Before the end of the year, we're going to begin working on subs (in addition to other economic features). I have some ideas around this and wanted to share to see what everyone thought.
Here's what I've been thinking:
- I want these to be recursive -- i.e. subs can have subs
- Substacker is the intuitive name, but it's a mouthful. I also like that it's self referential.
- I think these should exist at the top-level path, e.g.
stacker.news/<substacker name> ... it increases the odds of colliding with usernames but I suspect this is not too bad. It also would be intuitive for users who want following both subs and other users.
- Economics
- creator of the sub sets the "economic policy" and earns 50% of the revenue their sub generates
- they set: cost to post, min comment cost, and upvote cost
- by setting the policy, they are tuning sybil resistance and their returns
Amazing creativity. My 2 satoshi.
stacker.news<substacker name>/<substacker name>?re 3) 10k sats Not terrible- at the current sats/USD, it's similar to price of buying a domain for a year, which might be enough of a deterrent.
I wonder if maybe it could be something the community votes on for approval to avoid the potential spamming. Haven't been on indiehackers for a while but I think their subforum/groups functionality, after you apply and you need a certain number of people to express interest in joining before it becomes a real group.
Just checked out the repo, if your ambitions are to eventually make this distributed. You could make the payout-hook into a callable with some kind of standardized output format that the server understands. Then allow a substacker to config a pointer to the endpoint.
ex: stacker.news would send a
POSTw/ a body such as{'substack' : '/s/mysubstack', 'commenter' : '/u/jeff', 'comment' : '1234', 'tip' : '100'}...and then my own server could send back:[{'payto' : '/u/jeff', 'amt' : '50'}, {'payto' : '/s/erickuhn19', 'amt' : '20'}, {'payto' : '/u/anonporridge', 'amt' : '30'}]...this could be open sourced, or closed source. People could audit both the history, and "test" the endpoint themselves with a hypothetical POST-body.
Figuring out how to give the callable more context would get more interesting.
This sounds like a cool experiment.
Here's my 2 sats:
stacker.news/s/<substack_name>? Also, while you're at it, why not makestacker/news/u/<username>? the/s/and/u/clearly deliniate what item it is we're looking at. If you wanted to be really clever, you could do a search over users and substack names (with some preference for breaking ties) that doesn't have the prefix.(0,1)? Also, does the parent user/owner have power to delete the sub-substack and/or set policy to allow users to create sub-substacks?This is all kind of complicated from a UX perspective though so lots to work through.
For the last point, I understand the value of the substack but I was asking what the "value added" was for the person creating the substack. For example, why not just have anyone be able to create a substacker community without the reward structure for the creator? Maybe offer some "bounty" whereby some group of people can give the 10k sat threshold required to create the community (like a "Kickstarter" like thing or sort of how the area51.stackexchange voting works) if you want to only create communities that have actual buy-in.
Giving 50% of sats earned to the creator in the substack is kind of weird, especially if the creator doesn't do anything but create the substack and leave. In some sense, this is encouraging rent-seeking behavior. I can imagine that practically, the creator would be invested to drive content, especially if there's some 10k sat to recoup (say), but if a savy substack creator finds a good topic, all they have to do is sit back and let other people do the work to earn 50% on all proceeds.
More importantly, from my point of view, the creator's only real contribution to the substack was to create it. All other power, assuming you don't want any type of "admin/mod" behavior, isn't present.
If you don't give any real power to control the content in the substack to the creator, then why give them 50% of profits, why not just let the community create substacks and have at them? If you do imagine giving some power to the substack creator, what is it? That is, what "value add" does a substack creator give to the substack they create?
Great points. Rent-seeking is the framing I needed to hear.
What I wanted was for someone to have incentives to make the sub thrive (as you point out). I definitely don't want rent-seeking though. But I want to introduce novelty given we have digitally native currency easily flowing through this platform. I need more ideas around this.
One alternative is to have a group of users put up the 10k sats to start the sub, then 10k sats/month to keep it up, and that group of users paying that month gets the 50% split. That's just kind of complicated.
I guess any incentive structure needs:
Good god man.
"I've just received 1000 sats from @k00b, ask me anything"
The rent-seeking thing was insightful. Well deserved.
Please consider separating things. If clashes are possible people will create usernames just to fuck with future subs. It's also confusing.
Big +1 from my side for
/u/usernameand/s/sub.This will happen, +1 from me too
I hear you. It won't be top-level.
It's pretty neat currently being able to access/link your profile without the extra /u/ similar to twitter. That being said when SN has a million registered users and a thousand subs... it will be a challenging land grab for the good names.. so separating
/s/<substack_name>might become necessary.Proposals for "dedicated" subs:
As for the terminology of substack(er), this might get tricky with respect to the existing platform https://substack.com/ (where authors also get paid to write... be it in fiat in their case).
I see the tree structure, and I like it. I just don't know how the economic incentives might corrupt things.
Some substacker names would be inherently more valuable because they lend themselves better to generating subs-subs, like 'politics' and 'technology', and that could create some perverse incentives or just riddle the community with confusion, kind of like what's happened with reddit with legit forks from subs like 'worldnews' name themselves 'anime_titties'.
Great news. Sounds like the obvious next step. I can think of several substackers I'd like to create... with topics very different from btc.
As a complete side-note, how much on top are you about possible legal repercussions? Bottlepay started as a great startup providing the ability to tip other people and they had to nearly completely shut down before starting again as a full KYC, coinjoin-censoring, entity. I still think their new product is useful, just wondering how much you are thinking about this should similar regulatory constraints hit this platform once it grows.
I don’t think about this much at all (but perhaps I should?). When we’re decentralized and noncustodial it’s a non-issue likely.
Good to know. I don't know exactly what caused the problems for Bottlepay, but they started as a simple LN tipping bot and had to shut down because of such regulations. And could only come back (with a slightly different product) after clarifying their legal status. They have a telegram group (https://t.me/bottlepay) where you can find the contact information of its owner (Pete). Up to you to see what's the best strategy (see how it goes or proactively comply). I'd also like to believe in a world where decentralized and non-custodial mean what they mean, but until we get there...
How about including the ability to send private messages to other users? Maybe at a steeper sat-cost than the usual public messages to avoid spamming?
Yep, it could be user configurable too. So Jimmy Song can set something like a 20,000 sat hurdle to send him a message.
I foresee problems with username-sub collisions. Maybe just prefix users with @? Like https://stacker.news/@k00b?
I suspect I’ll just put subs on /s/ or maybe /$<sub name>
Will there be a way to be notified if your sub has posts or if someone responded to your comment ?
Yes. You'd receive all notifications that made sense.
Love it! Why not simply call them "subs"? It seems to be the natural name already.