Can you use money as the only moderator of a forum?

Community-Made Projects
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I spend most of my day hanging out on a forum where money is the only moderator. All users pay to post. Upvotes cost money (which goes to the post creator) and posts/threads are ranked by the amount of money community members have invested in them.

This probably sounds horrible to you, but it’s a surprisingly pleasant place.

  • Since every post costs money, posters automatically have a reason to put some effort into their posts and AI slop and spam is less common.
  • Since upvotes cost money, there aren’t bots and sock puppet accounts artificially promoting content.
  • Since money is the moderator, the burden of determining the visibility of content falls to the community as a whole, and not one person (or small group) who gets burnt out.
  • And it does feel kinda nice when you get a little pocket change because someone upvoted your post.

I’m curious what you think of this concept. Where do you think it will fail? What dynamics might be interesting to add?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

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The userbase selects for those privileged enough to have discretionary funds and whom don’t see socializing in such a place as problematic?

I believe such an environment would reproduce the hierarchies already present in society. Those with more cash to spend on hand get more visibility on this platform, so the opinions of the powerful get amplified. Which also means selecting for people who believe such hierarchies are justified.

Influencers and advertisers are more likely to avoid the platform because it has few users and no governance to take down bigoted or otherwise harmful posts. The fact posts and upvotes cost money would not be a factor as paying money to promote posts on social media is already the norm.

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The people I want to hang out with would never go for that.

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Yes, such a place turning into RichRank ™ is a possibility.

However, in a traditional forum where the moderators are chosen by the owners of the site, don’t we have an equally problematic dynamic? As long as the owners appoint moderators who agree with me, we are happy, but if that is not the case, we are not so happy and have no recourse.

In this case, spending a little money could allow you to gain visibility to the wider community, who may want to hear what you have to say.

But it is likely that some level of web of trust needs to be applied so that is not purely most money wins. I’m mostly interested in the idea of everyone having skin in the game as an alternative to strong moderation by individuals.

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May I ask you to elaborate why?

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Many of them are disabled or working-class people who are financially struggling to begin with.

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What if the amounts were quite small? eg fractions of a penny? At the very least, the goal is to prevent bot farms and spam posters – which I think a very small payment might do.

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I think a site should have explicit values (like this forum does!), and moderators who follow those values are then a lot less problematic than implicitly letting the powerful dictate the tone and culture of the site under the guise of meritocracy.

I’m all for decentralizing power, I just don’t think connecting your governance system to a hierarchical institution does anything but reproduce the institution’s hierarchies, defeating the point of the decentralization.

Fwiw, I recently wrote about anarchist cybernetics, which is all about governance with a flat power structure.

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Thanks for the link. I will check it out. I am not very familiar with anarchist principles (mostly thinking about this idea from an economics background).

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Hosting such a forum sounds like nice work if you can get it, but I don’t see how you could get a site like that off the ground.

On most popular sites there exists a mix of free posts and paid posts. We usually call the paid posts advertisements. These tend to be pretty sketchy because the ROI for scams is higher and they can out-bid legitimate goods and services.

So what do people post about on a forum where they have to pay? I would guess they engage in self promotion, try to pump their crypto holdings, or are trying to get some kind of ROI.

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It’s mostly technical/philosophical discussion. It doesn’t trend toward advertisements or self-promotion because the fees aren’t that high (very minimal really). The money a poster/commenter receives from upvotes is more meaningful, but in that case the poster/commenter has to write something that other users want to read.

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Even at a penny per upvote you can do 100 upvotes for a dollar. That’s practically nothing in today’s economy. Likewise if a new post cost a quarter and every comment cost a nickel. Still dirt cheap in an economy where Costco is one of the few places where you can have a halfway decent lunch for less than $5 (hotdog and soda for less than $2) in most of the USA.

I’d like to see if the forum you’re talking about actually exists, and is accessible without creating an account. Then we can get empirical and see how it actually works in practice.

