6 ms·

> They're a major part in killing off web forums, and a significant wet blanket on any sort of fun internet creativity or experimentation. > The only ones tha

by paulmd 4y ago

> They're a major part in killing off web forums, and a significant wet blanket on any sort of fun internet creativity or experimentation. > The only ones that can survive the robot apocalypse is large web services. Your reddits, and facebooks, and twitters, and SaaS-comment fields, and discords. They have the economies of scale to develop viable countermeasures, to hire teams of people to work on the problem full time and maybe at least keep up with the ever evolving bots. This is not true at all. There are web forums that are not "web-scale" and don't spend all day fighting bot spam. The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. Even the sites that don't require payment for explicit registration - often succeed by gating functionality or content behind paywalls. Requiring a "premium membership" to post in the classifieds forum is an extremely extremely common thing on small interest-based web-boards (photrio, pentaxforums, homebrewtalk, etc). That income supports the site and supports the anti-bot efforts as a whole. The customer isn't advertisers - it's the community itself, and you're providing the service of high-quality content and access to people with similar interests. You need to bootstrap a community first, of course, but it doesn't need to be a large community, just a high-value one. The twitters and facebooks of the world just don't like that solution because they value growth above all other considerations. They'd rather be kings of a billion user website with 200 million bots than a 1k-100k user forum with 100% organic membership and content. And they value engagement over content quality, which is the entire reason comment-tree/vote-based systems have been pushed heavily over web-1.0 threaded forum discussions as well. This botpocalypse is the inevitable outcome of the systems that social-media giants have created, not inherent outcomes of the internet as a whole.

