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"You really think a troll won't pay five bucks a year?"

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.)

There are sites which have severe problems with persistent trolls -- the kind that, once banned, will come back under pseudonym after pseudonym. A lot of spammers fall under this category. And, yes, I expect that charging money will solve that problem. This may be why some sites have had great success with charging money -- they needed a big hammer to solve a big problem.

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.")

"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."

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

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.

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.

It's much easier and more likely for someone to give you money than to give you more time.

You cannot always make back any money you lose, if you could, the world would not be in this current financial crisis and the many before it.

I see what you're saying... but I'm young enough that I could loose my house and cars and 401k and all the other junk, and still make it back in 20 years, probably less because I'm more productive. Granted, that's not true for everybody. But i think it's only true for the super rich, and the very old. My dad's doing pretty well. if he had to start over... I don't know if he has enough time to make it all back but he's smart and hardworking. I'm sure he could make a dent.

I think a better argument would be, "you have to start over" and starting over sucks.

Many jobs can be summed up as exchanging time for money. Also, to make back the money you lose, you have to use time.

So what about making HN invitation only. I like the idea.

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... )

I think that it would lead to HN becoming quite insular and elitist. More pragmatically, I think discussion would suffer if we judged new entrants solely by whether or not 'good' contributors vetted them. This might inadvertently weed out people with differing viewpoints.

So how would an elite hacker who knows no one currently on Hacker news join under your system.

Seems like a pretty broken model to me.

If she's an elite hacker, she already knows someone on HN, or could easily get to know someone...

Interesting that assume said elite hacker is female.

This just won't always be true. Consider an eleven year old hacker, he/she may be elite for their age level but are unlikely to know anyone on the site.

Same for many of the elite hackers in countries like China and Russia.

Well, a truly elite hacker would simply hack their way past the block. You can check that one off as solved then.

I don't think i can truly fork HN. HN is not only the code, it's also pg's leadership and the community that has gathered around it. (if you can give me the code for that, i'd love to fork :P ) Anyone else than pg making this work is much more difficult, as HN already exists and critical mass will be hard to acheive.

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.

It might discourage drive-by trolling, but it does nothing to stop the more determined griefer. If anything they'll see it as a challenge.

I think you underestimate the probability that the world does not divide neatly into trolls and non-trolls. Rather, the troll lurks within us all, and without constant vigilance, under the right conditions the troll will emerge!

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.

Yes, I am talking about intended trolling. 'Accidental' trolls can be brought to shape by the community, as they always have. Also, the payment T&Cs should say that the community still has the right to kick them out, refunding the amount if necessary.

That is certainly true. I've sometimes run across people cross-posting comments here and on Reddit who've actually taken the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a civil version for HN.

Having done something similar, it's not necessarily taking the trouble to write two versions. Sometimes after writing one version, you mellow out, have a change of heart, or just realize you might not have been completly right (that "W" word :-), so the post on a complementary site is more thought out and polite.

I would pay more, but that still wouldn't solve the problem. A better solution is to not allow anonymous posters. That said, a lot of folks here post under their real name or have info about their real name on their handle. This would do a lot more than charging $.

They flare up, grow, shrink, and die out all the time.

I think you pretty much captured the cycle of online communities.

"fork HN -- the code is open source!"

-sorry, where is it?

http://arclanguage.org/install

or write one thats better