Hey stackers. After a recent conversation with a friend of mine, I came to the conclusion that I need to re-found the ~memes territory and build a massive bitcoin meme gallery complete with all of the best bitcoin memes in the world to help preserve, protect, and proliferate quality bitcoin culture.
As I have been experimenting and learning how territories work, I came to the realization that I don’t fully understand how the different types of fees work and where the sats actually go specific actions.
For my own benefit as well as the benefit of the SN community as a whole, I thought I would take the time to put together this post complete with sankey diagrams to clarify where sats go when someone completes the following actions.
  • pays to post
  • pays to comment
  • boosts a post or comment
  • zaps a post or comment.

Pay To Post

This one seems pretty straightforward. You have to pay some sats to post in a territory to prevent runaway spam and low quality posts.
As far as I can tell, 70% of post sats go to the territory founder and the other 30% go to the rewards pool.
So, if Alice pays 100 sats to post in ~bitcoin, then 70 sats go to the territory founder and the other 30 sats go to the rewards pool.
Easy peasy.

Pay To Comment

Paying to comment is another spam prevention mechanism. I believe it only costs 1 sat to comment if you’re logged in and 100x that to comment anonymously. I have seen discussion about raising the comment fee to 10 sats.
If Alice comments while signed in, she pays 1 sat. If she wants to comment anonymously, she pays 100 sats.
These sats are split 70/30 between territory founders and the rewards pool.
Again, easy peasy.

Pay To Boost

Users can also boost to gain more visibility in several ways.
Boost in the home feed for 100k+ sats to be at the top of home + territory for 30 days.
Boost in a territory for 10k+ sats to be at the top of that territory for 30 days.
It also seems that you can boost comments to get better visibility within a reply thread.
If Alice pays 100k sats to boost a post in ~Bitcoin, then that post is at the top of the home feed as well as the ~bitcoin territory for 30 days.
All boost payments seem to be a 70/30 split between the territory founders and the rewards pool.
Straightforward.

Zaps

Zaps are where things get a little confusing for me so maybe this is where I need some clarification. When do users get sats that that are zapped?
This is my understanding…

Post Zaps

If Alice shares a quality POST in ~bitcoin and it receives 1000 sats via zaps, Alice does NOT receive any of those sats (I think) because that only incentivizes spam and Sybil attacks. Instead (I think) those zaps are split 70/30 between the territory founder and the rewards pool.

Comment Zaps

If Alice COMMENTS on a post and that comment receives 1,000 sats via Zaps, (I think) she receives 70% of those sats, 30% go to the rewards pool, and the territory founder gets 0%.
Are all of these scenarios correct? If I am wrong, please let me know so I can put together an updated post.
Aside from referrals and rewards, are comments the only way for regular users to stack sats?
I want to make sure that I am giving people accurate information and I think there are other stackers who would benefit from additional clarification as to where the sats flow.
Thanks in advance for any discussion surrounding this from any territory founders or developers.
If a post (or comment) authored by Alice gets zapped 100 sats: 70 sats go to Alice, 21 sats go to the territory founder, 9 sats go to the rewards pool.
Boost pinning in a territory and boost pinning on the homepage are not mutually exclusive. They are the same thing and share the same minimums. Boost pinning to the homepage costs more because you have to out-boost the boosts in all territories to pin to the homepage.
Everything else looks correct unless I'm missing something.
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The zaps make sense now. Thanks so much for clarification.
In regards to Boosts, does that mean that if there are no boosts in any territory, that paying the 10k sats for a boost would also pin on the homepage?
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In regards to Boosts, does that mean that if there are no boosts in any territory, that paying the 10k sats for a boost would also pin on the homepage?
Yes
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Do you think this is an accurate way to display how Boosts work?
I think I have most of this correct but I think I am still a little unsure of the precise percentages that get paid to referral rewards.
Does the rewards pool pay to anything else?
Can you confirm these percentages by hovering over the node links in this presentation? https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/19871667/
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 18 Oct
You nailed it.
One small clarification is that even if boost doesn't pin a post in a territory/home, it still "boosts" it in the rankings of the territory and home.
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I think I was noticing that. Thanks for the clarification.
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That's a sick market design. I really like that.
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Excellent comment, thank you very much.
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What @ChrisS and @k00b pointed out look like the only thing that's wrong.
Thanks for the nice visuals.
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 15 Oct
Agreed the visuals are very nice. Perhaps we can rewrite our FAQ to have visuals.
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I'm glad you like them. I think for referral fees and rewards pool, a "chord diagram" might be better but I have to do some experimenting before I publish anything.
I made these Sankey diagrams with an open source tool https://www.sankeymatic.com/build/
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I'm glad they're appreciated. I was hoping for exactly that effect.
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Yessssssss. Release the ~memes.
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That's awesome that you are bringing back the memes territory. Do it!
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Let the ~memes flow
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It's back!!! For good this time?
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For good this time.
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🤝 low time preference pays off in the long run. Of course there will be a memes territory. Why not help shape it now?
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💯
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Sankey charts are so nice
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They're the best when it comes to data flows.
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Nice, I like the graphics :)
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Thanks a bunch. I am glad you like them.
Let me know if there are other fees that you don't understand and maybe I can make a diagram.
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Thanks Only today I understood the fees here. 🤪
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Glad this helped. I might make a new post because some of my post is wrong and the devs have corrected me.
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If Alice shares a quality POST in ~bitcoin and it receives 1000 sats via zaps, Alice does NOT receive any of those sats (I think) because that only incentivizes spam and Sybil attacks. Instead (I think) those zaps are split 70/30 between the territory founder and the rewards pool.
This is incorrect. Alice receives sats in for zaps on her post.
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Thanks for the reply. I just made an updated image that I believe is correct.
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Great post!
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I have seen discussion about raising the comment fee to 10 sats.
It will not matter since there is a mechanism called FREEBIE. Even if it is raised to 10 sats. They will still be able to post using their FREEBIE.
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Yes, Freebies will circumvent the comment fee but I believe new users only get like 10 free comments or something.
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This is 100% correct from my personal observation.
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It turns out that some of my understanding was wrong. You can see the correct info in the pinned comment.
Zaps on posts and comments partially go to the OP and boosts work differently than I thought. I will have to find a way to update the boost diagram.
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I think the meme territory initiative is excellent, it will allow us to interact in a different and peculiar way. I think the SN system is very complete and should continue moving forward.
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Absolutely. The incentive structure is probably the best across all of social media.
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This is one of the best and most informative post regarding SN that I have seen so far. Thankx.
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Thanks a bunch. I am glad you found it helpful. I learned a lot while researching and making this post.
I will be making some changes in an updated post once I come up with some new diagrams with some more complete info.
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So right now I feel like I have seen how it really works here at Stacker News. Obviously, I like what I am seeing and I am planning to stay even though I felt like something drastic is about to be implemented.
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Totally agree. As soon as we see a mass exodus away from centralized shit shows like Reddit and others, Stacker news will become one of the most prominent websites on the internet.
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Interesting to see how it all works
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I'm glad it helps you to better understand the fees.
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hey, good to know bro. i just found stacker.news min ago and logged in with my npub and it's letting me reply for free instead of 1 sat. idk if its a noob thing or a nostr thing but just an fyi