Earning Bitcoin Through Content Curation: The Stacker News Revolution - Keyan Kousha at The Kevin Rooke Show E17

Written By 2minutebitcoin
“Stacker News is kind of like the front page of Bitcoin on the internet.”

Introduction to Stacker News

  • Stacker News (SN): Bitcoin-specific forum, similar to Reddit or Hacker News

    • Unique feature: users tip each other in Bitcoin (through Lightning) for upvoting content

    • launched around August 2021

  • Keyan is part of Pleb Lab, an accelerator for Bitcoin projects in Austin with ~10 Bitcoiners working on startups

User Experience

  • Upvoting mechanism: users pay small amounts (minimum 1 sat) to upvote or tip content

  • SN integrates the Lightning Network for Sybil resistance and reducing spam

  • Onboarding new users can be challenging due to Lightning UX.

    • Users need Bitcoin deployed in a Lightning channel to fund account

    • Lightning Network adoption still small

      • Keyan: "A lot of users when they come on to Stacker News for the first time, they haven't really used Lightning."

Earning Bitcoin

  • Upvote sats are sent directly to content creators and affect post ranking

  • Users can earn substantial amounts by creating or curating content

    • example: Gigi earned over 100,000 sats, Jimmy Song and John Valis earned over 50,000 sats each in AMAs

    • Potential for new job category as online curators

“That to me is what like community-owned social media should look like. Not like someone trying to go out and get pre-sale tokens on some new social media service that hasn't launched, but someone who's actually using a product actually gets rewarded with actual income that the site is generating.”

“The next iteration of the web is people owning more of their data. The real definition of web 3 is the user is capturing more of the value they're generating.”

Web of Trust

  • Web of Trust ranking algorithm - directly quantifies trust between users

    • based on users’ interactions with each other

      • different users can have different webs of trust based on their preferences and trusted users

    • helps prevent gaming the system

      • Reddit and Hacker News have more absolute measure of trust - 1 upvote == 1 upvote (easier to game)

    • reputation of users can further be leveraged for other ideas

"I find Stacker News is already a higher signal kind of community."

The Future of Stacker News

  • Stacker News is currently centralized, but plans for decentralizing

    • "So the goal is to have something open peer to peer as like similarly decentralized as Bitcoin."

  • Decentralization plan: nodes, similar to Bitcoin's mempool

    • a potential solution for a censorship-free internet

    • could be run on personal servers like Umbrel: control over information and data

      • centralized Stacker News to coexist with decentralized versions, supporting different user preferences

    • Lightning to help solve spam problems and denial of service issues in open peer-to-peer networks

  • Exciting roadmap items:

    • job board with ranking based on market dynamics and willingness to pay

      • time-ranked: dynamic fee system using lightning, responsive to market conditions

    • new sub-boards: archiving mailing lists, support for value-for-value podcasts

    • media support (images and videos), UX/UI improvements also planned

      • "I'm really excited about getting that core experience for the user much better."

  • Devices becoming more Bitcoin-enabled and able to perform decentralized tasks:

    • Impervious' upcoming browser as a step towards web 3.0

    • Lightning Signer and Blockstream's Greenlight as solutions for infrastructure issues

    • in the future Bitcoin nodes could be integrated into phones as device power, storage, and internet connectivity increase

Engaging with Stacker News

— originally posted on https://2minutebitcoin.org and https://www.2minutebitcoin.org/podcasts/summaries/stacker-news-keyan-kousha-kevin-rooke-show-episode-17

A summary is never a good substitute for the full podcast episode - details, nuances, emotions and the general vibe are all missed. We recommend listening to the original episode in full.

2minutebitcoin

The team at 2 minute bitcoin boasts decades of experience in financial institutions - investment banking, cryptocurrency exchanges, family offices, gold brokers, and payment processors. They all turned Bitcoin maxis after learning about the financial system throughout their careers.

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