[dalke]

So it's a $1 advertising fee? Are I guaranteed that the posting will appear? Do I get a refund if it isn't, and if not, what does HN do if I take the issue to the credit card company? Do I get a discount for many posts? Will HN take foreign credit cards? How does HN pay foreign people? Is there sales tax or any other tax to worry about? How does the infrastructure change to handle credit card processing?

That's all above the question of 'how much will it improve the site?' and 'will it prevent people from giving good, interesting links?'

There's what, a few hundred new links per day in 'newest'? That's ~$200 minus credit card fees. Is that enough to manage the headache of dealing with the issues surrounding money?

My answer to these is "no." It's not worthwhile. What are the problems you're trying to solve?

[chrmaury]

The problem is creating a market for content creation. The idea is that if you can generate revenu from quality content, then more quality content will be generated. Think of what Etsy has done for small craft products or what hollywood has done for movies. HN and reddit have created enough of a viewership that an upvote has some amount of value. However that value is only enough to support link aggregation, blog posts, and other low value items.

the idea behind charging to post/upvote is to generate enough of a return to warrant higher value content creation.

[dalke]

Great idea, but does it work? To start with, please address my questions.