# Can money be the only moderator of a forum?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-money-be-the-only-moderator-of-a-forum/410209
**Category:** Community Building
**Created:** [August 17, 2026, 1:03pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-money-be-the-only-moderator-of-a-forum/410209 "2026-08-17T13:03:40Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 34

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### Author: ![scoresby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/scoresby/32/574252_2.png) [@scoresby](https://meta.discourse.org/u/scoresby)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2026, 12:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-money-be-the-only-moderator-of-a-forum/410209/34 "2026-08-18T12:58:18Z")

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I did not know about the SomethingAwful pay-to-change-someone-else’s-title thing. I’m in awe.

Bundling is a way to make a money-moderatred forum like this work with normal payment processors, and I agree that it mostly sucks. I might want one recipe from NYTimes Cooking, but to get it, I have to pay for a month-long subscription and that’s just stupid. It seems to me that pay per action is much better…however, there is friction.

There’s a pretty good article about this from 1999 ([Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs](https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs/)) that comes to the same conclusion as you: it’s too annoying to bother with really tiny payments.

But, most people don’t seem to mind tapping a like button or retweet button, and on this money-moderated forum, the upvote button is just as easy to tap, it just automatically withdraws a set amount from the users wallet. I think good UX could get the friction down to a pretty low level that would not be cumbersome to users.

In the case of something like Flattr, I suspect most users stop using it because it’s donation-based. If people don’t _have_ to pay, they often won’t. In the concept I outline above, users are required to pay to send any signal (whether it’s a reply or an upvote or a post). If they want to do the action, they must pay (keeping in mind that the money any user does pay mostly goes to other users).

I don’t deny that it’s a weird system. And I’ve appreciated the feedback from people here.

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