What Is Stacker News?
A speaker-led introduction from frequent participant OT.
Session
OT walks through Stacker News as a Bitcoin-native discussion site, then opens up the design questions around sats, incentives and community moderation.
What Stacker News Is
A link-aggregator and discussion site in the mould of Hacker News or Reddit, but built on Bitcoin.
THE FORMAT
Users post links and discussion threads about Bitcoin, Lightning and related topics, and comment on each other's posts. The feed ranks what rises to the top.
POWERED BY LIGHTNING
What sets it apart is that participation runs on Bitcoin micropayments over the Lightning Network, not ad revenue or free engagement.
ACCOUNTS
Accounts are pseudonymous and you can sign in with a Lightning wallet; there is no KYC to read or post.
OPEN SOURCE
The site is open source and was created by the developer known as k00b.
How Sats Change the Feed
The core idea: an upvote costs money, so attention is expressed in sats rather than free clicks.
ZAPPING IS THE UPVOTE
Instead of a free click, you zap a post or comment by paying it a small amount of sats. The payment is the upvote.
POSTING COSTS SATS
Posting and some other actions cost a small amount of sats. That fee is a spam-resistance mechanism: low-effort content is no longer free to publish.
RANKING
The feed blends those sat signals with recency, so what rises reflects what people were willing to pay to signal, not just raw clicks.
BOOST
A poster can also pay sats to boost a post's visibility, an explicit, priced way to buy attention rather than a hidden algorithm.
Territories And Rewards
Where the sats go, and how the site is organised into communities.
TERRITORIES
Content is organised into territories, user-created sub-communities for particular topics, run and moderated by their founder. The rough analogue is a subreddit.
REWARDS POOL
Stacker News pays out a pool of sats to top contributors, posters, commenters and curators, funded by the site's own revenue from fees and zaps.
THE LOOP
Attention is paid in sats, and some of that value flows back to the people who post and curate, rather than to advertisers or the platform alone.
For OT's Walkthrough
A lightweight agenda for the live demo.
THE FEED
How links, discussion posts and comments surface, and what the ranking rewards.
A LIVE ZAP
Watching a real sat payment act as an upvote, and what posting costs.
A TERRITORY
Browsing a territory, who runs it, and how it differs from a normal forum board.
IDENTITY
What a handle and payment history signal that a normal forum account does not.
Discussion
Questions for the room after OT's walkthrough.
QUESTION
Does adding sats make the conversation better, or just different?
MODERATION
What should be handled by explicit moderation, and what should be handled by incentives and user behaviour?
COMMUNITY
Could this kind of tool help local Bitcoin communities between meetups?
TRADEOFF
Where does payment-linked participation create friction, exclusion, spam resistance or privacy concerns?