And how many of those are bot posts?
So they use imaginary money?
That interface 
Yes it is and I like it; I was playing around in a fork for Monero currency and it was cool to experiment.
The BitTorrent private (paid) trackers also carry some of this because they allow curated content AND comments within them. Niche spaces are made for niche users as well.
Perhaps you need to learn about one of the most decentralized networks on Internet. The payment was specifically made for keeping the spam away.
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and doing what? so… you aren’t allowed to transfer your bucks.
spammers get voted off the island soon enough
this
now you’re thinking!!!
Maybe it could all be an extension of the gamification plugin
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the community has been around since 2021, and I know most of the users. Sure bots try to post there, but since it costs them money, they tend to stop pretty quickly.
the money is bitcoin, which may be imaginary depending on who you ask.
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Not my thing, but why not give it a go and create a Discourse plugin to do something similar!
It would definitely have a better UI! 
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If we are using “bucks” to put up a spam filter of sorts, it doesn’t make much sense to give out bucks to all new accounts. Spammers will just use up all their starter cash and then create a new account and use up all that starter cash.
Flagging and fining doesn’t help if every new user can immediately pay the fee to post (unless the fee has some real cost to them outside the forum – hence real money).
gamification is fun and it surprises me that more forums haven’t tried something like this (even with pretend money).
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I see money as the root of all evil. Money is the biggest enemy of Open Source Software.
Discoin. 
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far be it from me to suggest rubbing some blockchain on anything. I’m more interested in the mechanics of using money in a forum. If there are paid Discourse communities, it seems that an a la carte option (pay to post, pay to upvote, etc) might not be so far afield.
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Metafilter is an interesting case - it costs $5 to sign up. It’s a very civilised place (although not entirely without its problems) and I think they hold that this nominal sign up fee is a big part of that - less spam, fewer drive-by miscreants.
Other than that, the OP proposal smacks to me of ‘one dollar one vote’ and that idea fails in part because the value of money varies extremely widely between different people.
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I would say the most common types of money-based communities are likely pay to access (exclusive content, courses, etc) or pay to support (via donation)… this is much easier because they payments are larger and consistent. There’s still moderation value here, because people don’t want to lose access to something they paid for.
The problem with the smaller transactions (post, upvote, etc) is that at small scales the friction of actually making the payment and the payment processor fees create a barrier that make it not worth it (this is maybe less of an issue in some countries with better peer-to-peer payment systems).
There have been attempts to solve small transaction friction, like Flattr - Wikipedia… but the complexity of understanding and using a system like this still creates a barrier that makes it hard to break into some kind of mainstream popularity. Cryptocurrencies also have this problem.
One modern way to avoid this is to bundle up payment in a package that gives you in-app currency “gems” or whatever you want to call them… many video games are doing this now. Discord also does this with their “Nitro” subscription to some extent (you pay $10 a month and can give “boosts” to 2 servers for extra features everyone can use).
This comes with its own problems of having to spend more than what you initially need, which I’m sure some companies love to take advantage of… things like selling some $1 in-game item, but making the minimum purchase $5.
For a completely different take on this, in addition to a sign-up fee, the long-running somethingawful forums offer an adversarial transaction: for $5 you can change your own title on the site, for $10 you can change someone else’s.
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If I were to say on this,
Paying to access anything means that if you are unwilling to pay money fees, you are not a part of the community. People who pay however, get access to the community, which creates a divide between the poor and the rich. Meaning good ideas are wasted all because you forgot to bring your silver coin to reply. In comparison, we can look at forums with advertising, which also sucks money out of people, and is annoying, but at least one can reply without the act of having to pay.
A pay to interact forum means a very limited community potential because not everyone wants to pay to socialize.
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Absolutely 
l loved this reply.
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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) 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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it seems that the idea may be sound enough but the micro-payment requirement may have more to do with someone else having not tried it.
As I have outlined above, if a user could start out having to pay maybe 25 cents or a dollar that would immediately cure the spammer issue.
this also cures that problem
so the idea isn’t necessarily to make tons of money, it is mostly to keep spammers away and relieving the burden on the moderation staff by making users invest in the quality of the community?
It has always be my philosophy that the way to drive traffic is to provide something people want, even if it is trivial.
If somehow a website could offer benefit that users desired and were willing to invest in as well as pay for. Seems that just outright charging them at the door, you better start out with something they really want.
Something else you said earlier caught my attention:
I wonder how many sites use it and we just aren’t aware
This recent blog post indicates AMD (a large corp) uses it
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This, I think, has a chance of success. Do not connect these in-forum credits with real world money. No one can buy their way in: they earn credit by positive contribution and they use credit to shape the forum (or the experience of the forum.)
You still have the possibility of bad actions by sock puppets and voting rings.
I’m reminded of slashdot’s moderation and meta-moderation. I don’t think it should be forgotten - it’s a case study. From vague memory: users gain moderation points and spend them. Some small random chance that a moderation user will get a metamoderation challenge, to confirm or overturn a moderation decision. Users gain reputation as reliable moderators, or lose it, depending on metemoderation by their peers.
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I personally have found this topic very interesting because the mere mention of charging users to participate caused a large percent of the community to immediately recoil in horror.
And yet, I would guess most already pay for some kind of online service.
The original post is by a new user. None of us know anything about this user. This user may run a Discourse forum (I’m guessing) or several. This user may already have a viable forum which generates income (or several)
The title of the post is ‘Can money be the only moderator of a forum?’. It’s a simple premise. From my point of view the work load on moderators was (at least in part) what was being asked about. Many participants in this community may struggle with the exact same problem. How do I keep trolls and spammers from overloading my moderation staff and keep from running off my legitimate users?
Discourse seems to partialy address this with the trust system.
Can gamification or (dare I say it) charging money (possibly a very small amount) help?
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Thanks for the kind words. I do help run a forum where these ideas are implemented.
I think the problem of bad actions by sock puppets and voting rings is pretty large. I think that any kind of “non real” money will quickly get back to a system that relies on mods. Gamification with points or fake money might help users enjoy their experience of the site and stay engaged, perhaps – if well designed – even shifting behavior in one direction or the other, but at the end of the day it will require human moderators.
Every forum I’ve ever used has had mods, and there are good mods and great mods and not so good mods. It’s a proven system, but it isn’t necessarily the only way. I’m mostly interested in designing a forum that doesn’t require mods. And the thing I want to test out is whether money, being somewhat more valuable than likes and upvotes, can remove the need for mods.
Probably, there will also need to be at least a little influence from web of trust (which is what we did for a number of years – however now it is almost entirely run along the lines I described in the OP).
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Maybe in a small uniform culture - young people perhaps, or pensioners - you’d have enough constancy of value to make this work. But in the real world, someone could see your 10 cents and raise you $10. You’ll end up selecting for a crowd of people with similar disposable cash, and you’ll always be vulnerable to exploitation by someone with more cash.
There’s always someone richer than you.
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There’s always someone richer than you.
Ain’t that the truth. But if the only way they can exploit me is by paying me, the blow is softened somewhat.
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