Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN?
A lot of problems this site faces are due to the large influx of new, anonymous users. So I was wondering, how would this website be different if there was a small (say $5/yr) subscription needed, at least for posting. For one thing, it would have less (active) users, but we know that the sweet spot for social news sites is when they have a relatively small amount of users. Also, these users would be easier to identify and perminently ban if necessary. Finally, these users would most likely be those who are more positive in their interaction with the community. I find it hard to imagine a troll paying.
There are of course negative side-effects, not least of which is the locking out (from posting) of hackers who may not have a paypal account/credit card. Also, some may feel a sense of entitlement, an expectation of service-level. On the plus side, if there is anything left after the transaction processing, it may go towards covering server costs and whatnot. Even if pg/YC was to make some money off of this, I doubt us raging capitalists would mind, given the value we get out of HN. It might also go some way towards proving (if successful of course) that users will pay for quality and that ad-supported/freeminum is not the only way.
So, do you think such an alternative-reality HN would be desirable?
171 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadThat doesn't mean it's a good idea, though. I think it almost certainly isn't. It sends entirely the wrong message, it's a much bigger pain to implement than it's worth, it might work all too well at cutting the volume of submissions and comments (if you think a crowded HN is bad, fork HN -- the code is open source! -- put it up on your server, and see how exciting that is)... and it won't work. You really think a troll won't pay five bucks a year? I think you severely underestimate the entertainment value that a troll derives from trolling.
If, in fact, HN eventually declines to the Reddit level, the solution will be the same as ever: Some of us will head off into small invite-only groups (note that invite-only is distinct from for pay), and the rest of us will migrate to a handful of other new social news sites which will thrive for a while until they succumb to the same problem, or to an entirely new problem, after which the cycle begins anew. As someone has said in the past, it's like restaurants, or music clubs. They flare up, grow, shrink, and die out all the time.
The reason I think trolls won't post as much is that while trolling is based on impulse decisions, making a payment is a much more elaborate procedure and I don't think the impulse to troll would usually be enough to overcome that threshold. But even if it does, blocking that account, noting the payment details and blocking further re-registration with them raises the re-registration barrier even higher.
In other words, users will not pay to troll. They'll pay to make a comment, which may or may not be a trollish comment. (A lot of trolls can't, in the heat of the moment, tell the difference between a troll and a comment -- that's what makes them prone to being trolls.) And then they'll have paid, which means there's no barrier at all to future trollish behavior from the same person.
A wise old man once told me: "Time is more important than money; I can always make back any money I lose, but time is gone forever."
I think a better argument would be, "you have to start over" and starting over sucks.
I think a truly motivated troll might pay five bucks.
But now we've got a clear, concrete ban target. Thwack! Out five bucks.
Can they sign up again? Sure! I wouldn't even try to stop them. But thwhack!, out another five bucks. How many trolls are $100 interested in trolling?
The equation for trolling radically alters when money is involved. Just like how spam wouldn't be practical if we could somehow charge even a penny per email. (Which I am well aware is impractical, but if it was, it would destroy spam.)
But is that a problem HN needs to solve? My impression is that whatever PG is doing to keep out the spammers is working very well. I don't see a lot of complaints about it, even from PG himself. (Not that PG ever seems to complain. He just quietly goes about the business of trying things.) What people seem to be complaining about is a sort of gradual degradation in the quality of comment threads. That's not a problem you can easily solve by banning anyone, unless you really do want to make people flee in terror. ("That LOLcode meme used to be funny, but now it's ten months past expiration! The penalty is death.")
The people who have contributed in the past could be autoinvited and could invite others as well (maybe depending n karma -> 100 points -> 1 invitation... )
Seems like a pretty broken model to me.
Same for many of the elite hackers in countries like China and Russia.
They flare up, grow, shrink, and die out all the time.
I think you pretty much captured the cycle of online communities.
-sorry, where is it?
Basically, part of the value (most?) of HN is that there are other people here. Charging $5 would mean less content submitted and fewer comments. If the NYTimes or WSJ tries to charge, it doesn't significantly change the content of their sites since they're both created top-down by paid writers and editors.
When you're trying to monetize user-generated content, you can't try to do so in a way that will mean less user-generated content. This is the same problem that Facebook has - their value is that you have so many users and content from those users, but if they start charging they won't have so many users and people will find another site to replace Facebook with. Sure, one could make the argument that here a $5 fee could keep out some of the less desirable people, but it would also eliminate many of those who make the site desirable. It's not that the content doesn't have enough value to be worth $5 to me, it's that once you start charging money, the value of the content drops as many won't pay for it.
