This ties into one of the territory features I still pine for, more for principled reasons than a personal need for it: allowing people to become a "member" of the territory by ante-ing up. This would serve two purposes.

First: revenue generation, as per the Substack example. If someone wanted to do a paid newsletter or something, now they could; or even the paid / public combo that a lot of writers use, where some stuff is exclusive to members. Since SN already has a really nice commenting / threading system, it makes that member connection thing viable.

Second: adding real anti-douchebag defense. If you're a giant asshole, posting garbage, insulting and threatening users, etc., there is currently limited way to dissuade that, and there's no way to dissuade it that has teeth. If you had to ante up, and then acted like a dick enough times, I could sweep your ante, and you can't talk until you ante up again, at which point I could sweep it again. It's a nuclear option, and some territories won't want to require it, but the only way SN will not have to confront this issue is if it doesn't scale enough for the issue to materialize. Which would probably be bad for its future prospects.

Some vocal critics of "censorship" hate this idea, of course, and that's reasonable. It all comes down to your working model -- to me, territories really ought to be territories, and they can be run by a tyrant, a visionary leader, or whatever -- exerting that control is what you get for your 100k sats / month. SN should be able to accommodate different visions, and users should be free to choose which of these visions they want to be a part of.

That kind of went afield from our original discussion, sorry :/