Join Us Today for a Q1 Review + Q2 Roadmap Discussion (11am ET) \ stacker news ~meta

Join Us Today for a Q1 Review + Q2 Roadmap Discussion (11am ET)

25.7k sats \ 33 comments \ @sn 15 Apr meta

Howdy, stackers!

Today we're hosting our Q1 2024 Review + Q2 2024 Roadmap call to discuss all the latest developments and plans for Stacker News starting at 11am ET.

Today's hybrid format will feature a live (and recorded) YouTube call with @k00b, @ek, and @kr to cover 4 high-level topics:

What was shipped in Q1 2024
What was adoption like in Q1 2024
What is planned for Q2 2024
How stackers can help out

After the call, we'll transition to a roundtable discussion right on this thread for anyone to bring up questions, suggest new ideas, or give feedback on anything related to Stacker News. Feel free to share any questions here in the meantime, and they'll either be answered on the 11am ET call, or directly on Stacker News afterwards.

At 11am ET, we will pin a comment on this thread with a link to the video stream and the slide deck.

view all related items

0 replies \ @sn OP 15 Apr

Live Stream: https://www.youtube.com/@stackernews/live

Slide Deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PSs90MQPkbQK8-gQ_TgfjFAmdsaY3wxdbBv-A1EWMEw/edit?usp=sharing

3002 sats \ 6 replies \ @grayruby 15 Apr

@ek @kr @k00b

Great call. Appreciate the update.

A couple thoughts:

Referral program is going to remain a challenge. Most stackers prefer to remain nym on SN and the most likely referrals would be to people they know in the real world. This likely prevents them from referring even though they love and support SN.

With the above in mind, it SN itself needs to be the primary sales and marketing funnel. I don't think you can rely on organic growth. I continue to be shocked how many highly active bitcoiners on twitter and nostr have never been on SN. Need to capture this low hanging fruit. Personally I would like to see SN accounts much more active on social media and much more proactive at identifying and engaging with potential users. Too busy, hire a social media intern for a couple months, if it doesn't bare fruit move on. Also, fountain ads were great and seemed to work great, go where your audience is, I suggest you do promotion on one of the Bitcoin pods.

Territories are finally starting to look like the value add I expected them to be.

Get rid of MSM reward payout structure. Don't fool yourselves with artificially inflated numbers, they will not sustain. Keep it as a once a year promotion tied to march madness and do smaller similar promotions throughout the year. Go back to daily rewards or test weekly but no leaderboard.

That's my 2 sats.

188 sats \ 4 replies \ @ek 15 Apr

Referral program is going to remain a challenge. Most stackers prefer to remain nym on SN and the most likely referrals would be to people they know in the real world. This likely prevents them from referring even though they love and support SN.

Mhh, I see, good point! I think if we allow invites without gifts, they could work as anonymized referral links. Then you could still refer people IRL without exposing your nym. The only downside is that you can't use invites to link to some post simultaneously.

I continue to be shocked how many highly active bitcoiners on twitter and nostr have never been on SN. Need to capture this low hanging fruit. Personally I would like to see SN accounts much more active on social media and much more proactive at identifying and engaging with potential users.

I wonder how much conversion is related to aversion of centralized services from bitcoiners. At least on nostr, I would think that most are active there due to the decentralization aspect.

I also have to admit that I planned to be more active on nostr but my activity is quite embarrassing.

Go back to daily rewards or test weekly but no leaderboard.

I am also wondering if we should do more events that sound fun and we can mention in social media, for example a day where everyone is @anon or whatever else we can come up with. I also thought about doing something like r/place but maybe SN is way too small for an event like this.

158 sats \ 3 replies \ @OneOneSeven 15 Apr

#309619

Or a "Zappy Hour" instead of Happy Hour, like at bars lol!

No idea what it would consist of though, if it's only an hour people might feel left out. I suppose it would depend on what happens during the hour, and if it's random or fixed, time zones and all that.

159 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 15 Apr

If Stacker News can find a way to get me half-price nachos and cheap beer, I'm in.

72 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 15 Apr

You just inspired me to buy nachos, brb

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 15 Apr

I like it.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 15 Apr

Agreed completely on MSM.

Two possible workarounds on the referral point, one possible now, one that would require a change:

Now: People could create a second "burner" account just for referrals that doesn't have any association with their main account or identity.

Possible after a change: Give each account a referral link that's not associated with their nym (or even a way to generate new ones each time, for extra anonymity).

