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How about this: charge a subscription fee to perform "destructive" actions on HN. This means posting comments and voting, including upvotes. Perhaps submitting
by gcv 14y ago
How about this: charge a subscription fee to perform "destructive" actions on HN. This means posting comments and voting, including upvotes. Perhaps submitting stories can remain free — the paying users will determine the quality of the submissions.
Some of us (used to) get a lot of value out of HN, so $10 or $50 a year would be a bargain.
- panacea 14y agoMetafilter's $5 entrance fee and active human moderation contributes to it being a polite and intelligent community.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoI would not blink twice at this. Few better ways to weed out the trolls. It would be interesting to devise a way to utilize money and karma in a way that basically says, "If you are provably improving the community significantly, this costs you nothing; but if you are average or, worse, a drag, you will pay."
- silvestrov 14y agoAgree. Creditcard payments, however small, seems to be the by far most efficient way of filtering spam. CC payments make banning have a real effect. Metafilter is the NIH syndrome on HN. The problem with the New page is the extreme volume of entries due to everybody being able to post. Voting only goes so far, it doesn't work when you have too much stuff and users feel that their time spent voting doesn't make any significant difference. The signal-to-noise ratio on the New page must increase before most users will go to the trouble of voting.
- slurgfest 14y agoAnd now all your opinions on the internet are linked to your credit card... while I'm not so concerned about HN, I don't think this is a great solution in general