
Free To Use. Pay To Play. - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/23/free-to-use-pay-to-play/
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DenisM
What I would pay for is for someone to read through stuff and only bring
interesting stories to me. Depending on quality I would pay many hundreds of
dollars per year for it.

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samson
wasn't that what newspapers were for?

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DenisM
No, newspapers were in business of printing that which appeals to majority of
people (with some segementation - e.g. conservatives vs liberals or some other
division in large enough groups to support the business). Conforming to
majoirty's interests is counterproductive when my goal is to learn what's
behind the next turn.

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rokhayakebe
I would pay 2 to 3 dollars a month for HN. Sometimes I I think I would pay up
to 10 dollars per month.

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vaksel
I think it could probably get away with charging $99.99 and still avoid losing
most users

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zimbabwe
You underestimate how many of us are college students.

The functionality of Hacker News is very basic. It's the community that
matters. Charing money would reduce the community, and somebody would quickly
make an alternative site for people to jump to.

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DenisM
Reduction in community size might actually be beneficial. It may be able then
to reacquire a set of common interests, thus making stories and comments more
relevant to everyone.

Of course using monetary barrier may not be the best way to achieve this. I
don't know what would work better though.

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zimbabwe
Money works for some things. It worked for Metafilter. It would not work for
Hacker News, where until recently the best thing it had going for it was how
nobody knew about it. Its apathy towards gaining users gave it a real edge.

But hackers are often the penniless idealist sort, and you need that sort to
complement the actual businesspeople. As I said: college students are valuable
for this site. And for something as generic as a social news site, money isn't
worth it unless there's something very specific gained for the purchase, and
there are already pay-for social news sites taking our valuable cash.

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chaosmachine
I think charging a $1 registration fee would kill spam pretty effectively
without too much downside.

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zimbabwe
Until very recently, I had no faculty for buying things online. It wasn't
poverty, it was lack of a credit card. So I have a latent bias against blunt
user fees without any trial first. That may be coloring my opinion here.

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chaosmachine
It's possible to get a PayPal account with just a bank account, so that's one
solution.

Alternatively, perhaps a "submit a paragraph explaining why you want an
account" screen could also be used for people who won't/can't pay $1. Someone
would have to weed through the entries, though (maybe make it open to votes,
like stories).

