Stacker News is a forum that lets anyone stack sats for creating or curating Bitcoin content.

It resembles sites like Reddit and Hacker News, but the key difference is that Stacker News rewards users for their contributions with real money instead of “upvotes” or “likes”.

Getting started is easy, anyone can stack sats in just a few short steps:

1. Create an account

You can log in to Stacker News with your email, Twitter, or Github account. You can also log in with Lightning (a more private option) if you have a Lightning wallet that supports LNURL-auth.

2. Fund your Stacker News Account

Stacker News users must pay for their posts as a spam prevention measure. Each post and comment costs at least 1 sat, but can cost 10 sats if they include a link or an image.

If you don’t have any sats, you can start by stacking a few sats on any one of these platforms.

3. Share Something Interesting

Users can start stacking sats right away by sharing interesting posts or comments. There are three different types of posts on Stacker News:

• Discussion posts
• Link posts
• Polls

Those who share the best content will stack extra sats the following day as a prize from Stacker News.

4. Identify and Support Interesting Content

Once you’ve started stacking sats for your posts and comments, you can choose to tip other people who create interesting content on the site. Users who tip great content can stack even more sats as a prize for curating content on the site.

Where Does the Money Come From?

When a user tips you, they’re paying with their own money as a show of appreciation for your content.

In addition to the funds paid by other users, Stacker News earns revenue from post fees and advertising on the site. It pays this revenue back to the best users on the site each day in the form of daily prizes.

How Stacker News Distributes Prizes to Users

At a high level, the prizes that Stacker News pays each day are split between active users who:

• Make great posts
• Make great comments
• Support great content with tips

To determine what "great" content looks like, Stacker News uses a Web of Trust algorithm to rank the contributions of each user on the site.

For more information, Stacker News has documentation explaining how their Web of Trust works.

Tips and Tricks

• Discovering new stories is a competition, and sats are the reward. Turn on notifications for high-signal Twitter accounts, group chats, and websites to find new stories before anyone else.

• Be intentional with the content you tip. The Stacker News Web of Trust measures your ability to identify great content, and your trust score affects your daily prize amount.

• Tip early and tip generously. Holding all else equal, users will earn more for their daily prize if they tip great content before other users do, and if they tip higher amounts.‍

• You can explore the profiles of all the top earners on Stacker News to see the content that earns the most on the site.

• When posting links, primary sources tend to earn more sats than Twitter links or repeat articles from news sites.

• When posting discussions, you can use markdown to format your post, insert in-line links, add images.

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