territory coststerritory costs
We've dropped to territory costs to 50k sats/month and 500k sats/year. The "once" option will remain at 3m for now. We're debating removing it or making it prohibitively expensive in the future, but for now it will stay the same.
Any active territory founders on a monthly or yearly billing cycle were refunded the difference of what they paid for the rest of their billing period and the new price of the billing period.
other stuffother stuff
ek and I have been re-nerfed in rewards. We're still competitive, but we have to work harder at it. We'll see how it goes and nerf us harder if we need to (or just nerf me harder as I tend to zap like crazy).
There were some smaller bug fixes in here too.
We have a lot of awesome stuff pending review, including bolt12 receives/withdrawals. Hopefully we'll get those released soon.
Merry Christmas!
View all commits here: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/commits/master/
Since starting the Open Source Contributor Award Rules (OSCARs), we've paid a total of 13.9m sats to 39 contributors for 163 contributions! View an up to date list of contribution awards here: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/blob/master/awards.csv
Previous release: #814634
I have 3 territories that I paid just 1 million sats to rent for the year but I seem to have only been refunded like 400k sats. Shouldn't I get back that much for each of the 3 territories that I paid the 1 mil sats for?
Will those of us who paid the full 3 million sats still get to keep out territories for life if you eliminate the option in the future? ...or are you planning on removing that and pushing us to a monthly or yearly payment?
we don't know yet, all we know is that in hindsight, we probably shouldn't have added territories for life
What is the reasoning behind that regret?
I think lifetime territory founders have an incentive to build a community for life.
I spent the 3 million sats because I have every intention of building thriving communities that outlive me. I’m def playing the long game but my focus for now is driving new users to the platform so that we have more than ~1300 monthly users on SN.
Yes, that was the idea but in practice, they don't: from 16 territories paid for life (excluding ~bitcoin, ~nostr, ~meta, ~tech and ~jobs), 7 founders have disappeared (= no post since months). That's 43%.
To be fair to those founders, I don't think they want to disappear. They bought them for the same reason we created the
onceoption - it's way more convenient and gives peace of mind.I think that owning a territory is probably like owning a boat. Sometimes owning one is more enjoyable than being on the water.
I think we've also done a poor job of giving them reason to put effort into their territories. Lots of work to do on our end.
In the meantime, the
onceoption will remain. It might be good for all territory founders if we can learn to cope with this incentive problem.Yes, knowing that I don’t have to worry about forfeiting a territory if I were to miss a monthly payment makes it an even more valuable option.
Merry Christmas
Maybe the reason behind their disappearance is not losing interest but the fact something happened to them - we're people after all.
P.S: This brings the topic about lifetime territory inheritance - do you think it's a good idea the owner of a lifetime territory to be obliged to add his heirs which after a reasonable period of inactivity to take charge?
On a relative basis,
oncepaid territories have more absentee founders. It looks like there's a small squatting effect. Maybe it's too early to tell, but that's what it looks like.Yeah, that makes sense. I have been super busy lately with a move and family for holidays but I am def here to grow the community for decades to come.
I think we need more users posting in more territories every day and I think many territory founders would agree.
After things slow down after the new year, my focus will be on attracting more quality posters and commenters.
Yes, I probably made the same mistake I made with territory revenue. Thanks for the heads up!
🙏🏻
I've manually corrected the mistake. It was the exact same mistake as territory revenue. This is like always getting the same person's name wrong.
No worries, man.
We appreciate you.
Will those of us who paid the full 3 million sats for lifetime territories still get to keep our territories if you decide to remove the option found them for life?
Yes.
We also discussed a little bit to add a weekly plan and not have any discounts between plans, so a month would cost as much as 4 weeks and a year would cost as much as 12 months. These options would then just exist for your convenience.
The idea was that the discounts were meant to incentivize long-term thinking founders but it seemed to have the negative effect: territories on more regular bills are better maintained than territories bought outright (also the reason we're debating removing
once). Removing the discounts would also make it mentally easier to start a territory for a week and see how it goes. You're not punished for not knowing immediately if it will work out or not. I think there are many cool ideas for territories but having to pay and commit to a territory idea for at least a whole month is maybe too risky.But we already have too many territories so we want to see some churn first before we add an option for even more territories or have a better interface to discover territories.
If you feel like there are too many territories already, why make them cheaper?
We want more territories (especially when we build what's required to support them). We just want fewer people unhappy with territories, and given we've been forced to neglect them, people are more likely to be unhappy with them as-is. Reducing the cost is mostly aimed at increasing the benefit to existing territory owners.
Shhhhh some of us aren't made of money 🤣🤣
I welcome these reduced fees as now I may be able to say ~Music can self sustain and/or is profitable 💪💪
To me, the only real option is to pay for lifetime because rent-seeking each month or year only drives up costs over time.
