

Ask HN: Would you pay $5/yr for HN? - alexandros

I know what I am going to say is borderline hubris in this web 2.0 world we live in, but bear with me.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So, do you think such an alternative-reality HN would be desirable?
======
mechanical_fish
Of course I would pay $5/year for HN. I lose more money than that every time I
compose a new comment. Time is money, after all.

That 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.

~~~
dpapathanasiou
" _Time is money, after all._ "

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."

~~~
supahfly_remix
I get your point, but how does the wise old man explain how to make back money
without losing even more time?

~~~
swombat
The value of your time increases with time. Making back 1 hour's worth of your
time in cash today will probably only take you a few minutes a 20 years' time.
However, making back 1 hour's worth of your time in time is impossible.

~~~
redrobot5050
Originally? The wise old man bought and sold mortgage backed securities with a
triple-A rating. Now, he stands out in the street corner with a cup in his
hand and a cute cardboard sign.

------
mdasen
No.

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.

------
ilamont
Metafilter has a one-time, $5 signup fee, plus restrictions on new users to
post content:

<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).

~~~
cosmo7
a lot of people who would be an _asshat_ to the community are prematurely
excluded

FTFY.

The problem with staying free and censoring unpopular opinions is that
sometimes those opinions turn out to be right.

------
kirubakaran
I'll give you one data point that you may want to consider:

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.

~~~
yesimahuman
Oh you aren't from the us, I got ya. That would be difficult.

------
stewiecat
This is what MeFi and Kevin Smith's forums do. I believe Smith donates the
money to charity, but his aim is to keep the crap out.

I'd pay $5/yr for this. Hell, I'd pay $10 if it went to a tech charity.

~~~
cbryan
I'm glad someone mentioned this. MeFi has done really well and certainly
hasn't lost steam since requiring a paid account. If HN were to go in a paid
direction I think the posts and comments should be available to anyone (a la
MeFi).

------
GeneralMaximus
Nope.

I _just_ turned 18. I have no bank account, no credit card, no PayPal account,
nothing. Charging for HN would mean asking me - and others like me - to leave.
HN is a valuable website, and I don't want to lose it.

Here's an idea: make HN invite-only. Members get to invite others only when
they reach a certain karma level (say, X). Once they reach level X, they get
to invite 3 people. After that, they get to invite one more person per Y karma
points, where Y < X. Moreover, inviting others would mean losing those Y
points.

Diligence on the part of existing users would ensure only people who post
insightful content get karma.

~~~
hrabago
Invite-only would get rid of people like me, who come here to learn from those
who are able to do, with hopes that one of these days I'll be able to do it
myself. I lurk, yes, and only try to comment when I feel I can contribute to
the discussion. But I certainly don't troll, or post witty one liners just to
get my karma up. A pay site would at least allow me in, but I don't know
anyone here, and no one here knows who I am, so I wouldn't know how to get an
invite.

------
tptacek
Yes, because what Hacker News needs most right now is a bigger sense of
entitlement among its users.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Do you have any idea how much billable time is lost/spent with a group of
highly skilled hackers sitting around commenting? Millions of dollars? Tens of
millions?

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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I realize that I may have sparked this line of argument with my quip about the
time I spend posting on HN. But the fact is that for every hour I lose here I
might well save an hour somewhere else, because some person posts something
about github, or Linode, or Dropbox, or some other tool that I might otherwise
never have heard of and I get that much smarter.

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.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Seconded. I've spent a lot of time here over the last few weeks as I've slowly
come to understand the culture (not that I _really_ understand it yet) but
that is time well spent. I've seen several pointers I've already used, and
come away enthused and eager to work.

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.

------
wheels
Only if it would stop posts like this.

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.

~~~
ojbyrne
Meta-discussions were really the death of digg. Soon after come the
"experiments."

