Not a large fee. Just something like the local equivalent of $10 USD.
The deposit sits in escrow during a probationary period while the new account holder has to prove they’re here with good intentions. If the account starts spamming, advertising, trolling, or plugging their slop-coded garbage, they get banned and forfeit the deposit to the instance they signed up with. If they interact in good faith for the “probationary” period without showing signs of being an LLM bot / gaming the system / “karma farming”, the deposit gets refunded in full and they exit the probationary period.
If they don’t interact enough to prove their intentions here a good, the deposit still gets refunded in full but the account gets banned.
This would virtually eliminate drive-by spam and trolls while also funding instances and encouraging positive engagement.
Is it feasible? Probably not. Is this an idea likely to be popular? Nope, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting it here. Do I think this is a good idea? Yep.
You can’t employ any measures like this on what is a fully open network by design.
Someone can set up an instance that doesn’t do this the same day any organised effort to do this takes place
And honestly, for someone who gets a kick out of being a pain in the ass, $10 isn’t going to stop anyone remotely determined.
Still get the benefit of the determined people funding the instances they’re using.
Going by my gut, so happy to be told how I’m wrong, but the majority of (well meaning) users that come to Lemmy aren’t going to drop $10 to see what it’s about, even if there’s a promise they’ll get it back again.
Hell the reason Lemmy.world is the biggest instance is because most of the other instances asked a question before allowing you to sign up. I couldn’t be arsed with that when I was just arriving to see what it was all about, so that’s why I’m on this instance and still on it because I can’t be arsed moving.
Added friction on the web generally ends up discouraging the users you want and does very little to put off the users you don’t
They can browse for free to see what it’s about. That’s how ArsTechnica works, and I’ve been a subscriber there for 10+ years.
Sometimes a little bit of friction and slight gatekeeping is a good thing. As my massive block list can attest, not everyone who signs up here makes the fediverse a better place.
Ars technica would have the same amount of content even if there were 99% fewer users, user comments aren’t why people visit. At least I don’t think I’ve ever read them and I’ve been reading it for around 2 decades, the users are irrelevant to the main purpose of the site.
The same is not remotely true of the fediverse. The quantity and quality of the content is directly related to the volume of users
I agree with all of this.
I don’t think I even realized that ars technica had a comments section until now.
On here, I comment pretty frequently, but rarely if I would be the first commenter on a post. I will often read an article I’m not that interested in here if there’s an active discussion in the comments, and I regularly seek out ask_[blank]_ type communities to read through posts with a lot of comments.
I agree with this as a concept. I’d even be willing to just pay the $10 outright. I feel like the community provides a valuable service and I think a small fee to keep it bot free is reasonable. I’m not sure it is doable, but one can dream…
Bad idea.
Driving adoption is much more important than inconveniencing spammers.
A good idea if your want to make sure this place is empty 🤣
Wouldn’t real spammers and bad actors just set up the account anyway? They’d just wait for the probation period to end to start doing bad stuff.
This is very similar to what metafilter does, you have to buy an account to participate. People with skin in the game act better. You don’t get it refunded. But I think philosophically this is similar and we can take lessons from it. I think it’s valuable
It’s nlan unpopular opinion because it is an objectively terrible idea.
Enjoy the 5 users who are going to do that.
Just create your own safespace where you can ban everyone you want. You can do all the government ID checks you want and if you want to charge money just charge it.
This capital-fascist dog whistle is weak sauce suck my dick you coward.
I think the better idea would be nano payments for every resource used including moderation fee. Neither server resources are free nor is the moderation time. And lemmy has no ads.
Users should pay their fair share for resources they use, and suddenly spam wouldn’t be a problem, scraping wouldn’t be a problem, and mods would get paid for their work
dont think it will work, it will just force people back to reddit, its only useful if you are providng “premium content”
Users pay a monthly fee to an ISP. It is the ISP who should be distributing the resources to the attached entities out there, as they are making profit hand over fist, regardless of the infrastructure involved. Without websites, ISP’s are nothing.
You could try this as a funding model for a particular instance, which is maybe potentially viable if you actually offered some kind of extremely high quality content or moderation…
But it wouldn’t stop drive by shitposts and trolls.
Unless you made the instance insular, self contained, not federated with any body.
If you are federated to any other instance… well they can now access all your stuff without the paywall.
Strictly speaking, you can spin up basically a private forum/webzone, but your ‘business model’ here makes basically no sense unless it is totally exclusive.
I don’t know if it would be a fit for the fediverse, but I do know of what seems to be like a great community that has seemed to survive for a long time where others have long gone by charging something like $5 to sign up one time.
I would assume it would eventually lead to corruption.
