I'm finally doing it, @cryotosensei. I've given some thought to how to sustainably take profits from my use of Stacker News. I probably won't start until after this month's MSM concludes, because I'm still guilt zapping away my ill-gotten rewards from last month.
Optimal Zapping Behavior
Previously, I wrote about how to find your optimal zapping strategy for Stacker News: #287074. Despite that being my highest ranked post, people are still radically underzapping (but that's not the point of this post).
That strategy uses the waxing and waning of my SN wallet balance to inform what my default zap ought to be. The problem with this strategy is that it converges on a zero profit point. I'm happy to recirculate my Stacker News earnings, so this problem didn't bother me.
Zap bigger. Zap oftener. Zap earlier.
Profit Taking
Since I was already using my current balance to optimize zapping, I couldn't use it to also optimize profit taking. However, I can still use the growth rate of my SN balance to inform profit taking. Optimal profit taking would mean my balance remains stable.
The approach I came up with is to withdraw my average daily net earnings. If Stacker News grows or I get better at using it, then my daily profits will grow.
I've been on SN for 537 days and have 395.9k in my wallet, so I would withdraw 737 sats per day with this strategy. Hopefully that will grow. Even with my optimistic estimate for the value of sats (#474759), that's not a lot.
Why bother?
A big part of SN's pitch is that you can earn sats by contributing here. Of course, you can do that without jumping through these hoops.
In part, I just like thinking about this kind of stuff, but the rewards system also makes the optimal usage of SN non-obvious. How much you should zap depends on what you're zapping, when you're zapping, and how much other stackers are zapping. How much you should take in profits depends on how much you're getting back in rewards and how much you should be zapping.
I like simple methods that converge on optimality, rather than trying to fully solve a system analytically and derive the optimal solution.
TL;DR
- Have a dedicated SN wallet.
- Use turbo zaps to zap 1/100th for great posts, 1/1000th for good posts, 1/10,000th for good comments.
- Withdraw daily profits = wallet balance / days on SN