~~~
calambrac
Sorry, but I disagree. The death of digg is squarely at the hands of the
trolls, spammers, and morons that flocked to the site like locusts.

~~~
ojbyrne
Ok, I stand corrected. The meta-discussions were the _start_ of the death of
digg.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
No, you're confusing cause and effect. The arrival of the spammers and trolls
led to the discussion of the long(er) timers over how to prevent it. The meta-
discussion was the symptom, not the cause.

~~~
ojbyrne
I don't think I am. There were meta-discussions very early on.

~~~
calambrac
Kevin Rose was famous and pitched the site hard. The community started going
downhill very early on.

~~~
ojbyrne
Except that he didn't pitch the site hard at all for the first nine months (in
fact he repeatedly denied being involved with it). And he wasn't all that
famous (host of a dying show on a dying network). It was only after the VC
money arrived that that started.

~~~
calambrac
I'm obviously not going to argue with _you_ over the history of digg, of
course you're intimately familiar with that, but I felt like I got there
pretty early, and I only personally got a couple of month's worth out of it
before I felt it was overrun.

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.

~~~
ojbyrne
Actually I'd love to argue with you - my memory is not perfect, and I'd love
to hear other people's perceptions. What point in time were those couple of
months?

------
pg
I'm pretty sure this is not the answer. Metafilter does this, and I would not
want the kind of culture they have there. What's prized there is _sounding_
clever, and I wouldn't be surprised if the $5 fee was partly responsible-- if
people were more willing to pay $5 to hear themselves talk than to e.g. answer
a question someone had asked.

~~~
bd
Wow, that's rather harsh. You must had some really bad luck with Metafilter,
or it must have had changed significantly since I frequented it more often.

I remember _Ask Metafilter_ as an excellent resource for questions on many
topics with many thoughtful responses (especially from people that knew a lot
about what was being asked [1], not just the internet-usual - "I'm clever so I
think X is the answer").

Indeed, it was usually worth to start your search on some particular problem
on Ask Metafilter before turning to more general Google search.

Metafilter also has much less transient feeling than HN. There is a strong
culture of not repeating yourself, so people detect duplicates and link to
previous instances of similar questions/answers.

This leads to answers have more "archival" feeling to them. You know that it's
worth to spend a lot of time on your answer, because if anybody in the future
will ask a similar question, there is a very high chance that somebody from
the community will remember your answer and link to it.

[1] As an example, here is Steven Wozniak paying $5 just to post one comment:

[http://ask.metafilter.com/47835/Woz-More-like-Was-am-I-
rite#...](http://ask.metafilter.com/47835/Woz-More-like-Was-am-I-rite#728258)

Or Adam Savage looking for inspiration for the MythBusters episodes:

<http://ask.metafilter.com/55694/Old-west-Mythbusters>

[http://ask.metafilter.com/111253/Movies-where-someone-
hangs-...](http://ask.metafilter.com/111253/Movies-where-someone-hangs-onto-
the-hood-of-a-driving-car)

------
inklesspen
Something Awful Forums charges a $10 one-time fee (plus add-ons), and it
doesn't seem to impede people from doing truly stupid things, as you can see
with a simple glance at their Lepers Colony:
<http://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php>

~~~
nihilocrat
I'm surprised how the $10 barrier suddenly makes the quality of people and
discussion on the forums much, much better. You can at least depend on
everyone to use decent punctuation and spelling, among other things. Being
able to lurk before signing up an account is a crucial part of this; otherwise
people won't have any idea if you have quality content or not, and will
default to not signing up.

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.

------
marksutherland
kuro5hin.org did more or less exactly this and it pretty much killed the site.
Growth reversed, and the trolls and spammers turned out to be willing to pay.
Personally I'm in favour of enforcing strong identity so that folks
reputations follow them around.

