Recently I noticed an increasing number of forums adapting a similar system: Valuable posts has restrictions attached at the judgement of the moderator. The user has to be a forum member in order to see the content. Even more restrictive posts requires the user to actually reply first for the selected content to become visible.
The former way is likely an approach to increase membership. People generally do not mind to register in a forum if they find a good number of quality works there. After people become members, they are more willing to post something. So we are essentially saleperson who comes in people's house - once they agree to let us in to do demo, they are more likely to buy that ultra-expensive knife set. This is actually not a bad way to promote participation - if we actually have the quality works that justify this restrictive treatment. But the forum might be branded as "stingy", "secretive", or "not different from a door-to-door salesman".
The latter is actually a paradox - how do I know what to reply if I have not read the content? Naturally we will have threads that receive hundreds even thousands of replies and appears red hot, but maybe only 1% of the replies are actually meaningful, as the user bothered to go back to edit their originally meaingless reply to something more meaningful like "This is great work, thanks!" or "What a scam! * you!". The inventor of this strange system probably wants some way to seriously promote a post so it is constantly bumped to the top by curious users. But why can't they just make it a sticky is beyond my comprehension.
I am not suggesting that we should do those crazy things, but these are ideas that we can think of to encourage participation. Hiding an already open-content post would be evil, but we might be able to try it on new contents that the author may voluntariily agree to the terms as a well-intended experiment. We might be albe to increase some forum participation down the road this way.
What do you think?
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