seydor 4y ago
Alternatively, allow $0 signups but approve every new account. It's rather easy to spot spam signups
Nextgrid 4y ago
There are (at least) 2 kinds of spam - "technical" spam such as bots hammering the web service with requests and consuming resources, and the commonly-accepted definition of spam where bots post promotional or other obnoxious content. I feel like the article here talks more about the first kind. I do agree with your solution for the second kind of spam though.
- remram 4y ago
  > bots hammering the web service with requests and consuming resources I've never seen this referred as "spam". Denial of service, botting, scraping, sure, but does anyone call that spam?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    The author seems to be referring to this as "spam" so I've reused their definition. In general I agree, what the author is experiencing is more akin to a DoS than a spam attack.
  - tpoacher 4y ago
    It's spam from a server owner's point of view in the broader sense, in that it is "junk requests" instead of legitimate requests, they can be sent as a flood at no cost or consequence to the senders, and it's up to you as the recipient to find a way to filter it all to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's certainly not denial of service, that means something far more specific. One could call it "scraping", but I'd argue the meaning / emphasis is different (it'd be like describing trolling as 'typing'). And "botting" is not a word. :)
    - dtgriscom 4y ago
      > And "botting" is not a word. :) It is now! OED, here we come.
    - bambax 4y ago
      But supposing it's not purely malicious, what's the benefit to the spammer?
    - remram 4y ago
      > And "botting" is not a word. That's fair. Replace with "scripting" if preferred.
sircastor 4y ago
>The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. Many years ago there was a public server called SDF (Super Dimensional Fortress). It was a BSD system and anyone could get a user account for $1. The theory was even the least of us, a kid scrounging for money on the street, could come up with a dollar (and presumably the postage to mail it). To a certain person, access to this kind of server was invaluable - the only situation you could hope to get close to this kind of system. As time went on, the number of people interested in this was dwindling. Jumping through hoops is a useful gateway, but if your hoops are too complex or arduous, you miss out on people who you genuinely want to include in your community.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  SDF is still alive and kicking, though. I have an account with them.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > As time went on, the number of people interested in this was dwindling. That's mostly because access to computers has became easier - you can either get your own Linux box or get a proper VPS for extremely cheap (if not free - see cloud provider free tiers) nowadays so why bother with a non-root account on a BSD system? IMO it doesn't have anything to do with the barrier to entry.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > Many years ago there was a public server called SDF (Super Dimensional Fortress). It was a BSD system and anyone could get a user account for $1. The theory was even the least of us, a kid scrounging for money on the street, could come up with a dollar (and presumably the postage to mail it). To a certain person, access to this kind of server was invaluable - the only situation you could hope to get close to this kind of system. As time went on, the number of people interested in this was dwindling. SDF is still around though, and still operates on the same model - pay once to get in, and you can stay as long as you want unless you become a nuisance. > Jumping through hoops is a useful gateway, but if your hoops are too complex or arduous, you miss out on people who you genuinely want to include in your community. It is certainly not impossible for communities with this model to die - that's not what I'm saying at all. Small social media sites die all the time, including with Reddit-style gamification bullshit. Or they turn into cesspits like Digg or Voat. But yes, increasing the friction of engagement is literally the point, you are losing some users but increasing the quality of the ones who remain. It's the old "fire your bad customers" routine, but for social media. "Oh no, we are all losing out on your valuable shitposting, how will this community ever go on?"
jart 4y ago
> it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. You've highlighted its biggest tradeoff which is that it creates an economic incentive to ban people. The only way to make more money, is to have more rules and culture for ostracizing people. It would have been smarter of Something Awful (since that's the site we're talking about) to charge $4/month or something.
- bluedino 4y ago
  You used to have to really, really try to get banned or even probated on SA, now it doesn't take much at all.
  - eropple 4y ago
    I can't remember the last time I saw a ban on SA that wasn't after a string of "stop trashing discussion" probes--sometimes in the dozens--or wasn't some flavor of FYAD-escapee bigot or death-threat-spewing weirdo. Even extremely tedious, thread-killing arguers will often be left alone unless a IK is ignored when they say "drop it" or whatever, and that's usually just a sixer. There are people who get really mad that they eat probes for, say, misgendering trans people, and I for one would like those people to be madder still. And preferably no longer on the site.
    - piaste 4y ago
      > I can't remember the last time I saw a ban on SA that wasn't after a string of "stop trashing discussion" probes--sometimes in the dozens--or wasn't some flavor of FYAD-escapee bigot or death-threat-spewing weirdo. Well, you made me curious so I looked at the leper's colony and looks like things haven't changed much: - Ban for offensive joke: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=525156774&noseen=1 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&p... - Ditto: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=525143105&noseen=1 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&p... - Ban for insulting a political movement: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=524819272&noseen=1 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&p... That was just on the first page, mind you. There were some funny bans in there, though. "No, climate change does not justify pedophilia" and "Do not ever ask how to convert commercial drones to deploy grenades" are my favourites.
paulmd 4y ago
