Feature Request: Making Advertisements Fun on Stacker News

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Stacker News currently offers advertisers the ability to pay for temporary promotions using boosts, which immediately raises the position of a certain item to make it more visible.

However, these promotions only last hours or days and are not stable sources of traffic for advertisers. As such, they are not widely used and have limited effectiveness for users, advertisers, and Stacker News.

To solve these issues (and to introduce a new opportunity for users to earn sats), I believe Stacker News should build the following treasure hunt feature.

How Treasure Hunts Work

When an advertiser creates a promotion, a treasure chest item will be placed somewhere within the home feed of SN users, in randomized locations between the top-ranked posts. The treasure chest icon will be bright orange and will replace the Lightning icon that usually sits to the left of all posts. The treasure chest item title will read something like "You've stumbled upon a treasure, click to claim your prize".

When the user clicks the treasure chest item, a gold coin animation will briefly explode from their cursor (like the Lightning bolt animation today) and their account will be credited with extra sats. Once the item is clicked, the closed treasure chest box will become an open one, the orange color will fade to grey, and the advertiser's promotion copy will replace the treasure hunt item title.

If the user clicks the item a second time, they will be directed to the URL provided by the advertiser.

This approach accomplishes a few things for users, advertisers, and Stacker News.

First off, users get sats every time they find a treasure chest. Top users may find multiple treasure chests every day, while new users may only find one every few days. Stacker News can even use cowboy hats, cowboy hat streaks, or trust rankings as a proxy for establishing how frequently a user should be shown a treasure chest. Overall, this is a new way for users to earn sats on Stacker News without needing to come up with new posts or comments, and ultimately fuels the Stacker News economy with more sats.

Advertisers get reliable exposure to SN users along with proof that the users viewing their ads are in fact paying attention and looking directly at their ad. Since users must click the treasure chest icon to reveal the ad, advertisers should see higher engagement on SN vs. traditional banner ads, as users will be actively seeking out treasure chest icons instead of trying to ignore static banner ads.

In addition to all the points mentioned above, treasure hunts could drive new users to join Stacker News and could generate more engagement from existing users who return to their home feed throughout the day in search of treasure.

The revenue generated from advertisers will cover the treasure hunt payments made to users, and logged out users/lurkers without accounts will be nudged to make an account in order to begin earning sats.