Ask HN: Would You Pay for HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would You Pay for HN?

3 pointsdesertraven16 comments

I would be okay paying a one-off fee for lifetime access.

I would never pay a recurring fee. Subscription services sap a little mental energy from the subscriber for as long as they are active (and occasionally after they are supposed to have gone inactive)

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that feels this way. Recently, I decided to buy a one year gift subscription to a substack I follow and give it to myself, just to avoid that feeling.

I too feel this way. Also, how do you find substack as a resource? Rank it higher than HN?

No. It’s not important enough, and I can get most of the same news elsewhere.

It's not the news. It's the commentary. Mostly sane, which is getting harder and harder to find. (And sometimes harder and harder to find here...)

You might have a point here. Frankly I have no interest in most of the commentary since a lot of it devolves into arguments having little to do with the original topic, but the main thing is that we have no idea what someone’s qualifications are when they respond to something here. For example, I have NO business providing advice to start up founders as I have no experience there.

But a paid model could open the door to verifying a person’s qualifications on various topics. Then we’d be able to know to some degree if a person’s taking out of their ass or not.

So yeah…not a bad point, especially if it lets to credibility and better experiences.

Why might a paid model open the door to accessing a person's qualifications?

It's possible that a condition of a paid model is that the merchant (YC or whomever for example) could require an interview, resume, GitHub profile/code samples, etc. I'm not suggesting anything NEAR what a job interview process is like (that's insane enough as it is, we don't need any more of that!), but just something to reasonably verify that the person has some relevant qualifications. Then the publisher/merchant/etc. (again, YC for example) could add "tags" or "badges" to a person's profile showing they're a paid user, and badges for the skills they've "reasonably" verified for that user.

This wouldn't be anything near an ironclad guarantee (what is anymore, with anything?), but would provide people a relatively fair amount of confidence that the person WANTED to be part of the discussion bad enough not only to pay to get in, but to pay for the privilege of, and go through the (relatively easy) work to, prove their credibility in certain subjects.

I'm not at all envisioning anything requiring people to divulge their real life identities to the public (only the publisher for verification/billing reasons), force them through hours and days and weeks of endless interviews like job hunting, or limiting what they can and can't say or respond to. It's just an idea intended to show people, along with every comment, that the person is *REASONABLY* qualified in certain areas of expertise.

So, let's say for example I were to comment on an Ask HN thread about how to pitch to VC's. Without this kind of system, how might you know if I have any idea what the hell I'm talking about? (Because personally on that topic, I'm clueless and therefore not at all qualified to give people input.) This allows the reader to see the person doesn't have verified qualifications for getting investment capital. Doesn't mean their comment is invalid or bad, but allows the reader a chance to "take it with a grain of salt".

On the other hand, if I were to comment on writing code in say, Ruby, Go, etc. and I'd been verified as having at least some degree of experience with those, the reader can have a better degree of confidence that what I was saying wasn't total bullshit.

Just a few thoughts on how this kind of thing could be useful for some folks. :-)

HN's superpower is that you get a unique list of articles that you can browse. Yes, you can get the links somewhere else but it would be next to impossible for you to get the same collection of information plus you get the commentaries which gives you information you can't get elsewhere.

I would probably pay but it would be nice if the money went to a nonprofit related to journalism.

Interesting idea about the non profit. I too would probably pay.

I'm wondering why you ask. What is the impetus here?

Good question! I was thinking of starting a discussion forum, but am just wondering of ways to minimise the amount of moderation needed if it had high traffic. The quality of content here is usually high, and I’d want to maintain such a standard. But I can only imagine how much work goes in behind the scenes.

So was just curious if people would pay for high quality discourse. I think I would!

You would probably be better off looking at discussion forums that use that business model. HN is part of a larger business model unrelated to what you are considering doing. Asking such questions here likely doesn't actually get you the kind of info you are looking for.

I'm in agreement, and certainly could have phrased the question differently to get nearer to my goal. Though I'm curious about the question I did ask nonetheless.

No. I've never paid for any digital media.

Hahahaha

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