few edits I wanted to make but couldn't while HN was down: this comes to a question of intentions, right? Like are you trying to build a high-value community, or are you trying to make a billion-dollar company? Photrio or Pentaxforums is never going to sell for a billion dollars like Reddit, and that's not the kind of community that Reddit is trying to build. The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. The "everyone responding to everyone" is literally engagement, and that's what those sites/companies want to drive, not community-building. It's designed to suck as a medium for serious discourse, because making 27 slight variations on the same response to 27 different comments keeps you on the site. As long as we persist in having engagement be the primary metric, that's what you will get, and as long as we persist in the idea that the objective of social media needs to be making a couple people into billionaires, engagement is going to be the focus. And again, it's a fundamental shift in "who the customers are". Are the customers the people using the site, who want a great place to discuss the nuances of parrot taxonomy, or are your customers the advertisers? Those lead to different ways you build the community. And you can still make a six-figure income being a webmaster of a smaller community too. You're just not going to make Reddit money off Pentaxforums.
- GTP 4y ago
  You're right that requiring a small fee to register can solve the problem for small communities (and so OP is wrong in the paragraphs that you quoted), but still this solution doesn't work for OP's case as this requires login and he says that he doesn't want to know who is using his search engine (I guess for privacy reasons) and in this case indeed the bots can harm the proliferation of this kind of small scale services.
- closewith 4y ago
  > The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. I couldn’t disagree more with this characterisation. Part of the reason that sites like Reddit and HN are preferred to traditional fora (which have their own engagement mechanisms) is because it's possible to have a different set of discussions on a topic. Single-threaded fora result in many conversations on various sub-topics and of varying quality being multiplexed in a single chaotic and incomprehensible comment chain. Comment trees allow sub-topics and sub-conversions to be grouped in a reasonable fashion, and voting allows junk contributions to be pushed to the bottom. It's not just webscale entrepreneurs - users love comment trees. It's part of why sites like Reddit and HN succeeded in gaining traction, and why subreddits are now the de facto replacement for fora (unfortunately, as it centralises editorial power).
varispeed 4y ago
> There are web forums that are not "web-scale" and don't spend all day fighting bot spam. The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. There is a big problem with all sorts of activists though. Their modus operandi is finding forums they don't like and the go on post illegal material and reporting it to hosting provider. Many forums stopped accepting new users because of that and for instance only way to sign up is to find the owner and speak directly to them.
Tehdasi 4y ago
> And they value engagement over content quality, which is the entire reason comment-tree/vote-based systems have been pushed heavily over web-1.0 threaded forum discussions as well. While they certainly do value engagement over quality, I suspect that the systems are put in place because they don't scale in terms of manpower, and they don't trust their users to do formalize the structure of the site.
gostsamo 4y ago
A bit below the author talks how creating any form of account is going counter to their goal of free and anonymous, so they are looking only for a behavioral sift of bots.
- tlholaday 4y ago
  Anonymous proof of stake?
NickRandom 4y ago
> The solution is real simple Uhhmmm, I beg to differ and so do a lot of very smart people with many more servers and users than you or I are likely to see. As with most 'Oh, its' Simple - Just Do XYZ' solutions there are often very good reasons for not doing the 'Easy/Simple/One-Liner' and here are a few with yours - Firstly - The '10 bux' could exclude a vast swathe of the poorest. Skipping a couple of Starbuck coffees vs. the local currency equivalent of whatever you are charging equating to a month's worth of food or being able to send at least one of your children to the local village school. I mean - your forum / site so you can gate it anyway you wish, I'm just pointing out that it could and would be exclusionary (perhaps unintentionally so). Next Problem: Accepting and Processing the 'Good Behavior' deposit. Congratulations, you now need to become a Payment Processor and as such have certain legal requirements regarding payment details and storage and also tax returns. 'Oh, just Off-Load it to Stripe' someone might suggest. Do-able I guess but anyone who has taken payments over the internet will tell you that its a Royal Pain in The Ass. Also, now all a 'Griefer' needs to do is run a few dodgy cards through your registration system and 'Poof' there goes your payment processor and/or the fees go sky high. Most ‘oh its simple – why don’t they just…’ overlook (or are not aware) of the many, many good reasons why greater minds than yours or mine haven’t already implemented it. Sure – sometimes people do come up with novel solutions to old problems so theres no harm in spit-balling and I’m certainly not directing any scorn or ill-intent in my reply.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gnome_chomsky 4y ago
  > Most ‘oh its simple – why don’t they just…’ overlook (or are not aware) of the many, many good reasons why greater minds than yours or mine haven’t already implemented it. The forums they are referring to have been operating with the "10 bux" model implemented on top of a highly customized version of vBulletin for over 20 years.
- Kalium 4y ago
  > Firstly - The '10 bux' could exclude a vast swathe of the poorest. Skipping a couple of Starbuck coffees vs. the local currency equivalent of whatever you are charging equating to a month's worth of food or being able to send at least one of your children to the local village school. I mean - your forum / site so you can gate it anyway you wish, I'm just pointing out that it could and would be exclusionary (perhaps unintentionally so). It is intentionally exclusionary. Not necessarily of the poorest among us, but of those who expect free service. Botters and spammers are disproportionately likely to look for free service. Pretty much any level of required spending in any currency will have a similar effect. By cutting off the abuse-prone free tier that many bad actors depend on, you dramatically decrease your exposure to abuse. The point is not to keep out the poor people. The point is to make it far more work to get over the hurdle than it's worth for abusers. If you have a way to do the latter without the former that doesn't hinge on pushing a bunch of extra work onto administrators, I suspect quite a lot of people would be very curious to hear about it.
tablespoon 4y ago
> This is not true at all. There are web forums that are not "web-scale" and don't spend all day fighting bot spam. The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. That doesn't work at all unless your service is already pretty popular. Who would pay $5 to access a new, empty forum? You mention "you need to bootstrap a community first," but that's basically an admission that this solution doesn't solve the problem at all, because you have to solve the problem in some other way to use this solution. 10bux was a solution limited to a very specific time.
- ineptech 4y ago
  Step 1: Plant a tree twenty years ago...

