hey friend: your sats are just as powerful as everyone else's on Stacker News.
Stacker News uses money as the moderator. You are free to zap people (even yourself) and others are free to zap you (or...
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 sats flowed in a way that felt like real feedback, and the visibility was noticeably higher. For a few days it felt like the kind of place where honest discussion could happen with real v4v signal.
Two things changed that:
First, the downzapping on my last post about BIP-110. It earned over 5,000 sats, generated 37 comments (many of them substantive technical exchanges), and was still downzapped to -13.9k into complete invisibility. That's not "money as moderator," that's proof of stake. People with larger sat balances or higher trust scores can suppress content they disagree with, regardless of proof-of-work or the engagement it generates. My sats are not "just as powerful as everyone else's" if trusted accounts can downzap a post into invisibility. According to SN's own source code, all sats from downzaps go to the rewards pool, which gets redistributed to top-ranked content. So the sats spent suppressing a post flow back to the users the trust system already favours. That's a closed loop.
Second, the culture. I welcome critical feedback, honest engagement, genuine disagreement. From my experience so far however, comments are from a small group of recurring accounts, and a significant portion of the interaction is trolling. That's X culture. I'm not on traditional social media including X for exactly this reason.
You asked how many zaps I got on my last Nostr post. Fair question to which the answer is much fewer. Nostr has a structural attention concentration problem that I've written about extensively backed by data. Less than 1% of new users are still active after three weeks and select accounts are set up to grow larger during new user onboarding. Many pleb accounts feel like we're shouting into a void, and that's not a feeling, it's measurable: https://daniella.io/nostr-retention-structural-diagnosis/
So yes, Stacker News had better visibility and better sat flow for me in 1 week than the same posts on Nostr which I've built over 2 years. That part worked. What didn't work is that the same sats that reward engagement can also be weaponised to censor it.
I didn't join Stacker News to be censored.
I still think the idea is great and the platform could genuinely support real v4v, but these two problems are a deal breaker for me.
Two things changed that:
First, the downzapping on my last post about BIP-110. It earned over 5,000 sats, generated 37 comments (many of them substantive technical exchanges), and was still downzapped to -13.9k into complete invisibility. That's not "money as moderator," that's proof of stake. People with larger sat balances or higher trust scores can suppress content they disagree with, regardless of proof-of-work or the engagement it generates. My sats are not "just as powerful as everyone else's" if trusted accounts can downzap a post into invisibility. According to SN's own source code, all sats from downzaps go to the rewards pool, which gets redistributed to top-ranked content. So the sats spent suppressing a post flow back to the users the trust system already favours. That's a closed loop.
Second, the culture. I welcome critical feedback, honest engagement, genuine disagreement. From my experience so far however, comments are from a small group of recurring accounts, and a significant portion of the interaction is trolling. That's X culture. I'm not on traditional social media including X for exactly this reason.
You asked how many zaps I got on my last Nostr post. Fair question to which the answer is much fewer. Nostr has a structural attention concentration problem that I've written about extensively backed by data. Less than 1% of new users are still active after three weeks and select accounts are set up to grow larger during new user onboarding. Many pleb accounts feel like we're shouting into a void, and that's not a feeling, it's measurable: https://daniella.io/nostr-retention-structural-diagnosis/
So yes, Stacker News had better visibility and better sat flow for me in 1 week than the same posts on Nostr which I've built over 2 years. That part worked. What didn't work is that the same sats that reward engagement can also be weaponised to censor it.
I didn't join Stacker News to be censored.
I still think the idea is great and the platform could genuinely support real v4v, but these two problems are a deal breaker for me.
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