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Of course I would pay $5/year for HN. I lose more money than that every time I compose a new comment. Time is money, after all. That doesn't mean it's a good i
by mechanical_fish 18y ago
Of course I would pay $5/year for HN. I lose more money than that every time I compose a new comment. Time is money, after all.
That doesn't mean it's a good idea, though. I think it almost certainly isn't. It sends entirely the wrong message, it's a much bigger pain to implement than it's worth, it might work all too well at cutting the volume of submissions and comments (if you think a crowded HN is bad, fork HN -- the code is open source! -- put it up on your server, and see how exciting that is)... and it won't work. You really think a troll won't pay five bucks a year? I think you severely underestimate the entertainment value that a troll derives from trolling.
If, in fact, HN eventually declines to the Reddit level, the solution will be the same as ever: Some of us will head off into small invite-only groups (note that invite-only is distinct from for pay), and the rest of us will migrate to a handful of other new social news sites which will thrive for a while until they succumb to the same problem, or to an entirely new problem, after which the cycle begins anew. As someone has said in the past, it's like restaurants, or music clubs. They flare up, grow, shrink, and die out all the time.
- alexandros 18y agoI don't think i can truly fork HN. HN is not only the code, it's also pg's leadership and the community that has gathered around it. (if you can give me the code for that, i'd love to fork :P ) Anyone else than pg making this work is much more difficult, as HN already exists and critical mass will be hard to acheive. The reason I think trolls won't post as much is that while trolling is based on impulse decisions, making a payment is a much more elaborate procedure and I don't think the impulse to troll would usually be enough to overcome that threshold. But even if it does, blocking that account, noting the payment details and blocking further re-registration with them raises the re-registration barrier even higher.
- marksutherland 18y agoIt might discourage drive-by trolling, but it does nothing to stop the more determined griefer. If anything they'll see it as a challenge.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoI think you underestimate the probability that the world does not divide neatly into trolls and non-trolls. Rather, the troll lurks within us all, and without constant vigilance, under the right conditions the troll will emerge! In other words, users will not pay to troll. They'll pay to make a comment, which may or may not be a trollish comment. (A lot of trolls can't, in the heat of the moment, tell the difference between a troll and a comment -- that's what makes them prone to being trolls.) And then they'll have paid, which means there's no barrier at all to future trollish behavior from the same person.
- alexandros 18y agoYes, I am talking about intended trolling. 'Accidental' trolls can be brought to shape by the community, as they always have. Also, the payment T&Cs should say that the community still has the right to kick them out, refunding the amount if necessary.
- pg 18y agoThat is certainly true. I've sometimes run across people cross-posting comments here and on Reddit who've actually taken the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a civil version for HN.
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y agoHaving done something similar, it's not necessarily taking the trouble to write two versions. Sometimes after writing one version, you mellow out, have a change of heart, or just realize you might not have been completly right (that "W" word :-), so the post on a complementary site is more thought out and polite.
- dpapathanasiou 18y ago"Time is money, after all." A wise old man once told me: "Time is more important than money; I can always make back any money I lose, but time is gone forever."
- supahfly_remix 18y agoI get your point, but how does the wise old man explain how to make back money without losing even more time?
- JabavuAdams 18y agoIt's much easier and more likely for someone to give you money than to give you more time.
- swombat 18y agoThe value of your time increases with time. Making back 1 hour's worth of your time in cash today will probably only take you a few minutes a 20 years' time. However, making back 1 hour's worth of your time in time is impossible.
- redrobot5050 18y agoOriginally? The wise old man bought and sold mortgage backed securities with a triple-A rating. Now, he stands out in the street corner with a cup in his hand and a cute cardboard sign.
- babul 18y agoYou cannot always make back any money you lose, if you could, the world would not be in this current financial crisis and the many before it.
- jfoutz 18y agoI see what you're saying... but I'm young enough that I could loose my house and cars and 401k and all the other junk, and still make it back in 20 years, probably less because I'm more productive. Granted, that's not true for everybody. But i think it's only true for the super rich, and the very old. My dad's doing pretty well. if he had to start over... I don't know if he has enough time to make it all back but he's smart and hardworking. I'm sure he could make a dent. I think a better argument would be, "you have to start over" and starting over sucks.
- jerf 18y ago"You really think a troll won't pay five bucks a year?" I think a truly motivated troll might pay five bucks. But now we've got a clear, concrete ban target. Thwack! Out five bucks. Can they sign up again? Sure! I wouldn't even try to stop them. But thwhack!, out another five bucks. How many trolls are $100 interested in trolling? The equation for trolling radically alters when money is involved. Just like how spam wouldn't be practical if we could somehow charge even a penny per email. (Which I am well aware is impractical, but if it was, it would destroy spam.)
- mechanical_fish 18y agoThere are sites which have severe problems with persistent trolls -- the kind that, once banned, will come back under pseudonym after pseudonym. A lot of spammers fall under this category. And, yes, I expect that charging money will solve that problem. This may be why some sites have had great success with charging money -- they needed a big hammer to solve a big problem. But is that a problem HN needs to solve? My impression is that whatever PG is doing to keep out the spammers is working very well. I don't see a lot of complaints about it, even from PG himself. (Not that PG ever seems to complain. He just quietly goes about the business of trying things.) What people seem to be complaining about is a sort of gradual degradation in the quality of comment threads. That's not a problem you can easily solve by banning anyone, unless you really do want to make people flee in terror. ("That LOLcode meme used to be funny, but now it's ten months past expiration! The penalty is death.")
- BvS 18y agoSo what about making HN invitation only. I like the idea. The people who have contributed in the past could be autoinvited and could invite others as well (maybe depending n karma -> 100 points -> 1 invitation... )
- comatose_kid 18y agoI think that it would lead to HN becoming quite insular and elitist. More pragmatically, I think discussion would suffer if we judged new entrants solely by whether or not 'good' contributors vetted them. This might inadvertently weed out people with differing viewpoints.
- chollida1 18y agoSo how would an elite hacker who knows no one currently on Hacker news join under your system. Seems like a pretty broken model to me.
- MaysonL 18y agoIf she's an elite hacker, she already knows someone on HN, or could easily get to know someone...
- iuguy 18y agoInteresting that assume said elite hacker is female.
- chollida1 18y agoThis just won't always be true. Consider an eleven year old hacker, he/she may be elite for their age level but are unlikely to know anyone on the site. Same for many of the elite hackers in countries like China and Russia.
- jacquesm 18y agoWell, a truly elite hacker would simply hack their way past the block. You can check that one off as solved then.
- prakash 18y agoI would pay more, but that still wouldn't solve the problem. A better solution is to not allow anonymous posters. That said, a lot of folks here post under their real name or have info about their real name on their handle. This would do a lot more than charging $. They flare up, grow, shrink, and die out all the time. I think you pretty much captured the cycle of online communities.
- jdbeast00 18y ago"fork HN -- the code is open source!" -sorry, where is it?