by paulmd 4y ago

seydor 4y ago

Alternatively, allow $0 signups but approve every new account. It's rather easy to spot spam signups

Nextgrid 4y ago

There are (at least) 2 kinds of spam - "technical" spam such as bots hammering the web service with requests and consuming resources, and the commonly-accepted definition of spam where bots post promotional or other obnoxious content. I feel like the article here talks more about the first kind. I do agree with your solution for the second kind of spam though.

remram 4y ago
> bots hammering the web service with requests and consuming resources I've never seen this referred as "spam". Denial of service, botting, scraping, sure, but does anyone call that spam?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  The author seems to be referring to this as "spam" so I've reused their definition. In general I agree, what the author is experiencing is more akin to a DoS than a spam attack.
- tpoacher 4y ago
  It's spam from a server owner's point of view in the broader sense, in that it is "junk requests" instead of legitimate requests, they can be sent as a flood at no cost or consequence to the senders, and it's up to you as the recipient to find a way to filter it all to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's certainly not denial of service, that means something far more specific. One could call it "scraping", but I'd argue the meaning / emphasis is different (it'd be like describing trolling as 'typing'). And "botting" is not a word. :)
  - dtgriscom 4y ago
    > And "botting" is not a word. :) It is now! OED, here we come.
  - bambax 4y ago
    But supposing it's not purely malicious, what's the benefit to the spammer?
  - remram 4y ago
    > And "botting" is not a word. That's fair. Replace with "scripting" if preferred.

sircastor 4y ago

>The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. Many years ago there was a public server called SDF (Super Dimensional Fortress). It was a BSD system and anyone could get a user account for $1. The theory was even the least of us, a kid scrounging for money on the street, could come up with a dollar (and presumably the postage to mail it). To a certain person, access to this kind of server was invaluable - the only situation you could hope to get close to this kind of system. As time went on, the number of people interested in this was dwindling. Jumping through hoops is a useful gateway, but if your hoops are too complex or arduous, you miss out on people who you genuinely want to include in your community.

bayindirh 4y ago
SDF is still alive and kicking, though. I have an account with them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Nextgrid 4y ago
> As time went on, the number of people interested in this was dwindling. That's mostly because access to computers has became easier - you can either get your own Linux box or get a proper VPS for extremely cheap (if not free - see cloud provider free tiers) nowadays so why bother with a non-root account on a BSD system? IMO it doesn't have anything to do with the barrier to entry.
paulmd 4y ago
> Many years ago there was a public server called SDF (Super Dimensional Fortress). It was a BSD system and anyone could get a user account for $1. The theory was even the least of us, a kid scrounging for money on the street, could come up with a dollar (and presumably the postage to mail it). To a certain person, access to this kind of server was invaluable - the only situation you could hope to get close to this kind of system. As time went on, the number of people interested in this was dwindling. SDF is still around though, and still operates on the same model - pay once to get in, and you can stay as long as you want unless you become a nuisance. > Jumping through hoops is a useful gateway, but if your hoops are too complex or arduous, you miss out on people who you genuinely want to include in your community. It is certainly not impossible for communities with this model to die - that's not what I'm saying at all. Small social media sites die all the time, including with Reddit-style gamification bullshit. Or they turn into cesspits like Digg or Voat. But yes, increasing the friction of engagement is literally the point, you are losing some users but increasing the quality of the ones who remain. It's the old "fire your bad customers" routine, but for social media. "Oh no, we are all losing out on your valuable shitposting, how will this community ever go on?"

