Zapping on Stacker News ‎ How Do I Zap on Stacker News? To send a zap, click the Lightning bolt next to a post or comment. Each click will automatically send your default zap amount to the creator of the post or comment. You can zap a post or comment an unlimited number of times. You can also zap any specific number of sats by either changing your default zap amount or by setting a custom zap amount on an individual piece of content. ‎ How Do I Change My Default Zap Amount? You can change your default zap amount in your settings: Click your username Click settings Enter a new default zap amount ‎ How Do I Zap a Custom Amount? To send a custom zap amount, long-press on the Lightning bolt next to a post or comment until a textbox appears. Then type the number of sats you’d like to zap, and click zap. ‎ Turbo Zaps Turbo Zaps is an opt-in, experimental feature for improving zapping UX. When enabled in your settings, every Lightning bolt click on a specific post or comment raises your total zap to the next 10x of your default zap amount. If your default zap amount is 1 sat: your first click: 1 sat total zapped your second click: 10 sats total zapped your third click: 100 sats total zapped your fourth click: 1000 sats total zapped and so on... Turbo zaps only escalate your zapping amount when you repeatedly click on the Lightning bolt of a specific post or comment. Zapping a new post or comment will once again start at your default zap amount, and escalate by 10x with every additional click. Turbo zaps is a convenient way to modify your zap amounts on the go, rather than relying on a single default amount or a long-press of the Lightning bolt for all your zapping. ‎ Do Zaps Help Content Rank Higher? Yes. The ranking of an item is affected by: the amount a stacker zaps a post or comment the trust of the stacker making the zap the time elapsed since the creation of the item Zapping an item with more sats amplifies your trust, giving you more influence on an item's ranking. However, the relationship between sats contributed and a stacker's influence on item ranking is not linear, it's logarithmic. The effect a stacker's zap has on an item's ranking is trust*log10(total zap amount) where 10 sats = 1 vote, 100 sats = 2, 1000 sats = 3, and so on ... all values in between are valid as well. To make this feature sybil resistant, SN now takes 10% of zaps and re-distributes them to the SN community as part of the daily rewards. ‎ Why Should I Zap Posts on Stacker News? There are a few reasons to zap posts on Stacker News: To influence the ranking of content on the site Every post and comment is ranked based on the number of people who zapped it and the trust level of each zapping stacker. More zaps from more trusted stackers means more people will see a particular piece of content. To acknowledge the value of the content other people create (value for value) Sending someone a like or an upvote incurs no cost to you, and therefore these metrics can easily be gamed by bots. Sending someone sats incurs a direct cost to you, which gives the recipient a meaningful reward and acts as a clear signal that you found a particular piece of content to be valuable. To earn trust for identifying good content On Stacker News, new stackers start with zero trust and either earn trust by zapping good content or lose trust by zapping bad content.