Stacker News primary sources — 2026-05-03
Project status in this pass
- No canonical standalone Stacker News whitepaper or litepaper surfaced.
- The clearest current source of truth is the official site and FAQ, the open-source repository, the raw README, and the public awards ledger.
- The FAQ page was easiest to access in this pass through search-result snippets rather than a clean page extraction, but the first-party FAQ text was still clear enough to ground the key trust-model and onboarding claims.
Primary-source snapshots
1) Official site
- URL: https://stacker.news/
- Key excerpt:
- The live project identity is “Stacker News.”
- Together with the repository materials, the site presents the product as a Bitcoin-native forum rather than a generic social app.
2) Official FAQ
- URL: https://stacker.news/faq
- Key excerpt:
- The FAQ says Stacker News never takes custody of stackers’ money to send it to someone else.
- It says users without an attached wallet can earn cowboy credits when other stackers zap their content.
- It says users do not need bitcoin to get started.
- It says every post belongs to a territory, defined as a community where stackers gather to discuss shared interests.
3) Main repository and raw README
- URLs:
- Key excerpt:
- The README says “Stacker News moderates forums with money.”
- It says the project is “100% FOSS,” pays bitcoin for PRs, issues, documentation, code reviews and more, and is built with Next.js, Postgres, GraphQL, and
lnd. - It documents a one-command local development environment (
./sndev start) and a large contributor workflow surface, which is strong evidence that the product is not just a hosted forum but an open-source operating stack.
4) GitHub-facing product framing
- URL: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/releases
- Key excerpt:
- GitHub search/release surfaces describe the project as “trying to fix online communities with economics.”
- That phrase helps explain why Stacker News belongs in this library: the bitcoin payment layer is central to the community design, not an add-on tip jar.
5) Public awards ledger
- URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stackernews/stacker.news/master/awards.csv
- Key excerpt:
- The CSV records public awards for pull requests, code review, issue specification, documentation, security, and helpfulness.
- This matters because it shows the README’s bitcoin-for-contributions claims are operational and historically exercised.
Working conclusion
Stacker News is best cataloged as Bitcoin-native social and incentive infrastructure. The decisive signal in this pass was the combination of economic-moderation language, explicit non-custodial FAQ wording, cowboy-credit onboarding, territory-based community structure, a fully open-source application stack, and a public bitcoin-denominated contribution ledger.