Your concern is that someone won't pay if the content is under a libre/free license? Under what scenario would you be using the intellectual property angle to enforce copyright violations? Notice on HN that the first post to paywalled articles is a link to a non-paywalled archive site so people can read the articles.
No, my concern is users won't post certain kinds of content, particularly valuable original content, if in doing so they permit anyone else to use it however they'd like.
Alright, well, regardless, the IP will still be licensed by SN and SN will be positioned to be the gatekeeper to that knowledge.
I think this is standard startup playbook stuff, whereby a platform is created, a moat is built around all the content and everyone is funneled into a walled silo of content.
When I look at Twitter, Facebook and the rest of social media, the only ray of hope is cryptocurrency and some decentralized content, where incentives are given by the currency and decentralization is bolstered by the libre/free license.
In my opinion, sites that don't actively try to make their content accessible are doomed to have their content disappear. I don't know if Experts Exchange has their knowledge base available in any meaningful way but they've faded to irrelevancy. AOL has long since faded. My belief is that it's only a matter of time before Twitter, FB, Quora and even HN have their data lost. They're never incentivized to make the data available to the community and if they ever do, because they're failing, it's often too late as they're already passed the threshold of irrelevancy.
StackOverflow, Wikipedia etc. have embraced the libre/free idea and, in my opinion, are better for it. When I think of sites like this, I envision some hybrid of SO and Wikipedia where the digital currency allows for direct monetary rewards to contributors.
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