4 ms·

I wonder how well somethingawful-style signup fees solve this problem: pay $10 to sign up and if the platform doesn’t like your behaviour they can ban you or se

I wonder how well somethingawful-style signup fees solve this problem: pay $10 to sign up and if the platform doesn’t like your behaviour they can ban you or set you back to the pre-payment stage. This then somewhat disincentivises bad behaviour and, in particular, repeated or automated bad behaviour. Surely this would harm growth and it doesn’t feel like you’d have success charging a smaller fee in poorer countries. It could also be a recipient for being very unpopular with your users whenever they get punished. And I would worry that it would just incentivise spammers to steal credentials.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
It also means that people with large amounts of disposable income can get away with not following the rules.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Yeah this is definitely true but hopefully their repeated payments would help to offset that cost. And maybe some kind of ip or email based banning or account flagging could make moderation easier or account recreation more inconvenient.
- Tiktaalik 6y ago
  SA does eventually permaban people
  - etblg 6y ago
    There's a guy called Seraph84 who is already permaban'd, multiple times a month he will buy new accounts, make one or two posts on each, get immediately permaban'd again, and repeat this process. So it's not a foolproof system, but at-least it can help keep the lights on for people who are terminally online (unless they do CC chargebacks).
wilg 6y ago
We're working on a social tool (maybe not a network?) that we want to be funded by users instead of ads and we're thinking that as you say a fee may help discourage automated spam. Also we're finding that some of the features that enhance user privacy could help reduce bad behavior, like defaulting to smaller, closed groups of people. But it's a fascinating challenge and there's so many facets to it – glad people are starting to think about different ways to approach the problems with social! (Sneaky pitch: if this sounds interesting to you maybe let's work together! https://frenlo.com/ https://frenlo.com/)
Tiktaalik 6y ago
worth noting that traditionally, harshly moderated SomethingAwful didn't develop issues with fascists using the site as a grooming ground, while unmoderated sites like 4chan/reddit/twitter did.
johnnyanmac 6y ago
If news sites are having trouble getting people to pay to read news, I don't feel much more optimistic about a forum paying for the privelege of commenting (I say this as someone with a SA account). Maybe in the 90's it could have been normalized, but nowadays there are dozens of "free" alternatives, so the idea is considered absurd. The last thing a site trying to compete with FB/Twitter needs is more barriers, and it won't fix the problem on the largest sites even if they end up moderately successful.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

It also means that people with large amounts of disposable income can get away with not following the rules.

dan-robertson 6y ago
Yeah this is definitely true but hopefully their repeated payments would help to offset that cost. And maybe some kind of ip or email based banning or account flagging could make moderation easier or account recreation more inconvenient.
Tiktaalik 6y ago
SA does eventually permaban people
- etblg 6y ago
  There's a guy called Seraph84 who is already permaban'd, multiple times a month he will buy new accounts, make one or two posts on each, get immediately permaban'd again, and repeat this process. So it's not a foolproof system, but at-least it can help keep the lights on for people who are terminally online (unless they do CC chargebacks).

wilg 6y ago

We're working on a social tool (maybe not a network?) that we want to be funded by users instead of ads and we're thinking that as you say a fee may help discourage automated spam. Also we're finding that some of the features that enhance user privacy could help reduce bad behavior, like defaulting to smaller, closed groups of people. But it's a fascinating challenge and there's so many facets to it – glad people are starting to think about different ways to approach the problems with social! (Sneaky pitch: if this sounds interesting to you maybe let's work together! https://frenlo.com/ https://frenlo.com/)

Tiktaalik 6y ago

worth noting that traditionally, harshly moderated SomethingAwful didn't develop issues with fascists using the site as a grooming ground, while unmoderated sites like 4chan/reddit/twitter did.

johnnyanmac 6y ago

If news sites are having trouble getting people to pay to read news, I don't feel much more optimistic about a forum paying for the privelege of commenting (I say this as someone with a SA account). Maybe in the 90's it could have been normalized, but nowadays there are dozens of "free" alternatives, so the idea is considered absurd. The last thing a site trying to compete with FB/Twitter needs is more barriers, and it won't fix the problem on the largest sites even if they end up moderately successful.