# signups: allow signing up for web services only via invite or via payment

imagine creating a discussion forum or community site like reddit or twitter from scratch. if the site is popular and allows free registration then that creates huge amount of work for the moderators to keep spam at bay. it would be a battle that the site cannot really win.

what's a good deterrent against this? the simplest approach is to ask for some one time registration fee, like $10. if a spammer creates thousands of accounts then, well, it's raining money for the site. clearly spammers won't do this so they will avoid the site. good! it doesn't solve all spam but it limits its spread. account bans have more weight to them.

to make such payment more attractive for users, offer to send that money to charity. this would clearly signal that the site is meant to be free, the paywall is there only to reduce the spam. it also makes it clear that this is a non-refundable fee.

i do see this mechanism on some sites. chrome web store, android play console, microsoft dev account, and probably many other sites ask for a one time registration fee.

but what if the site wants to allow free accounts too? for that let users invite each other. the invite-graph could provide a very useful insights for combating spam accounts. and have the invites regenerate over time, such as 1 per week up to a 6 max in total. so if a user has 6 or more invites, they won't get another further free ones until the remaining invites drop below 6. the limit can be adjusted based on the desired growth factor. limiting the free invites prevents a user from banking on their invites and then creating a lot of new accounts in short amount of time. this is how gmail started and there are many private communities that work like this.

perhaps also allow paying for other people's registration fee too. e.g. pay $100 and get 10 paid invite links.

this invite-or-pay will greatly limit the growth of the site. perhaps allow free registration initially and set up the above limitations only after the site grew to a healthy size and spam is getting out of control. not allowing unbounded growth is good anyway. small, focused communities are much healthier than free-for-all mega-communities.

creating a payment system can be tricky though. one approach would be to create a business account with paypal, stripe, revolut, paddle, lemonsqueezy, shopify, or similar company and then use their api to add payments to your site. but that's quite an involved process given the requirements these systems have. alternatively something like ko-fi or buymeacoffee could work for the initial setup too. i haven't really used them before but their api and webhooks seem relatively easy and build up on.

# edit on 2024-05-09

i realized that in @/msgauth i had another idea for limiting signups: authenticate via whatsapp. this means users would need a unique working phone number for each registration. getting those has some barriers so it might be a good way to limit spam registrations.

# edit on 2024-08-01

note to self, maybe platforms like github sponsors, opencollective, liberapay, goteo, etc could be used as a paywall too. https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding is a comparison site of various platforms. it's a bit outdated but at least it's nice to see which platforms are still around and thus are somewhat more established.

# edit on 2024-10-07

lobsters works on an invitation system: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations. seems to be working quite well for them.

published on 2024-04-15, last modified on 2024-10-07

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