[forgottenpass]

Then the rich enough are free to continue posting whatever they want, the poor are discouraged from posting anything at all and everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway.

[networked]

>everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway

I think many people would pay to post on an anonymous equivalent of Hacker News. Of course, the question is how you bootstrap such a community.

A more straightforward alternative (which would benefit the poor posters the most) is to offer compensation to the posters through, say, the encouragement of tipping for good posts or some sort of a redistribution mechanism [1]. I wonder how this would affect the natural self-regulation of an anonymous community in what people choose to post. One could say that it would encourage the posting of popular opinions but I think that in most anonymous communities that already happens through other means.

Another, more out-there, idea would be to algorithmically grade the posts and assign a price to each. A long, thought-post post would cost you nothing while a post consisting of just "lol" would cost a lot.

[1] E.g., a voting-based system where everyone pays to post and then whoever paid can upvote other posts in the thread. The money is redistributed among the posters in proportion to the number of votes they got once the thread no longer accepts new posts. Try to come up with exploits for this system and ways of mitigating them.