No credit card. You have to send a $1 bill by snail mail, which is proof of "work" (mailing the bill) as well as $$. You enter the bill's serial number when you enroll the account, and the account activates when the bill arrives. You can be pretty anonymous this way.

I once proposed a scheme like this where you would donate to charities who would post lists of serial numbers they had received, for this purpose, but it never got anywhere. Maybe we need it more now than we did then.

I guess instead of mailing a $1 bill, if necessary it could be a hand drawn picture of a kitten (artistry not required). Authentication would involve checking the paper for pressure marks made by the pen. I wonder how many would take the trouble to fake that.

Those of us old enough to remember Compuserve know that the cost of entry was exactly why the quality was so high. I was lucky enough that my employer paid for it. I was also active on various comp.os.* Usenet forums. Both were great sources of quality information but Compuserve stayed “high signal” for longer. Usenet - the birthplace of trolling - eventually degraded to the point of near uselessness. The signal was drowning in noise. Mainly because some people are just shitty. Which is worth remembering here. Behind every AI agent spamming HN (and everywhere else) is a human who thought this was a good idea. Why do they think that? Maybe that’s the line to pursue for how to deal with this issue.

It worked for years for the SomethingAwful forums. A nominal charge for the ability to post, with plenty of 'timeout' chances for rehabilitation before an outright ban keeps out most of the junk.

It feels wrong at first to pay for commenting on a forum, but the alternative is almost always a gentle slide towards a trash dump. AI means that slide is almost a vertical slope.

Pay with karma?