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Vaniver comments on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't know if I would have made my account here if I had to pay $5 to do so. I would pay $5 now to remain a member of the community- but I've already sunk a lot of time and energy into it. I mean, $5 is less cost to me than writing a new post for main!
I am deeply reluctant to endorse any strategy that might have turned me away as a newcomer.
What if you had to associate your account with a mobile phone number, by getting an activation code by text message? It still has the effect of requiring some real resource to make an account, but the first one is effectively free. There may be some concern about your number being sold to scammers.
If I encountered an unfamiliar blog or forum and wanted to leave a comment, I wouldn't give my phone number to do so, even if it seemed quite interesting. Then I would probably leave the site.
I suspect getting that to work in all countries would be a bit of a hassle.
Hard to say. So far, I've only given out my phone number to online services like gmail (woo 2 factor authentication!) or banks, but that's because my email and bank accounts are more powerful than my phone number and because very few services ask for it. I think there's a chance I wouldn't give out my phone number, and I can't clearly feel whether that chance is larger or smaller than my reluctance to pay $5. (Modeling myself from over a year ago is tough.)
This also runs into the trouble that instead of getting resources from users, you're spending them on users- texting activation codes is cheap but not free.
Do you know how many offers of free SIMs I get here in the UK? Really quite a lot. Phone numbers are as easy as email accounts.
Err really? I'd like to make some sort of bet on this - how many phone numbers you can receive texts from verses how many email addresses I can receive texts from by some deadline. Interested? You wouldn't have to actually receive on them all of course, we'll both use sampling to check.
You are, of course, correct. There'd be a bit of a delay - I was thinking of different email providers, not creating lots on one domain. And SIMs are sorta slow to turn over. But accumulating a pile of phone numbers for trolling would not be hard.
"A pile", sure, but not millions.
The "different email providers" thing is an interesting caveat, but how are you proposing to make use of that caveat in software? It's not that it's impossible on the face of it, but any software that wanted to make use of it would AFAICT have to have a painstakingly hand-crafted database of domain rules, so that you accept lots of gmail.com addresses but not lots of ciphergoth.org addresses.
It's not like that in all countries. In Italy (unless the law has recently changed) you have to provide an identity document in order to activate a new SIM.