I know you are an active contributor to Stacker News so thanks. I joined just over a week ago, I genuinely enjoyed the first few days on the platform. The engagement was more immediate than Nostr, the...
You make some good points.
First off, trust scores on Stacker News have no relation to how content shows up. It really is just money. So if a brand new account were to zap your post more than however much it has been downzapped it would show up on the front page again.
> My sats are not "just as powerful as everyone else's" if trusted accounts can downzap a post into invisibility.
A downzap from my account (created in 2022) is no more powerful than a downzap from an account created today -- the only relevant factor is how many sats it is.
As far as whether downzapping is the same as proof of stake, I'm not sure. If the issue is that people who have more sats are able to affect the conversation more than people who have fewer sats -- isn't this also true of bitcoin? Miners who have more sats can mine more blocks than miners who have fewer sats.
How should any forum or website where can users post things determine what shows up?
On nostr, it's who you follow. But then, a new user has the problem of getting noticed. If no one follows them, how does anyone ever see them? The reason you (or me -- I've been here since before Jack) have trouble getting reach on nostr is that we don't have huge Twitter/X followings and weren't able to port that over to here. Don't you find it odd that the accounts that are big here are pretty much the same as the accounts that are big on X? Oh, sure, there are people like Odell who left Twitter to only use nostr, but I think if we're honest there is a whole lot of overlap. Why is that?
On Stacker News we're testing out what happens if you let the most honest signal in the world (sats) determine how visible things are. This means someone can zap a post into visibility at any time. It also means someone else can zap it into invisibility. We didn't land on this system on a whim -- Stacker News has been around since before nostr and we've experimented with web of trust and having no downzaps and lots of other things.
What would you propose as a better system?
(also, this is a very good conversation for the people at Stacker News, if you are willing to talk about your recent experience there, I will zap it).
First off, trust scores on Stacker News have no relation to how content shows up. It really is just money. So if a brand new account were to zap your post more than however much it has been downzapped it would show up on the front page again.
> My sats are not "just as powerful as everyone else's" if trusted accounts can downzap a post into invisibility.
A downzap from my account (created in 2022) is no more powerful than a downzap from an account created today -- the only relevant factor is how many sats it is.
As far as whether downzapping is the same as proof of stake, I'm not sure. If the issue is that people who have more sats are able to affect the conversation more than people who have fewer sats -- isn't this also true of bitcoin? Miners who have more sats can mine more blocks than miners who have fewer sats.
How should any forum or website where can users post things determine what shows up?
On nostr, it's who you follow. But then, a new user has the problem of getting noticed. If no one follows them, how does anyone ever see them? The reason you (or me -- I've been here since before Jack) have trouble getting reach on nostr is that we don't have huge Twitter/X followings and weren't able to port that over to here. Don't you find it odd that the accounts that are big here are pretty much the same as the accounts that are big on X? Oh, sure, there are people like Odell who left Twitter to only use nostr, but I think if we're honest there is a whole lot of overlap. Why is that?
On Stacker News we're testing out what happens if you let the most honest signal in the world (sats) determine how visible things are. This means someone can zap a post into visibility at any time. It also means someone else can zap it into invisibility. We didn't land on this system on a whim -- Stacker News has been around since before nostr and we've experimented with web of trust and having no downzaps and lots of other things.
What would you propose as a better system?
(also, this is a very good conversation for the people at Stacker News, if you are willing to talk about your recent experience there, I will zap it).
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