Every morning I get up and delete between 1 and 3 new users who have joined from South East Asia. I delete them because they have posted spam to the site. Its hard to understand why these people do this. The site doesn't increase the search engine page rank of pages that are linked by new users, and most of this content gets deleted immediately.

Some of it doesn't, because it is so borderline between what is clearly spam and what someone might think of as informational content that I don't feel that I can reasonably pull the trigger... Perhaps these people are just throwing ads at me hoping they'll post something I won't delete, and that the page's link on MemeStreams will have more traffic than their page does, and people will come into their site via MemeStreams via some search engine, and finally click on an ad, and those clicks will be worth the time of creating accounts and posting things here every morning.

Given that I'm not making enough off my web ads to even come close to covering colocation costs for this machine, I can't imagine people make much money this way, but then again, maybe the few dollars that roll their way are worth a lot more where they live than they are worth here.

In any event, I find deleting these accounts to be annoying, I find the ones I don't feel I have a clear right to delete even more annoying, and I'm sure that most of you find all of this annoying too.

Furthermore, its really rare that a new user pops up here, starts making great contributions, and sticks around. We've been running this site for a long time now. Its not growing. Almost all of the new participation has been from spammers. The people who do sign up and do make good contributions are usually connected with someone else on the site through a first or second degree association. Thats not true of all of you. There are a couple regular posters who I cannot trace to any direct relationship with anyone else on the site, but for the most part, MemeStreams was a social network offline because it was a social network online, and it hasn't succeeded in it's mission of pushing things the other direction.

So, I'm thinking of making MemeStreams invite only. Everyone who is currently a member would be able to generate invite emails out to people that they wanted to invite. If someone wanted in, they'd have to talk to someone else who was already in. There would be no way to generate an account without an invite and the invites would only work once. In a way the site would become more exclusive.

Positively some spammers would be on the inside when the wall came up, but the invites would be tracked to the person who made them, and both accounts could be deleted.

In a way, I think this could turn the heady environment here into an asset rather than a liability. If this site did become insanely popular it would cease to be what it is. We'd loose something as we gained it. By making this a private club, we have a way of maintaining it's integrity. Anyone would still be able to watch/read from the outside, but to get in, you'd have to put in some effort, and hopefully that would mean that you'd put some effort into participating.

But certainly before we made such a radical change we'd like to know what the rest of the community thinks. If most of the people on this site strongly reject this idea, I'll keep deleting spam. What are your thoughts?