I think setting a baseline posting price (e.g., every post costs x) is roughly isomorphic to the ante idea, but different enough that it might feel different in practice. I'm not sure, though!
I imagine that posts costing 100 would result in different douchebag behavior than a douchebag anteing up 10k, knowing that he's going to be a douchebag (surely that's not a surprise to him, although who can say) and will consequently lose the 10k. It's like you're paying 10k for the exuberance of making a shitty post/comment that will be deleted in short order; and then your subsequent antes will simply be sent to SN rewards, so it's basically one and done.
(Is there an easy way to post the "sats" symbol, btw? How do people do that?)
I'm the wrong person to ask those last two questions.
I see your point about the antes. I wasn't thinking about how a refundable ante could sustainably be orders of magnitude larger than posting costs can be.
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