Stacker News

• Name: Stacker News
• URL: https://stacker.news/
• Category: Bitcoin-native social platform / Lightning-moderated forum / non-custodial wallet-connectivity layer / open-source contribution marketplace
• Tags: bitcoin-ecosystem
• Summary: Stacker News is better cataloged as Bitcoin-native social and incentive infrastructure than as a generic forum. In this pass, the strongest first-party evidence came from the live site and FAQ surfaced through search, the open-source stacker.news repository, the raw project README, and the public contribution-awards ledger. Taken together, those materials show a platform built around economically moderated discussion, non-custodial Lightning-linked payments, fallback onboarding credits for users without wallets, territory-based communities, and an unusually explicit open-source contribution economy that pays bitcoin for code, docs, issue specification, reviews, and vulnerability reports.
• What it does:
  • Operates a discussion platform whose core product claim is that it “moderates forums with money,” using bitcoin-native incentives to shape posting, discovery, and participation
  • Lets users participate without attaching a wallet immediately, while the FAQ says users without an attached wallet can earn cowboy credits as an onboarding mechanism
  • Exposes a territory model where posts belong to communities organized around shared interests
  • Publishes the full application stack as open-source software and documents a self-contained local development environment built around Next.js, Postgres, GraphQL, and lnd
  • Runs a visible bitcoin-denominated contribution program that pays for merged pull requests, issue specification, code review, documentation improvements, helpfulness, and responsible security disclosures
• Key claims:
  • The project README says Stacker News “moderates forums with money,” is “100% FOSS,” pays bitcoin for PRs, issues, documentation, code reviews and more, and is built with Next.js, Postgres, GraphQL, and lnd
  • The GitHub-facing materials also describe the project as “trying to fix online communities with economics,” which is one of the clearest statements of its product thesis
  • The FAQ says Stacker News never takes custody of stackers’ money to send it to someone else, which is the key trust-model statement in this pass
  • That same FAQ says users without an attached wallet earn cowboy credits, making the project notable as a hybrid between non-custodial Lightning participation and low-friction onboarding
  • The FAQ also says users do not need bitcoin to get started and that every post belongs to a territory, reinforcing that the platform is structured as both a social system and a wallet-adjacent incentive layer
  • The README’s contribution rules and the public awards.csv ledger show that the bitcoin-for-contributions program is operational rather than merely aspirational
• Whitepaper: No canonical standalone Stacker News whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass. The clearest current sources of truth were the official site and FAQ, the open-source repository and README, and the public awards ledger; see ../whitepapers/stacker-news-primary-sources-2026-05-03.md.
• Sources:
  • https://stacker.news/
  • https://stacker.news/faq
  • https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stackernews/stacker.news/master/README.md
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stackernews/stacker.news/master/awards.csv
  • https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/releases

Internal linkages

• Keep this note on economically moderated discussion, wallet attachment, and contributor payouts rather than generic social-client comparisons.

• primal is the nearby Bitcoin-social contrast when Nostr-client packaging matters more than forum economics.

• opensats is the better funding-side read when ecosystem support matters more than discussion and posting incentives.

• Last reviewed: 2026-05-03 UTC