I have a WordPress blog and a separate forum for comments.
If I were responsible for comments, I would do either of two things:
a) just shut down the forum,
b] use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation. This means that people who would want to comment would probably pay some fee for that privilege.
Accidentally, b) is unusual for us, but a quite sustainable model. Surely more sustainable than current "show ads for free stuff", which seems to be hitting its limits.
> use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation.
Note that a side effect of this is that you would no longer have moderation control yourself. And how many of those paid services would exist, given the legal costs of running them?
What makes you think there wouldn't in practice be the same centralization that we see today -- one or two paid services that handle moderation for the entire Internet because only they have the lawyers necessary to do so. The only difference would be that every independent forum that didn't use them would be opening themselves up to significant legal risk.
At least right now if I set up a forum with Open Source software on a Linode server, I don't need to worry that turning off Google Captcha or avoiding a 3rd-party centralized service for my comments will get me sued.
"What makes you think there wouldn't in practice be the same centralization that we see today -- one or two paid services that handle moderation for the entire Internet because only they have the lawyers necessary to do so."
One important difference is that the networking effect is not as big as in case of FB et al.
But yes, the general trend in maturing markets is toward some kind of oligopoly. It is, I believe, time to reactivate antitrust laws, we are well beyond the point where they should have been used.
If I were responsible for comments, I would do either of two things:
a) just shut down the forum, b] use a paid commenting service that would come with moderation. This means that people who would want to comment would probably pay some fee for that privilege.
Accidentally, b) is unusual for us, but a quite sustainable model. Surely more sustainable than current "show ads for free stuff", which seems to be hitting its limits.