Sorry about that weird response. I turned into my father there for a second. Let me just say, if you want to hit the ground running here it's good to spread your sats generously. They will come back to you, and not just in a karmic sense.
No worries. New here so still figuring this thing out. I think the spam prevention by spending sats to post is good. Cannot yet see the value of zapping away at posts. I would understand upvoting or downvoting by spending sats though.
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SN has a community rewards pool of sorts (you can always see it by looking at the website footer).
If you are one of the first people to zap posts or comments that go on to get a lot of attention, you sometimes earn a share of the rewards pool. Same goes for making posts that end up being popular.
Sometimes because it's a little bit of a random function to make it difficult to game.
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From the faq:
Stackers reward each other for their contributions by zapping them with sats. To start earning sats, you can share interesting links, discussion prompts, or comments with the community. Beyond the direct payments from other stackers, Stacker News also uses the revenue it generates from its job board, boost fees, post fees, and stacker donations to reward stackers that contributed to the site with even more sats. Every day, Stacker News rewards either creators or zappers with a daily reward. These rewards go to stackers who either created or zapped one or more of the top 33% of posts and comments from the previous day. The rewards scale with the ranking of the content as determined by other stackers. Finally, Stacker News also rewards stackers with sats for referring new stackers to the platform. To read more about the Stacker News referral program, click here.
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