It's so tricky. First I think the community needs to do some soul searching: 1) Are you wanting poal to be a secluded, invite only, "prove yourself first" safe space for people of specific views to come and rest, find more source for their arguments, and then take them out to do battle on other platforms? 2) Or an open public platform that any one can join and contribute and that perhaps grows enough in popularity to rival ((reddit)) and actually directly influences and challenges main stream culture? Personally if it becomes the first, it's probably going to die out or get over-run with haters. Remember voat was invite only for a brief time. I think making it exclusive was a detriment. It turned away productive users and allowed an embrace of hateful grumps. The end result being post after post of complaining and conspiracy threads. You can have those communities, but that can't be your ENTIRE community. You need space for fun, silly, interesting/inquisitive, ect. Otherwise users will get burned out and look elsewhere (we are all proof of this). If its the latter I think you can build a solid user base that you can leverage for financle stability. To run this is going to cost money, like it or not. The larger your audience the more likely investors will poney up. But, if you want this to become popular keeping people from posting until they reach a certain level of points is just going to turn them off. The average internet user is not going to spend a few days or weeks coddling an account just so they earn the privilege of voting or commenting. Only users who are extremely passionate about their cause, or autistic trolls would jump through those hoops (like we saw with voat). Why do points at all? What if the point system is completely dismantled? Let's find a different filtering solution. Edit: Brainstorming.... Limit the amounts of post each user has: 5 posts per day per username for everyone. No exceptions. I feel like that would force people to make thoughtful decisions about what they are posting and limit all the shit posts where ten users are tagged in the headline. Keep comments in appropriate threads. For example: I hate when I post a recipe (lets say mac and cheese) and then some walnut replies about how much cheese Jews eat, or how Jews own a cheese factory, or whatever about Jews. Then some other nut comes along and replies to the walnut about Jews....then soon the entire comment section of my Mac and cheese post is hijacked with Jew hate. Cool guys, way to shut down a thread and keep anyone from having a conversation about any other topic that isn't about Jews. So let's create a filter to keep that crap from happening