I always thought that Something Awful’s $10 paywall was pretty effective. If you’re an asshole and break the the rules, you’re out $10 and have to pay again. If you’re a big enough asshole, then you get permabanned.

You’ll hear a lot of people complain about it and never register over the $10. I paid my $10 once almost 20 years ago and never got banned. That was the best $10 I have ever spent.

You're deeply confused if you think SA is/was not essentially defined by some of the most capriciously cruel people online. The founder just shot himself after leaving behind a wrecked family with multiple ex-wives, abandoned children, and DV convictions. FYAD, Helldump, etc. really define the spirit of SA, and it's also a precise counterexample to your argument about paywalls being a good thing.

Metafilter (used to?) charge $5 in the same vein.

That Lowtax was a piece of shit says nothing about his effectiveness in separating assholes from their money. The system works.

Is "absence of monetization" a value? Do we expect this with any other business other than the ones on the internet - news papers, magazines, local community events etc.

Absence of monetization, to me means its a hobby project funded by you and not a business, that also perhaps means it has not kept up with the competition - think servers, performance, websites, mobile apps etc. Maybe avoiding ad based monetization could be what you are talking about but then you still got to pay the bills some how, so unless you monetize, I don't know how a business would survive. Considering this, I don't think its a surprise that your users are on the decline. Besides, doesn't everyone like to complain about ads online but very few really want to pay for alternative paid services anyway e.g. email, navigation, private messaging etc

It is a value. It means that the incentives of the user and the producer are aligned: to enjoy the time in a community, rather than have one try to extract money.

Aside from that, not everything needs to be a business, and even then, not everything needs to be profitable.

By that logic lets stop paying street sweepers and sanitation workers. See, their incenitives are mutually aligned with the interests of those who walk the streets, so there is no reason to "extract money".

Sure thing, but the article in question EXPLICITLY mentions "You should make a budget that supports having a good community, or you should find another line of work.", which means that one way or another funding is needed, unless you're comfortable with making someone read through kilobytes of drivel and spam in their free (or perhaps not so free) time.

I'm sure if you stopped paying the street sweepers, you'd find out that a lot of them don't care about sanitation, and the rest can't pick up the burden. That's why they get paid.

Even then, I'd rather have one of those motivated by cleanliness service my area. Just the same way, I'll choose a forum that's not monetized.

I don't see how that sentence means that funding is needed. Plenty of forums exist with community moderation. Whether the person doing the work is compensated in respect and social connections, or money, doesn't really make a difference to me.

Exactly. And what do people do when there are tasks that: a) most people don't care about and b) are fundamental to the well being of the community? They offer a reward for accomplishing those tasks.

Why would they service your area at all? Are you sure that your area has people that would go around keeping the streets clean 8 hours a day for nothing in return? Not choosing a forum just because it's monetized is an odd choice to be fair, considering that this conversation takes place on a website that's, well... monetized.

Read the article again and see the context that the sentence was used in. Yes, plenty of forums exist with community moderation, but if the goal is to make a forum a place that is not going to become a disaster, a motivated and well compensated employee is the only solution. Otherwise you're relying on someones occasional contribution to the well being of the community rather than have things go smoothly at all times.

>Is "absence of monetization" a value?

If capitalism is a value, then anti-capitalism is also a value. A lot of people believe the presence of capitalism on the web is fundamentally antithetical to what they see as its fundamentally anarchist/anti-establishment ethos.

Besides, the cost per month of running a small forum nowadays is less than what many people here spend on a single lunch. Not everyone is running a business or a startup.

Ah, the fundamentally anarchist/anti-establishment ethos of millions of computers connected to each other (making a coordinated and organized establishment of their own with hierarchical substructures).

>anti-capitalism is also a value

Say it with me: communism.

Say it with me: anti-capitalist philosophies besides communism exist.

Communism is such an overloaded word that baseline communism as defined by David Graeber is probably a better antonym to capitalism.

Since you run it, why not change the core values?

The core values would be the entire benefit to the form of communication. The massive decline in classic forums has been a net negative for the Internet. The 2000s forum culture was a lot different from the current state of things, and better in many ways. You didn't have the level of de facto censorship that you see now with the massive centralized communication platforms.

>You didn't have the level of de facto censorship that you see now with the massive centralized communication platforms.

I disagree. Not every forum was SA or 4chan, plenty were aggressively moderated. The primary difference between then and now that I see is that, back then, moderation wasn't always considered censorship.

I'm talking about the upper level of modern content moderation, imposed by the platforms themselves. It's the autonomy that is missing nowadays.

>primary difference between then and now

is that there is little choice and even less variation