That being said, it does seem to have worked for Something Awful.

~~~
jacquesm
Second that. I wouldn't like to use an overlong username though so I've
shortened it a bit. And to put my money where my mouth is I've just added my
full name and email address to the profile.

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.

------
nostrademons
Probably yes, but think of all the budding college & high school entrepreneurs
that that would discourage.

$5/year is absolutely nothing now that I'm employed. But for a kid who doesn't
hold the purse strings, it's much more than that. It's not really the money -
most parents also have no trouble sparing $5/year. It's the hassle of
convincing the parents that it's worth it, and not just a random time-waster.

Plus, as soon as the 'rents are paying for it, you lose the sense of "this is
something I'm doing for _me_ , and it's my own identity and not my parents."
For me, one of the reasons I got into computers was because my parents knew
nothing about it, and I was overjoyed when I started getting jobs based on
connections _I'd_ made online instead of ones my mom had setup for me.

~~~
kirubakaran
Wow you nailed the story of my life with your last para.

------
andr
Make it $5 per HOUR. That would be the perfect noprocrast.

~~~
pistoriusp
I'm finding the ability to not override anymore is saving me a ton of time.
Funny how when I could override it I would... Even though I set up the
noprocrast parameters.

------
vaksel
the problem is that a lot of people refuse to pay on principle. To many people
it doesn't matter if its $.01 or $99, the whole process of paying is a barrier
to them

~~~
cool-RR
I have that principle, but I'd relax it for HN. I think it's because I'll know
that I'm being charged for a good reason.

That, and there's no "cat in a bag" situation: I know exactly what I'm
getting.

------
ratsbane
My first thought was absolutely yes but then I began to wonder whether that
would do anything for the quality of submissions. $5 isn't very much; why
would that discourage low-value comments any more than high-value ones? I
assume you mean that reading would still be free but you would have to have a
paid account to post?

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.)

~~~
marksutherland
I think strong identity is going to be how this sort of thing is eventually
settled. Email addresses is fine, but there are plenty of sites which provide
a means of getting a throw-away address. Maybe mimicking how banks and
governments handle it and requesting N out of M different kinds of identity
might help?

------
alexandros
[Since I can't update the post itself anymore, I'll write an update with a
reply]

After the great discussion that has followed, a number of good modifications
has been proposed that could significantly reduce grievances. The fee could be
one-time, and proceeds donated to charity. Also, uers with a lot of karma
could invite other users (in case they cannot register due to no cc/no
paypal/underage etc.) This would probably require an area for users to request
invites etc. but even the process would certainly make users more mindful of
their posting. Additionally, the new users could be mentored by the one
inducting them, further increasing culture preservation. Keep the thoughts
coming.

------
lgriffith
I find HN a mixed bag. Some things are very good, most things are so-so,
somethings are really bad. Just like real life.

The simple act of registration is enough to keep me away from most sites. At
least this one is good enough that I thought it worth registration. Add a
charge? I don't think it would be worth it for me to continue with it. I can
find what it gives me elsewhere.

Like it or not, the Internet is a jungle.

The good thing about a jungle is that its full of all kinds of living things.
The bad thing about a jungle is that its full of all kinds of living things.

When you live in a jungle its eat or be eaten then you die no matter what.

------
Retric
I might pay 5$ a week for HN as it i now, but I think you would lose a lot of
users at 5$/year. At which point the site might not be worth 5$/year. If you
want to make money off of a website the most proven method is to use
advertising or to have a basic free site and then add a premium tier.

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.

------
jacquesm
No, and not because I can't afford it but because I think that any site that
charges $5 for people to _contribute_ content is misunderstanding the beauty
of the web.

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.

------
pauljonas
No.

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…

~~~
pgebhard
Like others have been mentioning here, Metafilter has a fee like this, and
from what I hear, it works really well for them. Thinking about it more,
though, I can see how it would could really prevent new users from wanting to
join. I'm not sure exactly what would happen. I'd be willing to support an
experiment and try it, though.

------
omouse
Easily. I'd pay more depending on what kind of content is shown. If there was
a way to block 37signals, joel's blog, and some others then I'd be up to
$10/month ;)

------
natch
No. Building a critical mass of good users is hard enough without adding false
friction.

If you're looking for a place to improve, I'd look at the way karma is used.