jart 4y ago

> it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. You've highlighted its biggest tradeoff which is that it creates an economic incentive to ban people. The only way to make more money, is to have more rules and culture for ostracizing people. It would have been smarter of Something Awful (since that's the site we're talking about) to charge $4/month or something.

bluedino 4y ago
You used to have to really, really try to get banned or even probated on SA, now it doesn't take much at all.
- eropple 4y ago
  I can't remember the last time I saw a ban on SA that wasn't after a string of "stop trashing discussion" probes--sometimes in the dozens--or wasn't some flavor of FYAD-escapee bigot or death-threat-spewing weirdo. Even extremely tedious, thread-killing arguers will often be left alone unless a IK is ignored when they say "drop it" or whatever, and that's usually just a sixer. There are people who get really mad that they eat probes for, say, misgendering trans people, and I for one would like those people to be madder still. And preferably no longer on the site.
  - piaste 4y ago
    > I can't remember the last time I saw a ban on SA that wasn't after a string of "stop trashing discussion" probes--sometimes in the dozens--or wasn't some flavor of FYAD-escapee bigot or death-threat-spewing weirdo. Well, you made me curious so I looked at the leper's colony and looks like things haven't changed much: - Ban for offensive joke: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=525156774&noseen=1 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&p... - Ditto: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=525143105&noseen=1 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&p... - Ban for insulting a political movement: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=524819272&noseen=1 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&p... That was just on the first page, mind you. There were some funny bans in there, though. "No, climate change does not justify pedophilia" and "Do not ever ask how to convert commercial drones to deploy grenades" are my favourites.

paulmd 4y ago

few edits I wanted to make but couldn't while HN was down: this comes to a question of intentions, right? Like are you trying to build a high-value community, or are you trying to make a billion-dollar company? Photrio or Pentaxforums is never going to sell for a billion dollars like Reddit, and that's not the kind of community that Reddit is trying to build. The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. The "everyone responding to everyone" is literally engagement, and that's what those sites/companies want to drive, not community-building. It's designed to suck as a medium for serious discourse, because making 27 slight variations on the same response to 27 different comments keeps you on the site. As long as we persist in having engagement be the primary metric, that's what you will get, and as long as we persist in the idea that the objective of social media needs to be making a couple people into billionaires, engagement is going to be the focus. And again, it's a fundamental shift in "who the customers are". Are the customers the people using the site, who want a great place to discuss the nuances of parrot taxonomy, or are your customers the advertisers? Those lead to different ways you build the community. And you can still make a six-figure income being a webmaster of a smaller community too. You're just not going to make Reddit money off Pentaxforums.

GTP 4y ago
You're right that requiring a small fee to register can solve the problem for small communities (and so OP is wrong in the paragraphs that you quoted), but still this solution doesn't work for OP's case as this requires login and he says that he doesn't want to know who is using his search engine (I guess for privacy reasons) and in this case indeed the bots can harm the proliferation of this kind of small scale services.
closewith 4y ago
> The highly-chaotic multithreaded model of Reddit/HN/etc is directly designed to be impenetrable and chaotic, where everyone is just responding to everyone rather than having a "flow of conversation" in which everyone is involved. I couldn’t disagree more with this characterisation. Part of the reason that sites like Reddit and HN are preferred to traditional fora (which have their own engagement mechanisms) is because it's possible to have a different set of discussions on a topic. Single-threaded fora result in many conversations on various sub-topics and of varying quality being multiplexed in a single chaotic and incomprehensible comment chain. Comment trees allow sub-topics and sub-conversions to be grouped in a reasonable fashion, and voting allows junk contributions to be pushed to the bottom. It's not just webscale entrepreneurs - users love comment trees. It's part of why sites like Reddit and HN succeeded in gaining traction, and why subreddits are now the de facto replacement for fora (unfortunately, as it centralises editorial power).

varispeed 4y ago

> There are web forums that are not "web-scale" and don't spend all day fighting bot spam. The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. There is a big problem with all sorts of activists though. Their modus operandi is finding forums they don't like and the go on post illegal material and reporting it to hosting provider. Many forums stopped accepting new users because of that and for instance only way to sign up is to find the owner and speak directly to them.

