alt Hacker NewsI 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 $10 fee is a bargain to me. I think it's telling that people wouldn't bother using Facebook if it actually cost them money, because they don't actually enjoy using the site very much.
I'm not saying that SA is perfect and we can argue about the quality of its moderation, but I think it's a model that is underutilized; I think such a model might be able to survive now that so much of the "free" internet has been botted to shit. I would like to point out that SA both predates and outlived MySpace, so it can be a sustainable model.
I don't know how it might sound like but trust me when I say this, but as someone from third world country, 10$ can still buy us a lot and is a force to be reckoned with.
Especially as a teen as I am and the frugality that I usually hold close to my heart, just as a reference, my monthly budget of me and my friends within college is usually around 30-40$ and I think that I live very comfortably for what its worth.
Alas, I don't think that I would be here if the permanent account costed me 10$, I am sure that I might have read an occasional or two or lurked out here for sometime but I would've lost my interest if it not were for my ability to comment or make account easily/for free within my particular use case. So for me, its hard to support this model given that it would've excluded people like me in the first place (whom I am not sure how many are there though but I certainly talk a lot about Hackernews to my friends) but I still understand from where the rationale is coming from.
I do not know what the ideal form of community formation on the internet is, perhaps its a form of tradeoffs and there would be some community which might still be disenfranchised in this battle against bots.
From my personal opinion, there should be a way to show that some human effort has been placed within the community. Yet its a chicken and egg problem as giving the opportunity to showcase that can also invariably lead to them breaking that trust and spamming (and doing bot-like activities).
Maybe some form of system where people can write words say for example on blog and then they can get a score in terms of how much human effort is put into it. Maybe if we can show that some person wrote for 10 minutes on a keyboard or an hour showcasing the rough drafts from start to finish, it can be worthy exercise and then we can sort of have some key which can be verified with that level of human effort which we can then use to sign up to multiple forums.
I don't think that this last idea is the end-all be-all and I might even cringe reading it in a few years if my account is still up perhaps, but I think that there's really lots of potential in who can discover an good enough way of detecting human effort put in/for a community without having bots infesting the place.
Perhaps Monetary form is just one way of showing that as money is still one of the very few things left which we get in transaction of human effort and it is one thing that shows human effort without being infested with bots except the fact that an unequal amount of money is given for unequal amount of human effort. Some get less and some more which as in the case was mine could disenfranchise people.
It's gonna be interesting nonetheless though to see what tradeoffs are adopted by internet in this war against bots. I wonder what historians will think of this as people trying to re-invent town halls as the previous town-halls of the internet got infested with rats because it got too big to clean and the algorithmic incentives of profits rather than the cleanliness of it all.