IMHO sites like HN should continue innovating with ways to better calculate
and utilize karma. In most cases, it's done very badly, rewarding early
commenters disproportionately, so that people with a lot of time on their
hands get a bigger voice.

------
adnymarc
I would definitely pay (whether $5 or $50 doesnt matter) a year but feel that
paying just to post/comment would merely serve to limit the number of people
committed to quality contribution without offering added value to the core
community. Essentially you would have to pay to help other HN users. What if
the stories remained public but viewing/participating in the discussion
required membership (at a cost)?

------
Barnabas
OP suggested using a fee to reduce trolling and somehow qualify users. It
addresses the problem in a round-about way using economic incentives to filter
"non-HN" users, or trolls. Inefficient.

In order to qualify site membership, why not require a non-monetary merit
test? For example, one can only sign-up or comment/submit for a month if they
can solve a simple computer problem appropriate to the site content, in this
case maybe deciphering a simply double-encoded string (say, HTML entities +
rot13 or base64 or something). If you only want only "hackers" on HN, make
them "hack" their way in, like some kind of text CAPTCHA for computer geeks. I
guess a math forum could make people solve an equation to comment, or a
zoological forum could ask some taxonomy question or something.

If the real problem is that HN needs money for infrastructure in a depressed
ad market, then call it what it is and do a voluntary fundraiser, ala
Wikimedia or public radio. Those of us who value this site will pony up
accordingly.

------
twopoint718
Yes. I'd probably pay double that.

I think that there is a huge difference between $0 and $ANY, in that it forces
the the user to place a value on it. I think that the model to look to is
MeFi, which has very high-quality comments, high-quality posts, and as others
have stated, it seems to have more _memory_ than your average site. Old posts
are frequently referenced and there is a strong culture of DRY (don't repeat
yourself).

The main objection seems to be that the site will shed users that can't/won't
pay. For those users that don't have credit cards or Pay Pal (I, for one, hate
PP with all my heart) could there be other options to make payment more
flexible? What else is out there if you don't want to limit yourself to
payments of only those types?

But I do think the $5 barrier to entry will improve, or maintain, the quality.
If you don't want to pay, sorry, but I like HN more than I like J. Random
Bozo's troll.

------
electromagnetic
I love the community here at HN, but I don't want to discourage new users from
joining this environment. I do believe that good moderation by long-term users
will keep the environment stable, but eventually HN is likely to burn out like
an old candle and charging any amount of money is just hurrying up the process
that will lead to the end of HN.

------
grouchyOldGuy
I flat-out refuse to use PayPal for anything. I am reluctant to use my credit
card except for shopping sites that have a decent track record of security. A
small site with a Comodo certificate won't get my business. If HN used Amazon
for payment, then I would consider it since I already have CC info on file
there, it's no additional risk to me. Like some others have said here, I don't
think it would do much (if any) good for this site. It won't deter trolls, at
least not dedicated trolls. I think moderation is the only way to keep this
from degrading to Reddit, then Digg, and lastly 4chan. Delete posts that don't
conform to this site's goals and TOS. Ban users that violate TOS more than 'x'
times. I think this site is pretty good at self-policing itself already. The
tone is much more business-like and adult than any of the other techie
news/social sites that I frequent.

------
cturner
I think in time we'll see communities based on membership where you do pay a
fee, and then if you behave badly you'll get nuked and kicked out of the
community. And it needn't be limited to one site. You could have a site
goodcitizen.com and then people would have accounts with it, and their
membership there would allow them to participate in blogs, etc.

The trick will be in who finds a good way to do the 'justice' system right.
I've thought about this model quite a bit..

Another problem is payment systems. Part of the culture of the internet with
payments is that you have to work with parties who have a business model based
on bad faith. Google checkout seems to be changing that though, and now is the
first time I've thought about the model since evaluating them.

------
andrewconotes
I would not pay because the content on HN isn't so specialized that I cannot
find the community elsewhere. Furthermore, trolls are easily identified and
ignored, like SPAM.

