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 i

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.