Let me put a few caveat on why 5 dollars in 2002 DNE 5 dollars in 2018 for a 12 year old. Ease of payment, when SA instituted this barrier a young troll int

Let me put a few caveat on why 5 dollars in 2002 DNE 5 dollars in 2018 for a 12 year old. Ease of payment, when SA instituted this barrier a young troll intent on disruption had less of a problem coughing up 5 dollars for an account, and more of a problem finding a means to pay this 5 dollars. This is not the case for today's youth. See Xbox live and twitch donations if you don't think I'm being fair here. Scale-ability, which you directly touch on. Enforcing an upfront cost is a very real value calculation one must make prior to having extracted any value from the service and something most people my self included are currently adverse to. This directly impedes a communities ability to scale. I can completely relate to your idea that I wouldn't pay to post on the forums. For years I had friends telling me to sign up and I always just shrugged and responded MEH why would I pay for that sort of thing? I didn't understand (at the time) the point or the reason for doing this. My (and many people's) value structure was in-congruent with the owner of SA. Moving forward, people have to value the idea of an online community free of trolling in order to even put a price tag on that idea. I would find it very hard to believe that a.) enough people (I'm talking an order of magnitude equal to the number of facebook users) value a troll free environment b.) that, said people would have a unified enough of an idea of what an act of trolling is such that focused discussion doesn't boil down to pointing fingers. Maybe this point would merely resolve it self over time.