However if there were a subscription, I think you need to think about the
value of this community. Charging just posters would unleash a backlash by the
most active members of this community. Their thought would be, "why would I
PAY to participate in a community when everyone else can obtain the value of
my knowledge for FREE?" Using the email analogy again, if everyone who wanted
to email me had to pay $5/year, I would probably receive no spam, but more
importantly no emails at all -- not even from my mother who would just use a
cheaper substitute (phone).

------
merrick33
$5 is not much of a barrier to entry for someone with an agenda, say troll or
marketer.

~~~
eli
But it sure cuts down on repeated spam if they have to find a new credit card
and pay a new $5 every time they get booted.

------
skmurphy
I pay $20-30 a month for LinkedIn and find HN at least as valuable. I would be
willing to pay the same for the knowledge that's available in these forums and
the ability to take part. I find it extremely thought provoking.

------
iuguy
No.

Sorry, let me elaborate. I do comment on HN, I generally don't post as much as
I should. I find HN valuable but no more valuable than other community sites I
frequent. If HN went to $5/yr I'd lose some of the discussion but ultimately
I'd move on to a different community that didn't charge $5/yr. Whilst there
are many on this site that probably would pay the $5/yr for this community
with this amount of users, the community would lose a lot of people and the
quality of the community would drop with the quantity (as in you're not just
losing deadwood and trolls here).

------
juliend2
I don't agree with the idea, but if it was required, i would definitely pay
this amount to stay in the community. I dont visit Digg anymore since i know
HN! For me it's an evolutionary step.

HN means a lot to me.

------
nickathens
The content is what makes this site interesting. So I understand the concept
but submit doing anything to discourage content is a bad business model. I am
primarily a reader or "lurker", but am also an ANGEL investor and CEO of my
own self funded start up.

So I would propose you develop a model that has a charge for reading that can
be waived by posting credits. So announce 6 months from now it is $5 a yr but
by being active you can reduce the charge. I realize lots of loop holes, but
basically charge readers not content creators.

------
mattmcknight
It does work well for MetaFilter, but voting seems to work okay here. What
exactly would you describe as "a lot of problems"? What problems need to be
solved?

What if you could buy 5 whuffies (or whatever points on here are called) for
$5, but could only post comments if your score remained above zero? Or maybe
something in the stackoverflow type scheme, where the points are correlated
with privileges?

------
gr366
I'm reading this thread while drinking a latte that cost nearly $5. Yes, I
would pay $5 for a year of HN... even if there were still trolls.

------
d0mine
Metafilter has a one-time $5 fee <http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi>

~~~
brendano
Metafilter has been very successful in preserving its user culture -- and it
has a very particular community, with a sophisticated writing style, etc. It's
easy to imagine that if they hadn't done the fee, the site could have
degenerated into a digg-like mess.

I think Metafilter is a positive example of a small fee policy working.

------
CalmQuiet
If the charge served to reduce the chaff from unvetted commentators, then I'd
have no problem with it. Depending on...

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.

------
hs
now hn has orange, why not extend it further? like belt-color levels

say a new user is of white belt and can't post after s/he of age one week
(then automatically get yellow belt and can post 1 post / day max) ... higher
levels can post more per day

and maybe a penalty function like temporarily giving 1 day noprocrast for
trolling

------
jimfl
No, but I'd pay a $20 one-time fee. The reason for this is that I find
recurring costs to be a hassle to worry about.

------
FredSource
Surprising to me to see how many would pay $5 per annum. Personally I believe
in open communication!

"Stopping" anonymous users can be done with a little bit of design in the
sign-up process.

If money is required adding some ads down the RHS of the screen would easily
make that much ...

just my 2 cents...

------
Alex3917
I'd pay ten dollars a year for HN if everyone else had to pay five dollars a
year. :-)

In all seriousness, K5 provides a pretty good example of what happens when you
do this:

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/9/10/13920/3664>

------
lecha
I would pay if you find a way to avoid excluding people who are assets to this
community, but don't want to or can't pay.

