Slashdot Mirror
Announcing Slashdot Subscriptions
To understand why the system works like it does, you need to first understand that Slashdot is about to start accepting new ad formats. The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer. But we want to give you an option to see Slashdot without these ads. Second, you need to understand that Slashdot readers fall into a variety of types, and charging the same flat fee just isn't possible.
Slashdot subscriptions will essentially let you buy a thousand pages to be viewed without banner ads. And you will have some flexibility to decide what types of pages (Comments, Articles, The Homepage) you want ads removed from, and what types of pages you just want to see the ads.
The rates are currently set at $5 per 1000 pages. To put this into perspective, $20 (typical magazine subscription) will be enough pages for 82% of our readers to view Slashdot without ads for a year. Another 15% will need to spend $5 a month to accomplish the same thing. 3% of our readers would need to spend more than $5 a month- but they could choose to see ads on comments and in almost every case, still pay around $5 a month. (As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into this 3%)
We realize that this system is more complex, but Slashdot has a third of a million readers per day with different reading habits, and this is the best way to accomodate everyone fairly.
Currently we only accept payment via paypal. It was simply easy and fast. We intend to offer other options as time permits and readers request.
Eventually we intend to offer additional features to subscribers. Exactly what those plums are remains to be decided: Access to the rejected submissions bin? A 'Gold Star' in your comments header? Karma? (I think that would be hilarious) We really don't know. We'll decide and implement what makes sense as we have time to do it.
We are doing our best to learn from the mistakes made by other sites that have started charging for subscriptions. We won't create subscriber only features that cost more to maintain than they generate. But we do need support from you if we are to continue. So anyway, here's that link again if you forgot it ;)
It's called junkbuster
Hey, let's get a list of places we can move going.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Slashdot to offer a subscription service.
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted. Film at 11.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Just sell low UIDs. That'll raise you lots of money. Seriously, though, go nuts. Just don't be surprised when every signature links to instructions on using webwasher/adbuster/and so on to block out each and every comment. Or when somebody writes a perl script to grab slashdot every hour, parse out all the ads, and post it somewhere else, like freeslashdot.org or something.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Now I'll have to run slashdot through a perl proxy to filter these...
Whatever... all the money is going straight to the wedding pot. Don't let Taco fool you. He just wants to have a good wedding...
I'll stick to the ads... as long as there are no pop-ups, pop-unders and anything that pops... and especially NO X-10 ADS!!! :)
Heck, I've gotten enough enjoyment and such from reading Slashdot over the past few years, thats its worth it to me. Just paid my $20.
I have no problem with a subscription based /. (so long as it can still be got for free). I would pay $5 to see ad-free /. I might even pay more. We'll see how long 1000 pages lasts. However, I do not like doing business with PayPal. Please, ditch PayPal and give me an alternative!
Rhapsody in Numbers
Access to the rejected submissions bin?
Yes, please -- with the opportunity to moderate or rank them, so the most interesting rejected submissions float to the top.
If a story gets a very positive ranking, maybe the editorial staff can give it a second thought. And if it goes the way of the troll, nobody is the worse for it.
I think you should reward the people that have high karma by droping the rates, say someone with above a 30 gets $1 off the $5 rate, 40+ gets $2 and if you are maxed out at 50 you should have it for $3 off. That way you can reward the people that really use your site and are not just trolls.
Just My $.02
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
The subscription model is permeating everywhere. It's sad, and disappointing to have to choose to pay a small fee for the hundreds of websites I visit (and fork out literally hundreds upon hundreds of dollars) or to have to sit here and view large obnoxious ads.
Gee, I wonder what I'll do?
Let's try browsing with graphics turned off. *click* Ahh.. better.
I'm not sure about this -- not that I refuse to pay, since I understand the web won't survive on a free-for-all basis forever. What I don't like is the fact that you pay for a number of pageviews, not for a period of time or some other flat rate.
Flat rate pricing has two advantages: simplicity, and comfort. It's simple to say 'Okay, no ads for a year for $x.' No need to count the pages you visit, or wonder if reloads count, or if changing the threshold settings to go from 500 posts to 15 is going to count as an add-free counter item.
Comfort, because I hate nervously watching a meter deplete and trying to optimize my web viewing habits in order to make sure I don't run out. When you say 82% of folks are covered... don't forget that this site caters to the hardcore sorts that participate the most and are likely to fall into the 18% that have to worry. I've never counted my page views, so I can't even tell if I fit that 18%.
