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318 sats \ 15 replies \ @Undisciplined 31 Mar \ parent \ on: Top SN Territories - 17 weeks later charts_and_numbers
I'm glad to not be the only who felt that way.
I had been wondering if personal territories could be something that would work well for bigger names who might potentially join Stacker News, but I didn't quite get why other people would post in someone else's personal territory.
Similarly, when territories rolled out, I thought about founding ~undisciplined, for basically the same reason ~mostly_harmless was founded, but had that same hangup.
~mostly_harmless is showing us a proof of concept that its creator wasn't even thinking about.
I had been wondering if personal territories could be something that would work well for bigger names who might potentially join Stacker News, but I didn't quite get why other people would post in someone else's personal territory.
This is a really interesting idea -- I've seen those services where you pay some amount of money to have someone read email you send to them, as a kind of anti-spam thing. I think we talked about this on SN; in fact, maybe you were the one to bring it up (sorry if so, so many threads to stitch together at this point.)
Anyway, I suppose right now territories are, at least implicitly, a form of this? A traditional influencer who already has distribution probably would come out worse from using SN as a vector for paid attention-getting, but for a normal person, and especially someone prominent in the btc space, it could be a nice solution.
What features could SN add to really rock this use case? Anything come to mind?
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I'm in two minds about private messaging, but I know there's something in there to be explored.
This may be a bit crazy, but I'm keen to explore the idea of stacker bullets. If you were a territory owner, perhaps people posting could have a chance to pay to have you quote certain passages from articles in the week and have them land in a highlights post in other people's inbox/feed. They could just do it with a conventional ad like current, but I feel like doing this for specific paragraphs would make it much more scalable - and they could potentially be delivered by the territory owner themselves for added reach. Of course the territory owner could accept/decline that request. Or not run them at all - if that is a giant fiat-like flop.
In terms of monetary incentives, people are used to charging for their PoW still. SN incentives are definitely there but they are somewhat slower and not currently comparable to those with followings on substack or other platforms. Perhaps that will change. Being able to charge for private content (for territory owners exclusively) will likely see a proliferation of people wishing to purchase their own in order to monetise their content/products - and I think will make it far more financially viable going forward.
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Being able to charge for private content (for territory owners exclusively) will likely see a proliferation of people wishing to purchase their own in order to monetise their content/products - and I think will make it far more financially viable going forward.
This ties into one of the territory features I still pine for, more for principled reasons than a personal need for it: allowing people to become a "member" of the territory by ante-ing up. This would serve two purposes.
First: revenue generation, as per the Substack example. If someone wanted to do a paid newsletter or something, now they could; or even the paid / public combo that a lot of writers use, where some stuff is exclusive to members. Since SN already has a really nice commenting / threading system, it makes that member connection thing viable.
Second: adding real anti-douchebag defense. If you're a giant asshole, posting garbage, insulting and threatening users, etc., there is currently limited way to dissuade that, and there's no way to dissuade it that has teeth. If you had to ante up, and then acted like a dick enough times, I could sweep your ante, and you can't talk until you ante up again, at which point I could sweep it again. It's a nuclear option, and some territories won't want to require it, but the only way SN will not have to confront this issue is if it doesn't scale enough for the issue to materialize. Which would probably be bad for its future prospects.
Some vocal critics of "censorship" hate this idea, of course, and that's reasonable. It all comes down to your working model -- to me, territories really ought to be territories, and they can be run by a tyrant, a visionary leader, or whatever -- exerting that control is what you get for your 100k sats / month. SN should be able to accommodate different visions, and users should be free to choose which of these visions they want to be a part of.
That kind of went afield from our original discussion, sorry :/
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This is what I'm here for. Could not have put it better myself.
It's definitely got to continue being the Wild West here... if territories taught us anything... it is that there is no pleasing everyone.
Without choices & options, we should be taking off our cowboy hats and bowing to the k00b-king each day. Not even he wants that.
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I think he would barf if someone bowed to him.
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the only way SN will not have to confront this issue is if it doesn't scale enough for the issue to materialize
This may be correct, but I'm not sure. I think the cost to post is an extreme turn off for these people. They're looking for a place to spew their opinions at everyone without paying a price for it. As long as SN has the highest marginal cost for behaving like that, I think they may keep it elsewhere.
That is perhaps my market utopianism showing though.
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You could be right -- that would be an unexpectedly (to me) optimistic outcome. We shall see!
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Great idea!
Shortly before I left Minds, they introduced a market price mechanism for users' boosted content. I think that would be somewhat similar to stacker bullets. You choose how much to pay to have your content boosted and then how many people see it depends on how much everyone else has paid to boost their content.
On SN, I'm sure it would be opt-in at both the user and territory level.
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Guaranteed eye-balls, but without the dystopian retina scanning 😅 Certainly having the territory metrics on full display - like previous zaps & zap-rank boosts could help the decision making. I like the idea of it being based on trust/values rather guaranteed performance.
That's awesome you worked with those guys. They are fighting the good fight, but seem to have created an incentive where they will never fully opt-in to open networks. Eventually they'll get it, but seem to be hedging their bets for now.
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My statement was misleading. I only worked with them in the same sense that I work with k00b, kr, and ek currently: I offered lots of unsolicited advice that very occasionally got put into action.
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It's the best kind of "working" :)
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Clearly I enjoy it.
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It accomplishes something approximately like superchats, too. I wonder how active a personality would have to be on SN to make that work. If you were more or less certain to get a thoughtful response, there are certainly people who could charge a hefty posting fee.
It probably was me, btw. I had a similar idea for a nostr client to adopt.
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