I agree that a different way to discover territories would be beneficial so that the default setting is not to see every single post in every territory. I’m working on decluttering this is ~memes so there’s fewer one-off memes shared directly within the territory and more commenting within fewer posts.
Maybe increase the fee for new lifetime founders with a rent to own option?
As a territory participant but not an owner (with no current plans to change that), weekly seems like it would lead to lots of territories fizzling out early, which might get frustrating to users (though maybe as an add-on? So you can go weekly after a month/year/etc?).
Welp this all but kills my game plan to own my territories next calendar year. Plus I never got support on what happened with me trying to take over the stocks territory. I felt like my issue was just ignored when I think it was a legitimate bug
Either way. I like territories. I use them like a microblog and to share my thoughts and ideas to get stacker opinions this is why I was gearing up to cough up the 6M sats so I can blog into oblivion!
Wait, what happened with the stocks territory?
Also, we haven't removed the
onceoption yet.... IIRC you were trying to unarchive it. I'll see if I can find out convo.
I was trying to buy it and I kept getting an error message saying it wasn’t available
So I thought you had a special set set aside for kr because I know he owned it first.
That is why I created stacker stocks and started fresh but i really wanted the stocks territory and I was going to add the legacy content to the new content I was going to bring to the territory.
Yet! Hmmm plan can still transpire in 2025.
Did you want the name or just the old content in it?
It looks like we fixed a bug unarchiving territories on October 20th, about a month after you probably reported the bug (you created ~Stacker_Stocks around then). I'm sorry we forgot that you reported it. It's easy to miss bug reports and/or correlations between bug reports and their fixes sometimes.
I can manually give you the result of an unarchive, once you clarify what you'd like done.
Just the old content in it.
I'll get this done by EoW. It should be simple but it's a bit of heart surgery.
Done. Sorry about the delay.
Sorry, I forgot that you also reported it and only mentioned that we shipped a fix in #732201.
Are you keeping the 30% sybil fee or do you plan to reduce that as well?
That will remain. It's a pain to communicate (we get people who have been stackers forever thinking it's our "business model," and new stackers thinking it's a bug) but the higher it is the more honest zaps are, and if zaps are a big deal, honest zaps are a bigger one.
Agreed. I think most stackers have gotten used to it. I will admit I was concerned when you did it that it would reduce activity on the site but to me it seems about the same. I think people aren't zapping as heavily as before but that could also be due to the run up in bitcoin price. Fiat maxis!!!
It does take some time for folks to understand it and it being so high gives you some wiggle room to lower it a bit if you felt you had to without having to drop it back to 10.
It could also be that a lot of the zaps were self-zaps ... unless you're talking about the zaps you're receiving of course.
I think the amount of zaps is about the same but people are zapping fewer sats. Many posts used to get over a thousands sat but now usually only a handful a day.
I wonder if this is due to the fee increase or the bitcoin price increase or a bit of both. I have noticed this with my posts but other stackers as well.
Afaik, @k00b mentioned it worked great against people zapping themselves. It also helps with network fees since we pay network fees out of that budget and it increased revenue for founders a lot. So I don't think we want to reduce it.
Maybe an idea!!
Sure I'll figure out how to turn that into a feature
I mean "The World" can be a territory too. Now that the price is lowered and a few territories are in profit, I'm seeing an opportunity for me as well.
Thank you for this.
Bullish on BOLT12 ⚡️
Can I reopen an archived territory in the future that I wasn't the founder for? I kind of liked AskSN
Yes you can
50k is a big drop!! Is it like a Christmas offer or real? I'm sure lot of stackers should be mulling over a new territory idea.
At 50k sats/mo you got me re-tempted again to found my own!!
tofuq is wrong with me
Maybe there’s a secret Santa inside you, handing out gifts disguised as lower fee?
That explains the random sat deposit into my wallet. Cheers Devs. I'm glad you chose to make it less cost prohibitive to run a territory. I do think we're passed the start up craze we experienced when territories were released, so I don't anticipate a huge influx. But I for one am glad I can survive a little longer 🤣
Thanks k00b!
Hi there. What if I have only wallet of Satoshi I won't be able to zap with real sats after 3th of Jan?
And if yes, are you gonna add WoS as option to SN in the future?
You can receive sats via the lightning address but afaik, WoS provides no interface we could use to send sats.
Sad. Hope we will have handy option to use stackerNews
What a joke...
Interesting.
Keep riding out west cowboy you're doing well. 🐎🤠🍊⚡🎄🎉
I love seeing how SN continues to grow and evolve!
One of the best things I was able to do this year was to start here.
RE territories, did you look also into #1665 ?
This? #1665
What about it?
deleted by author