(via nostrich, sasquatchmedia)
From tomorrow, the Sun Chronicle, a Massachusetts paper, will charge would-be commenters a nominal one-off fee of 99 cents. But it has to be paid by credit card, which means providing a real name and address.
And the name on the credit card will be the name that will appear on comments. So it’s goodbye to anonymity.
This is an excellent idea, and I bet it will work: there will still be plenty of comments (not as many, but enough), and they’ll be more civil, more intelligent, and better written.
This reminds me of when Bill Gates suggested we charge a nominal fee (a small fraction of a cent) for every email. It wouldn’t materially affect the average user but would kill the economics of spammers.
We all know how far that went.
I’d prefer intelligent comment systems that, via algorithms or voting, push the best stuff to the top.
That being said… the more revenue for newspapers (especially digital), the better.