That, and there's no "cat in a bag" situation: I know exactly what I'm getting.
I think Metafilter is a positive example of a small fee policy working.
Hasn't experience over the past 10+ years answered this question been already?
1. Audience shrinkage — less readers and posters would mean less garbage, but it would also denote less of everything, including quality…
2. Less of an attraction even to one subscribed with the subtraction of public visibility (outside search engine scope).
3. Already a tried and failed proposition — look at NY Times, WSJ, etc.…
The genie is out of the bottle and their really is no way to stuff it back in and cap it again…
2 - I am not sure I understand this, can you clarify?
3 - HN is not a newspaper, it is (among other things) a filter and a community. While people may not pay for content, they might pay for these two.
HN is a bunch of bits. Worth about as much as any other bunch of bits. Without the people's investment of time and effort in submitting and commenting the site is worthless.
Does the phrase opportunity cost ring a bell?
Time spent socializing with smart people is very difficult to value in dollars, but it is certainly not valueless! If nothing else, it preserves one's sanity and morale. And these are very hard things to buy, indeed.
I don't "spend" time here, I "invest" it. As I discover people with similar opinions and complementary skills, my network expands, and my "value" increases.
My time here is not wasted, even if my username isn't orange.
I'd pay $5/yr for this. Hell, I'd pay $10 if it went to a tech charity.
http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi
Unfortunately, by raising the bar to participation, a lot of people who would be an asset to the community are prematurely excluded.
My suggestion for dealing with trolls and flames is applying a "three strikes" rule: If a new user's average comment rating drops below negative two, their account gets frozen for a set period of time. Or, you could apply some sort of "three strikes" rule (three comments -4 or below result in a freezing).
FTFY.
The problem with staying free and censoring unpopular opinions is that sometimes those opinions turn out to be right.
This means finding a feature that adds 5$ a year in value but is not needed for the rest of the site. Which is not as hard as you might assume. One obvious option for HN would be the ability to bookmark and follow users. Even a simple table with timestamps of last post, and the numbers of posts in the last hour, day, week, and lifetime might do it.
Everybody can contribute, even those for who $5 would be a very large expense, and you'd be surprised how big a portion of the world that would be.
Some Indian, Latin American, Chinese or Russian hacker would - even if capable of paying - find themselves locked out because they can't pay by card, either because they don't have them or because the IPSP won't allow them to use it.
We're not in charge of HN, we can't set up a billing system; we can't make Paul's decisions for him and he asks for input when he wants it. As such, these musings are just killing time and taking up space on the front page where actual hacker news could be.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465991
What bothers me more is the increasing number of meta-talk.
And I didn't mean to imply that he was actually famous, but he was certainly well-enough known among the target audience that having his name attached made a significant difference.
This thread isn't uninformative. Among other things, it is evolving into a catalogue of other sites that have tried this idea, and how it might have worked out for them (or not).
When I was a high school student, it would have been difficult for me to participate in HN. $5/yr was a significant amount of money for me then ($5 = INR240). And I wasn't even poor.
Many people I know totally couldn't have afforded $5/yr when they were students. I am sure there are countries where US$5 is even more unthinkable.
Now is it worth it?
That being said, it does seem to have worked for Something Awful.
Reputation systems that are based on anonymity don't really work well in the long term, your 'net creds' don't translate in to 'street creds' and vice versa unless there is a one-on-one correspondence between the two.
Wikipedia has made some big goofs with this, allowing people to claim a reputation they could not back up in real life. There was the one guy that claimed to be an authority on religion if I recall it right that had just read through 'catholicism for dummies' or something like that.
I also like the fact that it's a one-time purchase; I don't have to worry about a yearly charge to a card that I feel like closing.
SA also gets a decent amount of cash by charging for things which are free on most forums; forum avatar, avatar title, searches, archives, private messaging, etc.. I wonder if this model could be applicable to a more minimalist site like HN, or any other non-forum.
Counter-proposal: make it easier to tie someone's HN name to a real identity. Perhaps require email address confirmation and a waiting period for new accounts before allowing a first post?
On the high-ratio orange-username thing: neat idea but comment karma depends so much on how early in the life of the thread a comment is posted. Readers who check in less frequently and respond to longer threads are less likely to score high regardless of comment quality. (Also, I'm sad to not be orange.)
HN means a lot to me.
How smoothe (and trust-worthy) is the credit card payment process. If it makes registration/payment more of a hassle then the time/trouble cost would personally be a barrier when the $5.00 would not. But that's just me.
I would pretend that I was seriously considering it, and then would find something that was nearly as good and never come back.
cf. Salon.com (despite the fact that it went free years ago)