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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

That old saying doesn't flip around to mean that any service you have to pay for is worth the cost.

I personally don't want to use niche social networks, which is what any pay-to-play platform is, due to the barrier to entry.

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It's a feature not a bug. How many trolls will disappear if you have to pay to post? It brings other problems like economic disenfranchisement leading to social disenfranchisement for those less fortunate in the world but it is an interesting design experiment.

Most of the people I wish to read or interact with on social networks will never use a system that requires an up front payment.

To me (and, I assume, most people) it is most assuredly a bug.

That may change though. Say we brought in UBI to solve the problems I described above. At the same time twitter is over run by bots making engaging there even more exhausting than it is now. Maybe your peer group have been banned because of one thing or another. Would you consider it then?

Once a Member instance is big enough to be attractive for spamming/phishing/otherwise-exploiting the bot herders will arrive anyway, using compromised Member clients, just as current spammers don't generally pay for the data volumes they generate. Perhaps the entry barrier of charging will keep Member small enough to delay this.

"Delay" is the key word. Not prevent. Any service big enough too attract more than "fringe" users will start seeing spammers eventually.

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