263 sats \ 1 reply \ @OneOneSeven 15 Apr

I called out today because I'm SICK... not to listen to this discussion..

My list would be:

How's it going getting more signups on SN? Will there be a competition like MSM or something similar? I know there are some who don't care for the current referral code system and making sats from new signups, curious what you think about that.
Does it make any sense to allow merging of archived territories, or no? Should there be an extra cost?
Territory maps :D

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OneOneSeven 15 Apr

Thanks for all the answers!

1149 sats \ 9 replies \ @Undisciplined 15 Apr

The referral idea is really fun. I had a thought that would probably be a pain to implement, but here it is:

What if instead of having one referrer, we could have many referrers?

I was thinking about the same process you described, except that instead of switching referrers every time you follow someone's link, they would accrue a referral share in you.

Maybe, I come to SN via one of @grayruby's sports contests, giving him the initial referral share. But then, once I'm here, I follow nine of @elvismercury's links to older posts. Grayruby would now have a 10% referral share and elvismercury would have 90%.

They could also be weighted by duration, to give the initial referrers more of an advantage, but I'm guessing that's overkill.

148 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 15 Apr

A nice to have but I would think this would be down the road.

168 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 15 Apr

Maybe so, but I'm anticipating that the all-or-nothing nature of the new rewards system might lead to spammy looking posts that are full of unnecessary links.

Going with shares would really allow strong content creators to build some capital over time. The proposed system seems too frantic and, dare I say, too high-time preference.

102 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 15 Apr

I think something like that is structurally ideal. We discussed something similar. The complexity makes it hard to reason about though (for the average non-incentives nerd) and I think that'd have a big impact on the effectiveness.

The ideal action experience seems to be: I do obvious easy X and predictable good Y happens

A large portion of the negative emotions about rewards seem to come from the predictability of Y being low for instance.

120 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 15 Apr

That makes sense to me, but it also seems like giving us all a stake in each other would be the most aligned with the feeling of community you guys have cultivated.

40 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 15 Apr

Has there been any work done on economics UX? There's a lot of treatment of prices and transparent markets being more efficient I imagine. Maybe this is more in the domain of behavioral economics.

40 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 15 Apr

Maybe mechanism design is the right term.

1018 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 15 Apr

This is a little outside my wheelhouse. I know it's an issue that experimental economists (major overlap with behavioral) always have to deal with. Oftentimes, they're trying get subjects to jump through some pretty complicated hoops, so they need the UX to be as intuitive as possible.

I'm not aware of one canonical treatment of the subject, though. It seems like individual experimentalists largely navigate it on their own, while borrowing heavily from each other.

It is mechanism design, but mechanism design is generally more theoretical and would tell you about the incentives created by the system you're studying and what it's equilibrium conditions are. I'm sure there's a bunch of work on applied mechanism design, though.

40 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 15 Apr

"applied mechanism design" was the search query I needed to find this course and its reading list.

I don't expect to find a direct answer to anything we're talking about here, but it should improve my intuition at least.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 15 Apr

I'm glad my rapidly rusting knowledge was able to help.

reply on another page

62 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 15 Apr

Got busy and got there for the outro! 🤣

Will go back and watch.

62 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 15 Apr

I’ll be there!

50 sats \ 3 replies \ @grayruby 15 Apr

@ek looking like a proper hacker.

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @Natalia 15 Apr

like a real cyber punk 😂

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 15 Apr

Being a proper hacker hurt my nose because the mask got quite tight 👀

I also need to sit quite close to the screen to be able to read something with the sunglasses on.

the pain of privacy

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 15 Apr

You looked cool doing it and that's all that matters.

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 15 Apr

I really need to get better at speaking up. Takes me too long to think what I want to add in English. I mostly just nodded along haha

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 15 Apr

For me SN has become part and parcel of my daily routine in a matter of few months.

I think that SN should strategies to more adoption by providing some one time incentive program.

I'm ready to help out SN in any ways I can. So far I've orange pilled 4 or 5 people with the help of SN.

I am watching it now....

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 15 Apr

Please make the referral fee optional, allowing us to choose the percentage we want to receive (between 0% and 2.5%).

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @MLBofficialscorer 15 Apr

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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 15 Apr

Sorry this was my bad. I was listening while working on my survivor pool post so originally posted from the wrong account.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinGuru 15 Apr

I am all ears ..

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Natalia 15 Apr

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