By strong default, I do not pay money for Internet intangibles, but $5 is low enough that I think we might see people buying accounts for their likely-valuable-commenter friends or something, so I'm not quite so opposed (but I think it would sharply slow community growth, and prevent people who we'd love to have around - like folks whose books get reviewed here - from dropping in to just say a few things).
I wouldn't mind associating my website with my account - I already do, now that that's an available field. But even fewer people have websites than phones.
Wouldn't some kind of IP address thing suffice to rule out casually created socks?
Wouldn't some kind of IP address thing suffice to rule out casually created socks?
It would have false positives due to people sharing public IPs (but not computers) on workplace or campus networks.
The recent implementation of a -5 karma penalty for replying to comments that are at -3 or below has clearly met with some disagreement and controversy. See http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/eb9/meta_karma_for_last_30_days/7aon . However, at the same time, it seems that Eliezer's observation that trolling and related problems have over time gotten worse here may be correct. It may be that this an inevitable consequence of growth, but it may be that it can be handled or reduced with some solution or set of solutions. I'm starting this discussion thread for people to propose possible solutions. To minimize anchoring bias and related problems, I'm not going to include my ideas in this header but in a comment below. People should think about the problem before reading proposed solutions (again to minimize anchoring issues).