Tehdasi 4y ago

> And they value engagement over content quality, which is the entire reason comment-tree/vote-based systems have been pushed heavily over web-1.0 threaded forum discussions as well. While they certainly do value engagement over quality, I suspect that the systems are put in place because they don't scale in terms of manpower, and they don't trust their users to do formalize the structure of the site.

gostsamo 4y ago

A bit below the author talks how creating any form of account is going counter to their goal of free and anonymous, so they are looking only for a behavioral sift of bots.

tlholaday 4y ago
Anonymous proof of stake?

NickRandom 4y ago

> The solution is real simple Uhhmmm, I beg to differ and so do a lot of very smart people with many more servers and users than you or I are likely to see. As with most 'Oh, its' Simple - Just Do XYZ' solutions there are often very good reasons for not doing the 'Easy/Simple/One-Liner' and here are a few with yours - Firstly - The '10 bux' could exclude a vast swathe of the poorest. Skipping a couple of Starbuck coffees vs. the local currency equivalent of whatever you are charging equating to a month's worth of food or being able to send at least one of your children to the local village school. I mean - your forum / site so you can gate it anyway you wish, I'm just pointing out that it could and would be exclusionary (perhaps unintentionally so). Next Problem: Accepting and Processing the 'Good Behavior' deposit. Congratulations, you now need to become a Payment Processor and as such have certain legal requirements regarding payment details and storage and also tax returns. 'Oh, just Off-Load it to Stripe' someone might suggest. Do-able I guess but anyone who has taken payments over the internet will tell you that its a Royal Pain in The Ass. Also, now all a 'Griefer' needs to do is run a few dodgy cards through your registration system and 'Poof' there goes your payment processor and/or the fees go sky high. Most ‘oh its simple – why don’t they just…’ overlook (or are not aware) of the many, many good reasons why greater minds than yours or mine haven’t already implemented it. Sure – sometimes people do come up with novel solutions to old problems so theres no harm in spit-balling and I’m certainly not directing any scorn or ill-intent in my reply.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gnome_chomsky 4y ago
> Most ‘oh its simple – why don’t they just…’ overlook (or are not aware) of the many, many good reasons why greater minds than yours or mine haven’t already implemented it. The forums they are referring to have been operating with the "10 bux" model implemented on top of a highly customized version of vBulletin for over 20 years.
Kalium 4y ago
> Firstly - The '10 bux' could exclude a vast swathe of the poorest. Skipping a couple of Starbuck coffees vs. the local currency equivalent of whatever you are charging equating to a month's worth of food or being able to send at least one of your children to the local village school. I mean - your forum / site so you can gate it anyway you wish, I'm just pointing out that it could and would be exclusionary (perhaps unintentionally so). It is intentionally exclusionary. Not necessarily of the poorest among us, but of those who expect free service. Botters and spammers are disproportionately likely to look for free service. Pretty much any level of required spending in any currency will have a similar effect. By cutting off the abuse-prone free tier that many bad actors depend on, you dramatically decrease your exposure to abuse. The point is not to keep out the poor people. The point is to make it far more work to get over the hurdle than it's worth for abusers. If you have a way to do the latter without the former that doesn't hinge on pushing a bunch of extra work onto administrators, I suspect quite a lot of people would be very curious to hear about it.

tablespoon 4y ago

> This is not true at all. There are web forums that are not "web-scale" and don't spend all day fighting bot spam. The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you're a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on. That doesn't work at all unless your service is already pretty popular. Who would pay $5 to access a new, empty forum? You mention "you need to bootstrap a community first," but that's basically an admission that this solution doesn't solve the problem at all, because you have to solve the problem in some other way to use this solution. 10bux was a solution limited to a very specific time.

ineptech 4y ago
Step 1: Plant a tree twenty years ago...