[Poll Proposal] Pay to Post for Donut Registered Users

This proposal addresses the increased amount of post spamming on r/Ethtrader by proposing a fee to post for users who are registered to receive Donut distributions. This fee would disincentivize spammers by causing them to sacrifice a large portion of any rewards they earn without putting undue burden on normal and productive sub members.

Motivation & Process

Reduce the proliferation of spam posts for the purposes of donut farming by disincentivizing mass posting of low-quality and low-effort content. As the profitability of spamming low-upvoted posts goes down, the incentive to farm will be reduced.
Charging a fee for posts will essentially create a new burn mechanism in which fewer donuts will be issued during each distribution period.
As spam posting is reduced, there will be more opportunity to engage with the quality content that is currently buried under endless memes, tweets, and links.
We do NOT want this to be a burden on new users, users not registered to receive donuts, or users who post productive and quality content. To that end, this will in no way impact the process of posting. All users who meet the karma and age requirement will continue to able to post without any interruption. At the end of each distribution period, the total fee for posting will be deducted from any earnings received, thus only affecting users who are actively engaged in earning donuts. In the event that a user accrues more fees than they earn, they will receive 0 Donuts for that distribution.
How we set the fee: A reasonable fee should allow every registered user the ability to post and earn on quality content, but should be high enough to be a burden to farmers who spam low-effort posts that receive small amounts of upvotes. With that criteria we are proposing to start with a fee of 250 donuts per post.
- On average, r/Ethtrader has about 6,300 posts during each distribution period. While the total number of posts by unregistered users is unknown, it can be assumed that the indicated fee will reduce monthly distributions by 30-40%.
- On average, registered users earn about 3,500 donuts per distribution. As the number of spam posts is reduced, there will be less fee pulled out of each distribution and each productive user will end up earning more per post.
- The fee should be increased and/or decreased in the future if it is found too restrictive or ineffective.

Specification

Each post will incur a fee of 250 Donuts
At the end of each distribution, the total number of posts made by each registered user will be tallied and the total fee will be deducted from any earnings received.
In order to ensure that spammers don't cheat by deleting old posts, the Automod will create a record of each post/poster for the purpose of tallying fees.
Deducted donuts will be removed from the distribution and will NOT be issued.
After fee is taken out of the distribution, the amount mods earn will be recalculated based on the reduced distribution amount.
This fee will apply to all posts, regardless of flair type.
This fee will NOT apply to r/Ethtrader members who are NOT registered to receive Donut distributions.
The fee can be adjusted in the future through a governance poll.

Poll Options

The poll options would be:

[Yes] - Users earning donuts should pay a reasonable fee to post content.

[No] - Keep posting free for all users.

This governance poll proposal will remain up for a minimum of 2 days per the governance guidelines. This proposal requires sign off from 2 moderators to proceed to a full governance poll.