alt Hacker News> I don't respond back them to them, but I always want to respond with "dude this was something I vibe coded over the course of a week that almost by definition has no means of monetization", but of course it would be just arguing with a literal machine.
There is such an level of assymetry where it takes us effort to suppose even write such a comment but then we know that its going to a machine so to no avail.
And yet the spam messages still land in the mail so what happens is that we just end up being frustrated without any avail which is just annoying and rage-inducing.
I think about Something Awful a lot.
Something Awful has a $10 one time fee to buy an account; this is cheap enough to not really exclude any potential posters, but it does a good job weeding out a lot of low-effort spam; if you post a bunch of low effort stuff your account gets banned and you would have to buy another, which could get pretty expensive very quickly for spammers. In the rare event that you do get a persistent spammer, it just leads to more revenue for the site.
Importantly, I think it's a myth that people won't pay for things on the internet. People will pay for things if those things don't suck. Something Awful was/is fun to go on, I've gotten many hours of enjoyment from it, so the $10 fee is a bargain to me. I think it's telling that people wouldn't bother using Facebook if it actually cost them money, because they don't actually enjoy using the site very much.
I'm not saying that SA is perfect and we can argue about the quality of its moderation, but I think it's a model that is underutilized; I think such a model might be able to survive now that so much of the "free" internet has been botted to shit. I would like to point out that SA both predates and outlived MySpace, so it can be a sustainable model.