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This sounds like a cool experiment.
Here's my 2 sats:
  1. Cool
  2. Substacker is a good name (is "subreddit" any better?)
  3. Why not make it stacker.news/s/<substack_name>? Also, while you're at it, why not make stacker/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.
  4. Maybe a later feature, but it might be nice to have pools of people getting some stake for the substack, instead of just one person. It also might be nice to set the percentage the creator gets from the substack instead of fixing it at 50%. Some other questions:
    • Will other users be able to create sub-substacks whose parent substack is not owned by them? If so, how do you allocate sats that are in the range of (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?
    • Does the owner/creator of the substack have permissions to remove posts and/or comments in their substack?
    • What's the main "value added" to the community for someone creating a substack?
  1. I like thinks to be at the top level if the names have to be unique anyway. It's like giving these things prime real estate. There are only so many manhattans is the problem. It seems like names for subs and users are fairly disjoint though.
  2. Agreed, a pool is better.
    • Yes, I think so. Most things in the db are denominated in millisats so that should solve that problem. But subs of subs will have to exceed their parent subs posting costs, e.g. the "root" sub is the main page, any children will have to have posting costs of at least 2 sats.
    • I don't think I want this - but perhaps. My hope is we can sort out bad content with economic policy instead.
    • Differing Sybil Resistance, niche-focused content, and smaller dedicated community ... each substacker feeds content back into the parent and gets ranked alongside the content of other siblings
This is all kind of complicated from a UX perspective though so lots to work through.
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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?
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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:
  • a hurdle to starting it
  • a hurdle to keeping it going (to prevent rent-seeking)
  • rewards for keeping it going
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Good god man.
"I've just received 1000 sats from @k00b, ask me anything"
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The rent-seeking thing was insightful. Well deserved.
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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/username and /s/sub.
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This will happen, +1 from me too
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I hear you. It won't be top-level.
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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.
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