And all things considered, I'd rather browse with javascript off and image loading off than worry about depleting my ad-free views. It's less hassle. Which means less profit for you, but that's free market in action... maybe when you add those value-added feature you're thinking about we'll be getting somewhere.
I can already see thousands of "free everything" advocates typing angrily away at their keyboards. Running a popular site costs money, and most sites are realizing that ads are not supported. I have come to accept subscriptions as a normal part of better sites these days, although I only actually subscribe to a few of them. As useful as Slashdot is, it'll probably be well worth the while.
Also keep in mind that unlike many subscription sites, Slashdot is not talking about premium content for major articles (like Salon or IGN), only little bonuses for subscribers, which is fair enough. I'll wait until the ads actually start appearing to make up my mind, but let's not flame Slashdot for coming in line with the almost defacto practice that today's Internet economy demands.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
I wasted thirty precious minutes of my life trying to jump through hoops for them so I could sign up with a Canadian credit card. At the time I was trying to sign up for a PayPal acct. to purchase webhosting. In the end I found a host that didn't require me to pay with fucking paypal. Get the idea?
do not read this line twice.
We all knew it had to be coming. The question is, what would have worked better: 1) Building a volunteer subscription system and toting is features. 'OR' 2) Just opening a pay-pal account and asking for donations. It worked for laid off tod. Oh yeah, but he wasn't publically traded...
-Sean
I can see paying X dollars to surf without ads. A simple flat rate.
But of I have to start thinking "should I hit reload and waste a page view", it will make using Slashdot very awkward.
Time to install junkbuster
After reading about how much PayPal sucks on Slashdot, I don't think I'll be paying for any kind of subscription until there is another option available. PayPal isn't FDIC insured, isn't a real bank, and is being investigated and sued by various states and organizations.. I think I'll wait before handing over my credit card information to a potentially untrustworthy company.
As for the Subscriptions, well, I hope things work out, this could be really good for Slashdot, or really bad. I biggest concern is since I've read that only a small percent of Slashdot readers post and read articles, that means the majority only uses Slashdot as a proxy for news. If the banner ads start to annoy them, they'll start going straight to the new source.. Oh well, only time will tell, Good luck Slashdot team.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Sort of ironic that Slashdot, the bastion of free software, is being forced to go pay. While the mode is interesting -- paying for pages make a certain amount of sense -- I still wonder whether anyone will pay. Some may pay once, just in a kind of middle-finger to large-format advertisers, but I bet most will suck it up and go back to free eventually. Will that hurt Slashdot's economics? You tell us.
I think what might come of this is a tighter ship splintering off into smaller, private Slashdot sites. For example, not to slag all the people who put thought into their posts, but a private Slashdot just including my friends and others by introduction would be great for me--less traffic, so I could actually read all the posts, and less noise, so I would bother.
Just a few random thoughts... I appreciate what Slashdot has been and hope it doesn't lose its shine.
Each unique web page served to me? Or each slashdot story I click on, and all threads then suddenly are included in this page? If every time I hit "refresh" the counter goes down again, I'm going to be in sent to the poorhouse!
Let me just put out a vote that I don't mind big ads. I'm not a freeloader, and don't expect a free ride to pay for something as expensive as Slashdot.
And yes, if you use Junkbuster, you are a freeloader.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Questions:
Considering the number of articles posted here about PayPal fraud, will you accept any payment other than PayPal? Will you accept cash in the mail to ensure anonymity for the paranoid?
The rates are currently set at $5 per 1000 pages.
When we encounter the lameness filter trying to paste code into a comment, does that count as a page view?
Eventually we intend to offer additional features to subscribers. Exactly what those plums are remains to be decided: Access to the rejected submissions bin? A 'Gold Star' in your comments header? Karma?
May I reccommend the ability to pay to Disable Modbombing?
Good luck guys...
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
I still like reading /., though, b/c it's more news for nerds while k5, while it has it's technology and nerd news, also has a lot of political and social discussions. Oh yeah, and k5 also has subscriptions before /. did, but "subscribing" does nothing for you, really, since even if you don't subscribe you don't see any ads. (Although when k5 showed OSDN ads in the past, subscribing hid these banners...)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
This announcement should have been held off for another 31 days. While the ./ sub announcement is serious, the ensuing hilarity from posting this on April 1st would have been priceless.
