Free To Use. Pay To Play. | Hacker News Reader

Free To Use. Pay To Play.

techcrunch.com

8 pointsvaksel16 comments

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.

wasn't that what newspapers were for?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

So we need the hackers (people who hack instead of talking about nosense such as evil operssion by $evil-du-jour or who shared data with riaa etc) and (aspiring) busines people. How do we build a filter to keep everyone else out?

I'm coming up short on ideas. Recommendation-only memebership?

An IRC panel, perhaps? Private torrent sites handle things that way. Prospective members go on Mibbit and ask IRC for an invite, and the IRC people determine if the person seems like a cool person. No outright rejection, since anybody can send an invitation email, and the community retains some control of the proceedings.

Of course, that gives the IRC channel a lot of power. That might not be a good thing.

What do they look for? You can't look just for technical skills (consider slashdot). I suppose you have to look for other things such as absense of zealotry, absense of intention to conform/conflict and pursuit of that which works?

Yeah, that's it. That's what I'm looking for in an ideal community - relentless pursuit of that which works. This describes both the hackers and the business people.

That's kind of what I'd figure. Nothing tech-focused: just people deciding whether they want a particular person as a constant presence on the web site.

People will probably lynch me for this, but I think SomethingAwful is a fine example of how a money barrier for membership works really well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com