Comment by godelski
5 hours ago
Doesn't that put us into the same position?
Let's also be realistic, everything that can be automated will. Even if that thing is worse off for it. There's a clear historic pattern of this. Companies and people love to be penny wise and pound foolish.
> Doesn't that put us into the same position?
Of course not, because the number of low-quality PRs with $10 attached to it will be lower than whatever number of PRs are being created now.
You also lose out on a lot of would-be PRs. By people who don't have the money, don't have trust, or have a visceral "fuck you" stance. There's a lot more reasons that this suggestion creates a gate that dissuades the people you want. I stand by that the solution is naïve, but you're welcome to give it a try on your projects. I'm sure it'll be effective at reducing a lot of spammers, but I'm also pretty convinced it'll come with a large false positive rate, which is invisible (giving you false confidence)
> You also lose out on a lot of would-be PRs.
I am more concerned about the sustainability of the projects as a whole than trying to optimize the number of potential random PRs.
> you're welcome to give it a try on your projects.
It's not exactly the same, but in a way I'm already doing that with Communick. I'm running one of the few Matrix and Fediverse services where members must pay to have access. Up until last week, I was giving 14 days as a free trial period and no deposit/confirmed subcription required. But now because of AI bots, I dropped it and I am collecting payment info before activating any account.
If I were playing the startup playbook, that would be insane. It's already crazy to try to charge something that people are used to get for free; my conversion rates are already low, requiring credit card info will make them even lower.
In the end of the day, I don't care. At first I was really hoping this would be something profitable, right now I just keep it running because I can. Even with the small number of users Ithe servers get, I get enough to cover the better part of operational costs, I get to sharpen my devops skills and have a test lab to learn what is that people really want (i.e, they are willing to pay to have solved) vs what people claim to be a problem.
All in all, the Communick instances are not going to win any popularity contest, but my servers have been up and running without major issues or drama for more than 6 years, and that's a lot more than I can say for all the other servers that have come and gone because the admins tried to play the numbers game.