I think that literally every poster worth anything leaving is probably going to slow the growth of the site more than a couple of small barriers. The thing about barriers to entry is that they impact good users one time only. Adding a minute or two to a new user, ONCE, is not a big deal to that user. They spend a minute doing a thing, and then they never have to do it again and they just enjoy the site forever. Adding a minute or two to a shit stirrer who wants to make a bunch of shit posts and keeps getting banned suddenly adds up quick. They have to go through that process EVERY SINGLE TIME they want to make a new account. It slows them down massively. If they want to create 100 accounts to spam us they have to spend 100 minutes making those accounts. That’s not insignificant at all.
Small barriers to entry work very well as a deterrent. It’s not going to catch everyone. There is no strategy that catches everyone. But it catches some of the lazier ones, meaning that the mods have less work to do. It’s one tool in their arsenal. And depending on how its done, it’s an easy one to add.
Adding a minute or two to a new user, ONCE, is not a big deal to that user.
Most people click out of a website that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This would absolutely stop a bunch of people from joining, and that includes good users.
You don’t need to prevent ALL interaction and viewing the site, the vast majority of people lurk, at least when they first look around. Requiring some cooldown, a few hours, or days, when someone makes an account is not a big deal as they would lurk anyway, and it would improve the site immensely. Send an email that they can now post when the cooldown is off, and it’s fine.
I could see something like this working, although it’s hard to overstate how quickly people will nope out of a site they’ve never used if the slightest hurdle appears. If someone lands here from reddit or Twitter, and sees something they want to comment on, they might make an account – but they could easily just move on and forget all about the place if the instant they make that account they get a “you can’t post for 24 hours” message. I don’t think an email would work at the end of that period, either, because I’m betting many users don’t attach an email to their account or don’t read emails from social media websites.
Maybe a “first 5 posts are free” approach would work? New users can create an account, create 5 posts/comments as fast as they want, but then the 24-hour cooldown period hits. Everyone but users who want to sign up and post a ton immediately would be largely unaffected, and that group of users would still get a sample before they’re directed to watch mode for a while.
But do you mean like requiring a moderator to approve new users? Because that just creates even more work for moderators for little gain. In the non-virtual world, vetting is important because physical spaces and organizing just has higher stakes than silly online discussions, but online anything is really about the number of active users and good posts drowning out the bad. Vetting an online forum means it becomes as slow as real-world recruiting. Or maybe I’m making thus stuff up.
You don’t need to manually approve, that would be bad. Just add like a cooldown of a few hours or days when you make a new account, after that you can comment and post. Seems like an easy fix since most people lurk anyway, especially when they first join.
I dunno, that could turn away some normal people who want to comment, while still letting chuds who want to wreck sit on an account for a few days before wrecking. It’s difficult to be precise with this no matter what I guess. Purges as well always get a few good people, same as it always was :deeper-sadness:
Maybe it’s a job that could be given to a set of trusted users? Sort of sub-moderators but only for vetting new users.
That would make things slow as hell. Make new users go through some sort of annoying quiz on trans rights or something.