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i feel like it would probably make “blowing up/hitting it big” even more stressful for people

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huh! interesting idea. somethingawful is pay-to-enter and that’s worked pretty well for it, but this is pretty different.

you mention upvotes and visibility, so i’m guessing the format is a redditlike?

i’m skeptical of the idea that there’s no moderation on the site admin level, since they would at least have some legal liabilities to consider, but i suppose small projects like this often don’t consider that sort of thing haha. (the number of indie “social media” that literally don’t even have terms of service is, uh, large.) pretty big failure point there!

as with lots of similar little web communities, it seems like something that works fine until it doesn’t! as long as the place isn’t especially visible or high-traffic, you can muddle along without having to deal with too much spam/trolling/gore/etc for a while. with a pay-to-post model the main concern would be people looking to make money more than people looking to be disruptive, so i suppose it’d trend more scams/ads/bait than trolling.

i’m curious why anyone would upvote anything, since it costs money to do so! goodness of their hearts, i suppose? a lot of disposable income? maybe i am too poor to understand the subcultural practices/expectations… i cannot imagine liking a forum post enough to give someone money about it.

if the payout from upvotes can cover or exceed the cost to post, it doesn’t seem like spam would be especially discouraged; it seems like it’d trend towards bait posts polished or genned with llms, restating the same handful of popular ideas/posts over and over again. which, to be fair, is something that happens everywhere, lol.

this seems a bit misinformed? scams and spam almost always involve some upfront costs; they just have to be lower than the potential payout, which in this case they are (“the fees aren’t that high (very minimal really). The money a poster/commenter receives from upvotes is more meaningful,”). also true of ads in general lol. spam emails, for example, cost some money to send. + twitter/x’s paid blue check system was implemented with this same logic (if people have to pay, then it’ll cut down on spam/bots/etc) and famously has not worked at all. if anything it made the problem worse, since now people can just pay to get a little “totally not a bot” stamp which makes spamming much easier.

if the forum is avoiding spam and scams so far it’s because of luck and lack of traffic, not because money is an effective spam-proofing method!

~

i’m curious what the payment processor & structure is for this! is it a crypto thing? “no rules just vibes” doesn’t play nice with most payment processors these days.

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It does exist (since 2021) and is accessible without an account. I seem not to be allowed to include links in my posts. But you can find it at stacker [dot] news

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Oh, so this is based on Bitcoin? That might explain some of why Stacker News doesn’t seem to have a spam problem, a troll problem, or an advertising problem. You have to be willing to deal with cryptocurrency in the first place just to participate.

That’s a hard pass for me.

Also, why does Stacker News bear a suspicious resemblance to Hacker News?

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I think there are some ideas that work fine at a small scale, but not at a large one. Even this forum, with its more traditional modding structure, would break down if we got flooded with thousands of users.

I can see how the forum you describe works well with a small community, and it’s an interesting scheme to look at and consider. But the moment someone joins and decides to flood the system with excess cash, it will break down. Hopefully that doesn’t happen.

Over on MelonLand there was a thread discussing something similar, but with a votes system instead of money. You’d be awarded votes at join time, and then would trade and spend them during your day to day. It was an interesting thought experiment, and one of the things I like about virtual worlds and video games is that we can build experimental economies and see how they work in real time. Many MMOs have their own economies, and so far all of the successful ones have either had to institute regulations of some kind or–in the most extreme cases–simply remove resources from the hoarders at the top in order to continue to be functional (see Kingdom of Loathing’s meat inflation crisis).

It’s also tempting to try and create self-regulating systems that need no further intervention from us day to day, but I haven’t seen any that work yet. All the evidence I’ve seen so far shows that redistribution of wealth (whatever wealth that means; votes, cash, neopoints, whatever) is the only thing that makes economies work long term.

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Wow, this is fascinating but (in my personal opinion) horrible.

I assume part of why it works with relatively little friction in this instance is because the de facto subject of much of the forum is the currency itself. I guess if there were a load of people who Really Loved The Euro or whatever, they might pay a few euro cents to post on a forum that was mostly about the euro, because they just love the euro so much that they get a little dopamine blast every time they get to spend a few cents of it. But I’m not sure if those people exist for the euro, or indeed any currency other than the one that the actual forum deals in, and I’m not sure that a forum about the euro would be that interesting either.

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I have spent a little time on MelonLand. I’d love a link to the thread you are describing if you are willing to share.

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It started as a copy of hacker news for bitcoin development topics, so definitely has a resemblance to HN.

Lets imagine that instead of any bitcoin involvement, users paid a monthly or yearly subscription via credit card or paypal. This gave them a balance of “points” to use in the same way as Bitcoin is used on Stacker News.

In that case, do you think that you would still find the concept of using money in this way unpleasant?