[lbo]

This can work with an ad profit-sharing model for people who post content (which is how sites like ustream work, as far as I know), but that model doesn't really extend to article aggregators and I highly doubt a user would donate $1 to the community every time he sees an article he likes. An entire newspaper doesn't cost much more than that (nor do I think any balance of cost-to-post vs cost-to-upvote would really work). And you don't want users with deep/generous pockets doing all of the upvoting while the rest of the community is leeching.

If you could manage to build a reddit-style community behind a pay-wall, the pay-wall could be used to generate the 'finder's fee' money for posts and you could allot every customer x number of 'coins' that they could upvote with--needs to be tied to what they pay to prevent scamming. The end product would need to be vastly superior to HN to have a hope at attracting the initial community, but that's basically what Bloomberg machines do for finance, right? I'd easily pay $100/mo if not more for the best hacker news and commentary on the web (you could have the same pay-to-post, get-paid-for-upvotes model for comments to keep them quality).

[chrmaury]

I would fully except there to be people with deep pockets paying more often than others, but that's an interesting thought. How much would that affect the content being produced.

The pay wall was exactly what I was thinking. It would get users used to paying for upvotes, and then when that money runs out, their credit card is already linked, and makes it easier to fill up.

The main goal is to create a market which supports high quality/high cost content.