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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

My favorite Internet community is Something Awful, and I'm surprised nobody's followed its curation model: put your money where your mouth is.

Accounts cost $10, and you get banned (meaning you have to spend another $10) if you do dumb things.

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For starters, when most forums ban people it's because they want them to leave. Allowing trolls and assholes free rein as long they're rich kind of runs counter to the whole point.

Having to get out your credit card to swear at people on the internet seems to do a good job of getting people to stop and reconsider. Not always, but it helps.

You can still get permanently banned after a certain number of violations.

The trolls and assholes are still cleaned up after. There are people who spend a few hundred bucks trolling but they're essentially invisible unless you go looking for them.

It's still way better than the way most sites work, which is to let trolls sign up for new accounts for free.

The SA account cost and moderation work very well and do not result in a forum full of rich trolls. I've seen other forums use similar tactics (small cost of entry and strong moderation) to preserve a high signal to noise ratio.

MetaFilter has this model too, though I feel like it emphasizes stopping trolls getting in more than it does stopping banned trolls from returning. You must pay $5 to get a MetaFilter account.

I agree. SA is far from perfect, but the $10 entry fee combined with a group of active moderators improves the quality of the community.

Metafilter has followed this same model for many years.

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