That's interesting about hn...

I'm assuming zaps play a large part in MSM (again, I need to take the time to see what's already been posted about it, because I'm not super familiar with the ins and outs), in which case a single post could probably launch you into the top 50, if not higher. That seems to be somewhat against the spirit of the incentivizing frequent high quality posts from daily stackers via this competition. Imo. AMAs will typically make more in a day than most stackers will in a week if not longer, especially now that daily rewards are gone... So like - I feel like the incentive for AMAs is already there.

Additionally, AMAs typically seem to come from users who aren't necessarily active community participants. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! MSM just feels more like a community participant competition.

But I agree with you that things need to be kept relatively simple. Sounds like it's an issue if you can't reverse engineer how leaderboard placement happens, but I also understand that keeping users from gaming the system is complicated.

I work in cybersec and think through loophole prevention everyday (specifically in appsec, but also more generally in security architecture)... happy to consult if you guys want a fresh set of eyes.