I am not sure if this is aligned with SN product roadmap but having a follow feature allow us to follow voices that meaningful to us, instead of have to crawl all posts blindly. Perhaps a follow (idea: you spend sat to follow) and a dedicated page with posts from people you followed.
i like the idea, but i want to hear more about how you see the fees playing out.
do you want to see a fixed cost (let’s say 100 sats/month) to follow someone you find interesting?
or a one-time follow payment set by the person you’re following?
or something else?
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For simplicity now: I would vote for a one time paid “follow fee”
Creators could set and change the fee.
Set a low fee to attract followers and gradually increase fee as your reputation for quality content increases.
Future enhancement: Allow creators to set subscription follow fees. Users would pay on a monthly basis for ability to follow creators.
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That could create an interesting incentive to follow quality accounts early before prices go up.
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Exactly!
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i like where you’re going here.
one thing to consider is how this feature works with or against the existing stacker news main page.
on stacker news, like reddit & hn, the best ideas get the most visibility.
on twitter, or other sites with follow buttons, the most popular people get the most visibility.
i wonder if it makes sense for these two ideas to be separated entirely on stacker news. too much cross-mingling could cause popular users to always end up on top of the main page, no matter what they write.
one way to split the two concepts could be with an opt-in subscribe feature where users only use it if they want to subscribe to people, and those users aren’t able to impact the ranking algorithm for the main site by upvoting subscriber content.
users who want to subscribe to other users would still get a timeline feed of interesting ideas from their favorite people, and users who don’t want to follow people wouldn’t even notice any changes to the site.
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Great point! This would probably require a re-design of the main page for SN that allows the user to see organic content vs. curated content. Might also require a whole new UI so not sure where that falls on the road map/priority for SN.
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@kr, I think this is a good model to start with.
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I'd second this request. Like the idea of spending a few sats for the option to follow someone. This could even be a variable set by each user depending on if they want to be follow or not?
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I like this idea, sats to follow someone means that account is super high signal
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How to tag the boss?
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We have mentions like on twitter. I’ve been discussing follows. My only concern is it increases complexity of the product.
Do you all use the follow feature on Reddit?
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I've been a Redditor for almost two decades. I've never used the follow feature.
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I dont use Reddit, but follow in Twitter is probably the core feature. Perhaps SN have
  1. Main board - with everything in [Recent/ Hot / Top ]
  2. Followed board - timeline with posts/ reply from those we followed.
But. that is going to turn this into Twitter like, which probably not your original idea. Perhaps, do a quick poll (another new feature perhaps. taking part in poll pays n sats) haha (well, have skin in the game, and much lesser bots/ ingenuine response)
my 2 sats.
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I like the idea of a main board and a follow board to allow for a bit of curation.
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Thanks for echoing!
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Downvote. Keep it simple. Don't add following.
I thought everyone here was a Bitcoin alpha, you trying to follow?!?!
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