6 ms·
My favorite Internet community is Something Awful, and I'm surprised nobody's followed its curation model: put your money where your mouth is. Accounts cost $1
by jmduke 13y ago
My favorite Internet community is Something Awful, and I'm surprised nobody's followed its curation model: put your money where your mouth is.
Accounts cost $10, and you get banned (meaning you have to spend another $10) if you do dumb things.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoFor starters, when most forums ban people it's because they want them to leave. Allowing trolls and assholes free rein as long they're rich kind of runs counter to the whole point.
- ioddly 13y agoHaving to get out your credit card to swear at people on the internet seems to do a good job of getting people to stop and reconsider. Not always, but it helps.
- jmduke 13y agoYou can still get permanently banned after a certain number of violations.
- bcoates 13y agoThe trolls and assholes are still cleaned up after. There are people who spend a few hundred bucks trolling but they're essentially invisible unless you go looking for them.
- mikeash 13y agoIt's still way better than the way most sites work, which is to let trolls sign up for new accounts for free.
- mutagen 13y agoThe SA account cost and moderation work very well and do not result in a forum full of rich trolls. I've seen other forums use similar tactics (small cost of entry and strong moderation) to preserve a high signal to noise ratio.
- roryokane 13y agoMetaFilter has this model too, though I feel like it emphasizes stopping trolls getting in more than it does stopping banned trolls from returning. You must pay $5 to get a MetaFilter account.
- dktbs 13y agoI agree. SA is far from perfect, but the $10 entry fee combined with a group of active moderators improves the quality of the community.
- keypusher 13y agoMetafilter has followed this same model for many years.