Maybe there could be a system of free trial that would extend to a free yearly
subscription for people whose karma is high enough by the end of the trial
period?

------
wigglywonk
No.

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)

------
bsgamble
Yes I would. While I recognize that a pay for access methodology won't cure
all of the ills of the virtual world, like a padlock on a door, it will serve
as a deterrent to casual ne'er do wells.

------
floozyspeak
A troll would totally pay to manipulate and pee in your sacred pond.

------
jjudge
No, I wouldn't pay for it. Shouldn't the trolling issue naturally work it self
out over time? If anonymous users are the issue perhaps add some additional
validation of identities?

------
vivekamn
Yes. I would also pay to get more attention for my questions. Sort of like
many game worlds, where you can earn points either by activity or by paying
hard cash.

------
calvin
Yes, definitely. Hacker News is worth more than $5/year to me with the amount
of time I spend on it and it'd be worth it if it keeps users more reasonable.

------
jherdman
Isn't this the same thing that Metafilter does? How's it working out for them?
I know I paid my $5 for them, but I haven't been back there in a long time.

------
pneill
I'd pay. I left Digg because the signal to noise ratio got so bad that just
felt it wasn't worth my time anymore.

------
nazgulnarsil
we need a reputation economy. currently karma isn't good for anything but
stroking people's ego.

------
thorax
I would be happy to pay (much more even), but I don't think it's necessary to
help the community.

------
Dilpil
How about a two tiered system, whereupon we maintain both and open and invite
only board?

------
zandorg
How about a lottery where everyone pays, but where the winner gets loads of
free karma?

------
randomtask
If it meant that this place doesn't go the way of reddit/digg/etc. then sure.

------
gcheong
No, but I might be willing to go through some kind of hazing ritual.

------
c1sc0
Sure I will. Where do I send the money? California or Boston?

------
dattaway
Small $5 paypal button. Keep things simple. I'd click.

------
yawniek
have users with a certain reputation in and then charge a fee for new ones or
just forbid commenting for users without reputation?!

------
jwr
I would pay and I think it might be a good idea.

------
miql
Yes! HN is my main source of aggregated news.

------
jderick
How about a karma floor for upmodding?

------
killingmichael
100%. It is my main source of news :)

------
maxer
i never post here but have been reading isnce its inception and would gladly
pay $20+ a year

------
brianobush
yes, if it was moderated by a editorial staff - not crowd rated. otherwise,
no.

------
drsnyder
Yes. I would pay $5 per year.

------
adamo
I would gladly pay $5/year

------
known
I'd pay $5/yr for HN.

------
cellis
I would pay $5/month.

------
dreur
Yes without a thought

~~~
inffcs00
I'll pay that and a little more without hesitating.

------
jnl
Yes, unquestionably.

------
joanou
No. I'm too cheap.

------
ewakened
Yes for sure

------
kuniklo
I'd do it.

------
3pt14159
Absolutely

------
flexterra
yes, I would pay $5/yr

------
ggruschow
Yes

------
eduardoflores
No

------
VonGuard
no.

------
popschedule
no

------
tphyahoo
I had to think about this for a while, but finally: no.

It worked for something awful but it pisses me off that if I have something
valuable to contribute to a thread I have to cough up ten bucks. Just feels
wrong. I'm doing the work right? Something awful still gets paid when someone
reads my post and clicks on an ad. So, I have a negative feeling about
something awful and never go there.

I might pay $5 for something that was truly value added for me, such as a
secret list of "best of" content or something, or the ability to join a
community of meta-moderators, or like that.

------
TweedHeads
A thousand people will pay, a hundred thousand won't.

HN will be an elitist forum of jerks in an echo chamber with fewer posts and
two or three comments per post.

There goes the fun down the toilet.

------
weegee
no, there are too many other free sources for articles like this

------
giles_bowkett
google "clay shirky micropayments", kids.

