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There's a much better solution than a CAPTCHA, but when SN/HN was started, it wasn't as simple or easy to do. The answer is to simply require a tiny donation li

by jcr 12y ago

There's a much better solution than a CAPTCHA, but when SN/HN was started, it wasn't as simple or easy to do. The answer is to simply require a tiny donation like one to five dollars to a charity (like Watsi) or non-profit organization (like the EFF). YC now has (at least) two payment processors who could handle the transactions, either in real currency (Stripe.com) or virtual currency (Coinbase.com): http://stripe.com http://stripe.com http://coinbase.com http://coinbase.com The payment processors will always have upstream fees that need to be paid, but if they're feeling generous, they could waive their profits on the donations. If for some reason a person objects to donating to the EFF, then just give them a choice of charities, including the YC funded Watsi.org: http://ycombinator.com/watsi.html http://ycombinator.com/watsi.html https://watsi.org/ https://watsi.org/ The altruism would also be good promotion for YC, Stripe, CoinBase, Watsi, and whoever else is involved. If you want to give a break to the starving university students, then let them by-pass the donation requirement with an *.edu email address. To keep everything fair between new and old users, the tiny donation could be an annual requirement. I sincerely doubt the kinds of hackers who want to contribute to technical discussions will have any problem with making a small contribution to one of many known-good charities.

tptacek 12y ago
I like this idea a lot, but it won't work in practice without killing off serendipitous contributions from people associated with stories here that happen to find out about HN and join just to answer questions. That happens a lot, and it'd be a shame if we killed it off.
- jcr 12y ago
  That's a huge and important point. We all love to see the contributions from the people associated with the stories (well, I should only speak for myself, but it's seriously one of the best parts of HN). Using an eventual required donation in conjunction with an initially usable account (e.g. allowing "X" days/comments/submissions before requiring a donation) might be able compensate, but it would not solve the underlying CAPTCHA, drive-by trolling, or spam problems. It seems safe to assume the increased friction of requiring a tiny $1-5 donation (micro-payment) to a good cause will reduce the desired and beneficial contributions from people associated with a submission. The tough question is, "By how much?" It would be difficult to measure when associated people show up to add their contributions to relevant submissions. It would take just about all of the data on HN, and some very elegant code. The results would still be imperfect, but the results might still be useful. Even if actual measuring proves to be too difficult, a rough guess (opinion) of better/worse for before/after could still be useful. (Heck, removing per-comment karma scores "worked" to reduce hostility/competition even though we don't have any solid measurement data to prove it) And the tougher question is, "Are we sure?" Contentious comments (dumb/mean) have always been a problem in open discussion systems, and similar is true for abusive manipulation (spam, ring-vote, ring-flag, etc.). Having a gate of an act of altruism could also both assure intent/interest and improve quality enough to actively encourage associated people to consider commenting to be even more worthwhile than it currently is. In other words, there's also a second less obvious safe assumption; we're far more inclined to join a good discussion on a topic of interest than a bad discussion on the same topic. Without testing, we just won't know if the added friction of a required donation would be overall harmful, or overall helpful, or roughly even. Prior to Stripe/CoinBase/Watsi/... the idea of requiring a tiny donation just wasn't feasible, but now, it might be an experiment worth running. But the toughest question is, "How much will it hurt to try?" If it really did kill off contributions from associated people, then it would certainly need to stop, but other than the possible temporary reduction of associated contributions (which could be reversed), I'm unable to see any other real or lasting harm. Even if requiring a tiny donation turned out to be a totally failed experiment in forum design, it would still do some good in the world. You might be totally right and it might fail in practice, but until we run the minor risks of actually testing it, we'll never really know.
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by jcr 12y ago

tptacek 12y ago

I like this idea a lot, but it won't work in practice without killing off serendipitous contributions from people associated with stories here that happen to find out about HN and join just to answer questions. That happens a lot, and it'd be a shame if we killed it off.

jcr 12y ago
That's a huge and important point. We all love to see the contributions from the people associated with the stories (well, I should only speak for myself, but it's seriously one of the best parts of HN). Using an eventual required donation in conjunction with an initially usable account (e.g. allowing "X" days/comments/submissions before requiring a donation) might be able compensate, but it would not solve the underlying CAPTCHA, drive-by trolling, or spam problems. It seems safe to assume the increased friction of requiring a tiny $1-5 donation (micro-payment) to a good cause will reduce the desired and beneficial contributions from people associated with a submission. The tough question is, "By how much?" It would be difficult to measure when associated people show up to add their contributions to relevant submissions. It would take just about all of the data on HN, and some very elegant code. The results would still be imperfect, but the results might still be useful. Even if actual measuring proves to be too difficult, a rough guess (opinion) of better/worse for before/after could still be useful. (Heck, removing per-comment karma scores "worked" to reduce hostility/competition even though we don't have any solid measurement data to prove it) And the tougher question is, "Are we sure?" Contentious comments (dumb/mean) have always been a problem in open discussion systems, and similar is true for abusive manipulation (spam, ring-vote, ring-flag, etc.). Having a gate of an act of altruism could also both assure intent/interest and improve quality enough to actively encourage associated people to consider commenting to be even more worthwhile than it currently is. In other words, there's also a second less obvious safe assumption; we're far more inclined to join a good discussion on a topic of interest than a bad discussion on the same topic. Without testing, we just won't know if the added friction of a required donation would be overall harmful, or overall helpful, or roughly even. Prior to Stripe/CoinBase/Watsi/... the idea of requiring a tiny donation just wasn't feasible, but now, it might be an experiment worth running. But the toughest question is, "How much will it hurt to try?" If it really did kill off contributions from associated people, then it would certainly need to stop, but other than the possible temporary reduction of associated contributions (which could be reversed), I'm unable to see any other real or lasting harm. Even if requiring a tiny donation turned out to be a totally failed experiment in forum design, it would still do some good in the world. You might be totally right and it might fail in practice, but until we run the minor risks of actually testing it, we'll never really know.
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