I see what you mean about there still being a barrier, however I would describe it as a trailing barrier, rather than a leading barrier. Most people will never

I see what you mean about there still being a barrier, however I would describe it as a trailing barrier, rather than a leading barrier. Most people will never encounter it and if they do then they have already invested at least a little of their time to creating their content. It's been my experience that once they are invested in the process they are more likely to commit to following through and completing the process, even if that means getting rejected several times (I get to see the progression because the systems in production email me every time content is rejected). Those that don't follow through are the one who were just creating throw-away content anyway, which is what I want to discourage. From what I've seen the trolls do make it through a percentage of the time but they tend to be well-written, entertaining, trolls. Those who spout short comments full of racial slurs don't tend to understand why their comments are getting rejected and they either give up or their comment morphs into something marginally more useful. In that case the voting and flagging mechanisms built-in to the posting system come into play, the majority of users who are reasonable tend to be able to swarm out the trolls, just like they do here on HN. The pivotal piece there being that the rejection mechanism tends to discourage people from posting that have no investment in what they're writing, which means the remaining users have a vested interest in keeping the trolls at bay... If you are interested in seeing examples of content progression from a live system just shoot me an email!