Would you pay $5/yr for HN?
Retric: I might pay 5$ a week for HN as it i now, but I think you would lose a lot of users at 5$/year.  At which point the site might not be worth 5$/year.  If you want to make money off of a website the most proven method is to use advertising or to have a basic free site and then add a premium tier.This means finding a feature that adds 5$ a year in value but is not needed for the rest of the site.  Which is not as hard as you might assume.  One obvious option for HN would be the ability to bookmark and follow users.  Even a simple table with timestamps of last post, and the numbers of posts in the last hour, day, week, and lifetime might do it.