'll automatically upvote all your own stuff.
My main concern with upvotes is privacy. If I do it I'll probably make it opt-in. Also, I rarely go to someone's twitter profile and see what they're liking.
I agree on bookmarking! Created a GH issue https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/issues/71
Any way to enable the website as an RSS feed?
This exists now, where the "front page" entries are available as an RSS Feed.
https://Stacker.News/rss
Not yet. But that’s a good idea. I’ll open up a gh issue
What happens when 1 satoshi = $1???
lol Any day now! But when it's that high, hopefully there will be subs that have different, cheaper unit economics. The database denominates everything in millisatoshis so this aspect is future proof until each bitcoin is about $100 billion.
What is the advantage of connecting to the Stacker News lightning node?
03cc1d0932bb99b0697f5b5e5961b83ab7fd66f1efc4c9f5c7bad66c1bcbe78f02@xhlmkj7mfrl6ejnczfwl2vqik3xim6wzmurc2vlyfoqw2sasaocgpuad.onion:9735
Lower fees on funds/withdrawals. Liquidity helps the site. We might eventually become a hub I guess.
There might be better nodes to connect to but this node is ours. 😋
I see the license for the code building the SN website is MIT. Does this mean I could completely fork off the code, and build my own project with it (even going completely away from the SN project, just taking advantage of the website structure so I don't have to start from scratch)?
Asking because I never made my own website. Also to take advantage of the core functionalities using the LN and paying with sats. Don't want to leech of @k00b's hard work, so prefer asking before proceeding.
Yes it does! Fork away.
Great! Thanks
What does it mean those numbers next to the user name? I have like 90 \ 140 I understand that 90 are sats received in my wallet, but 140 what represent?
The first number is your wallet balance - what you have to spend or withdrawal. The second number is the amount of sats you’ve stacked (or earned) in total on the site.
Any chance we can change login method but keep our account? (name, posts, comments, balance...) Thanks
This is tricky from a UX perspective. I can probably figure it out though. I’ll add it to gh
Hey. Thanks for the site; cool. The RSS feed is not working as it should, well not with my reader app that is [I'm a Thunderbird user]. Also, I really can't stand 'white pages with black text'. Any chance that you could implement a profile based theme changer? I look forward to seeing how this site grows as I've yet to find a bitcoin community to which I feel that I can belong. Be safe; peace.
I'll give it a test with thunderbird. I haven't used RSS recently so I've been relying on user bug reports.
We have a github issue open for dark mode, and the approach suggested by John will allow user theming pretty easily.
If you have anymore advice, let it rip. Looking forward to seeing you here!
Thanks for the quick response. Regarding the RSS feed; it could very well be that I'm simply expecting more in the way of content from the feed, rather than any fundamental issue with your implementation. Some time ago, I implemented a web server based RSS reader. This is my code for one such feed...
... It's not that I think that you don't know what you're doing, as you clearly do; it's more likely than not, that I'm expecting too much from your RSS feed. The code here is a simple demonstration of what is fetched for each <item / channel / dom> which may or may not be of use to you.
So it looks like all you're grabbing is:
I have all of these in the RSS feed afaik. I'd be happy to add what's missing if you can pinpoint it. Other channels?
It's cool man; don't spend your time on it, thanks. Your feed does the minimum requirement, which is to provide a 'head-up' for site updates, which is just fine. I'm sure you've enough to keep you busy without having to service elements in the RSS feed. Keep up the good work and have a great weekend. Peace.
Alright, let me know if you do want anything more elaborate, or if you need anything else. 🤙
How do you boost a post? Went back to my old post and I'm not seeing the option on my end.
You boost a post like you upvote it. After your first upvote, all your subsequent upvotes are considered boost.
Note: that boost decays pretty fast with time since the original submission. The older the post the more upvotes (and yet even more boost) a post requires to rank higher.
I might change this in the future. Rather than using the time since the original submission I might use the average time of the upvotes and boost rather than the time of the submission.
I was trying to boost this FAQ in hopes that it would show up in the "Front page" (and thus in the /rss fee), so that new posts would automatically occur in the @StackerNewsFeed account on Twitter and also on Mastodon.
Is there a (reasonable) amount of sats that would cause this to happen (for this post from back in July)? Or does the rank algo just make that infeasible?
Ranking algorithm makes it infeasible.
Adding a math plugin to my markdown editor is on my todo list ... so I can show rather than tell what the ranking algo is among other things.
Does stacker.news have a Lightning Channel that can be looked up?
https://1ml.com/
Yes, this is our connection string:
03cc1d0932bb99b0697f5b5e5961b83ab7fd66f1efc4c9f5c7bad66c1bcbe78f02@xhlmkj7mfrl6ejnczfwl2vqik3xim6wzmurc2vlyfoqw2sasaocgpuad.onion:9735You can also find this info on our website footer.
what is the formula for distributing sats to users? When I get sats from SN, I don't understand how that number is determined
I seem to get sats for my contributions on SN. How is the amount of sats I recieve determined? I get sats from tips from other people, but I also get sats from stacker occasianally, how are this calculated or determined?
Is there a way to follow someone specific on stacker news? I mean, can I have a filter of content posted by the people I follow or on which I would like to interact further?
good question, I would like to know as well
I know I see my wallet balance in upper right corner. where can I see my balance history, and see how the balance has evolved over time
thanks will that also show sats I have recieved from posts etc? So far I am only seeing ma original funding transaction in my wallet
yes, just tick the boxes for the types of transactions you want to see.
you can choose between funding, withdrawal, earning, and spending transactions.
If you click your wallet balance, you'll see a wallet history button that shows you all your past transaction data.
Just added a new FAQ section going over this in more detail: https://stacker.news/items/349#how-do-i-see-my-transaction-history
I forgot how I logged into stacker.news when I created my account..anyone got any idea how to figure that out? Pretty sure I used a wallet and logged in with lightning but can't remember which one..
How do i boost posts and how can i forward tips?
It’s under ‘options’ in the post form
Why I don't have lightning ⚡ button side my articles?
Why did you make this choice
?
Why not just trust the amount of tips/sats? This would allow more spam to come in, but would make the algorithm more transparent and “trustless”.
Because it would allow more spam to come in. In the future, we plan to have user generated subs where people can experiment with ranking algorithms. ~jobs for instance is trust less.
Would like to see an option to set the post date/time to the block height number
Where do the sats from the post and comment fee go? I'm thinking it goes towards keep the site alive but I'm not sure.
Is there going to be a donation option or some revenue model in the future?
Thanks for this awesome site!
The posting/comment fees do go to SN. The revenue model is up in the air - I'm more concerned with making SN a cool place for Bitcoiners to hang out. We just launched ~jobs which should bring in some revenue eventually, but we plan to give a lot of those sats to our best, most active users because if the job board succeeds it'll be because our users made it so.
How do I post a job?
When you open the jobs page, then you can just click on the "Post" button on top.
Noob here, trying to fund my wallet here via lightning address from a Coinbase wallet. Funds have left coinbase, but I haven't received them here. What am I doing wrong?
You can only use lightning to fund your wallet on SN and Coinbase does not support lightning. Coinbase would also not accept a lightning address for withdrawal - so funds shouldn't have left Coinbase. If they did you should reach out to their support team.
If you don't have a lightning wallet, I recommend the mobile Muun wallet. Send your Coinbase bitcoin to Muun and then send from Muun to SN.
Right on, thanks!