pull down to refresh
I appreciate your emphasis on the viability of micropayments. Zaps are awesome and definitely work and I'm still of the belief that it is one of the basic use cases of bitcoin.
SN is based on the idea that monetary actions generally carry more signal than free actions. I think this is bearing out, but I do wonder if it has been proven in the case of spam. I think SN has less spam than other social media, but it might just be that we have less users and are less of a target. Spam reduction is certainly another use case of bitcoin, but I don't think we have made the most convincing case of it, yet.
people are lazy
You say this twice and I agree with you. How do you think we can make Stacker News more appealing to lazy people?
'How do we make stacker news appeal to more people... Who have never tried bitcoin, who don't know what lightning is, who don't understand the basic premise...'
I think this is self-selective and short of having 'more time'...
Better wallet UI, more reliable lightning spends, more places to spend bitcoin (like square), and the ****coiners getting absolutely recked.
To me the entire premise of bitcoin is the harvesting of extra energy to create capital - money basically - with decentralized traits that allows for better human interaction.
Right now we 'pay' using the internet with surveillance, ads, or slop (ai slop everywhere). The cost of posting and the small drip drip of sats should be the 'proof of life' that the user has something to say that they have 'skin in the game' when they interact with others.
Otherwise the power goes to advertisers, big tech and we are overrun with bots who 99% have nothing to say.
The fact that bitcoin is sound and transparent... And you can mine to your own bolt-12 or LNaddress is the 'drip' that you take with you to forums and online interaction. Basically the hash-cash of online interaction that proves you're not a bot.
I think the fallacy is thinking stacker or anything Bitcoin related should be 'cheap' or 'free' or 'just lowering costs' makes the service more valuable - people pay lots of money to use things that provide them positive feedback and in fact... Most high-value experiences require some form of payment to start.
Take for example Proton Mail. When they wanted to offer paid email... They got laughed at.
Look at them now. People will clearly pay for 'better email' that eliminates advertising and minimizes surveillance (although there is always some).
I see this period where useful apps and experiences are built on bitcoin that are NOT about more money or speculation noone is getting rich on zaps.
Nor should the focus be on being a 'bitcoin forum' just as amazon wasn't an 'internet company' they were a shopping company that was more appealing to customers who could now shop conveniently.
IMO we need the killer app that uses micropayments and I think SN is on the right track but it requires all this other baseline knowledge... And that's why the userbase is so small right now.
I have thoughts:
The issue isn't with lightning, the issue is with nostr itself.
Setting up a non custodial wallet is pretty trivial, you can do it on an iPhone. I remember seeing zap-locker sat 'notifications' on my apple watch in real time and it blew my mind.
With respect... I strongly disagree. People aren't on nostr and they aren't zapping not because zapping can't or doesn't work... But because people are lazy AND/OR they don't know lightning exists.
Not true. I'll take a 'free' 2 cents any day of the week and twice on Sundays. It is easy with effort to find places to spend bitcoin, where that 2 cents can go towards something...
And if you cannot find somewhere anywhere and stacker news isn't your cup of tea, there is always routstr where you can pay for AI prompts. Those zaps will add up and literally pay for AI inference which is one of the coolest things I have ever seen.
This is a bad idea. There is nothing wrong with 10 sats at a time.
Philanthropy is all well and good and very commendable... But is completely missing the point IMO.
The adoption is missing because bitcoin has no marketing department. People come to bitcoin because in one way or another they have tried everything else (in life, not in crypto). It is almost impossible to force people to bitcoin... And the only marketing it DOES have is shades of crypto twitter which has nothing to do with bitcoin.
In other words, people are lazy.
Twitter is 17 years old has paid advertisements, a CEO, a huge marketing team and is incredibly centralized. You can't (I couldnt) even access twitter with a VPN.
Social media micropayments isn't about 'making money' it is about spam reduction. You pay one way or the other... Either through advertisements, surveillance, or SLOP.
I rather pay tiny amounts of money and have a way better experience and that's what keeps me coming back to Stacker News and Bitcoin in general.
In my experience it takes a very specific set of character skills, background, and curiosity to 'get' bitcoin and nostr is an even more advanced application of it. Overwhelming people doesn't work... It takes time the vast majority of people don't "get it" instantly and having no CEO or marketing department only makes it that much more difficult.
Real thoughts