"Remember, any tool can be the right tool." -- Red Green
The people who run Slashdot are human, just like us, and need money, just like us. It does cost big bucks to put something like this together, and make sure it runs reliably. (I'm sure some long-time users are going to laugh at me for claiming that it does, but - well - it has been for some months now, and they obviously spent a lot doing it).
... but it's still how the world goes round.
And I think the subscription model is actually fair - what it looks like they are doing is, effectively, telling us to run our own personal ads on Slashdot - that is, we're buying their unsold ad inventory and using it to remove ads..
Here's an idea: Subscribers could be allowed to create their own main page out of the accepted and rejected submissions, so they could run their own weblog within Slashdot with their own submissions always approved. Might be a nice ego boost.
Anyway, I certainly want to see Slashdot continue; I'm surprised at all the negative comments. You want to get paid, I want to get paid, and surely Rob et al likewise want to get paid.
It's just how the world goes 'round. It was artfully concealed for a long time
D
...is that under this model, those who contribute to slashdot the most, and make the site what it is, are forced to pay the most.
/. community.
I think there should possibly be a "positive-discussion" discount, where if you post modded-up comments, you get more allowed page views. After all, you are helping the
I see the need for the system, I know you guys need to stay open, and I do understand that people like myself use up a lot of bandwidth on here, but I personally would really like to see some sort of reward for positively contributing to the site.
I agree. I think the world need to change it's attitude about paying for online content/software, you don't pay because you can't steal it or they force you to or you get a whole lot more by putting money into it, you pay because you support people who do cool smart things, like Slashdot. Sort of a "put your money where your mouth is" deal.
IMHO Slashdot deserves a little cash, all. Face it. Open Source doesn't have a whole lot of alliances these days, we need to make the ones we have strong.
spacefem.com
What kind of customer support will slashdot offer? What happens when there's a DOS attack or a slashbug and I can't access the site when I need it? With traditional publications, I have someone's ear to chew when the periodical isn't delivered as promised. What kind of assurances can slashdot give me that I'll get something for my money?
you must know how many pages users view. why not put that number in the _Your Info_ section on the _User Info_ page so that people can make informed decisions.
"Shut up brain or ill stab you with a Q-tip" Homer Simpson
Consider that if we all used an effective ad blocker, that'd be the end of adverts as an effective means of funding this site. And that'd mean we all pay, or byebye slash dot.
Or don't you realize that bandwidth doesnt grow on trees.
My question is, if people start subscribing, would this potentially make ad space on the pages less desirable for the advertisers? Those who subscribe will be those who care enough to spend the money, who have the money to spend (not that $5 is going to kill anybody), and who bother to spend it. If a lot of people subscribe, will the advertisers be left showing ads to people who can't / don't want to spend money? Or are the advertisers going for raw product-recognition building? It would be interesting to see the click-through and purchasing statistics before and after subscriptions, and see what impact it has on the actual effectiveness of the ads.
But it's not clear what motivation this plan is meant to appeal to. Get rid of banners? What do I care? I, and probably most readers, simply filter them out mentally unless they're so unbelievably annoying (X10, Shoot The Monkey) that I stop reading the site. Loading time might be an issue for some sites, but for loading even a moderate Slashdot page, the extra time to load a banner is insignificant noise relative to however trolls have mangaed to screw up the rendering that day. I was on a 28k modem connection at home until recently and banners were a non-issue. And the people who really hate them already block them, although I bet the number who really do that is even smaller than the number who actually bothered to write in about the Microsoft settlement.
If the plan is to get readers to support the site out of altruism they should say that. (Or at least realize it.) But if Rob and Jeff are really trying to provide added value for the price, they need to come up with something better to offer. Or take away something from the free side.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I think that paying users should have the ability to mod stories. That way we could mod out katz entirely.
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Okay guys. If you're really the libertarian, open source, _fair_use_ folks you claim to be, then make Slashdot the most wildly successful, profitable, FOR FEE site on the net.
You can't tell me you life hasn't been changed (for better or worse) by these guys. $5 a month is a _pittance_. You can't buy LUNCH for $5.
_MY_ 'checks in the mail'
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Slashdot is essentially a portal with a strong community of knowledgeable supporters. In asking what value it contributes, let's ask why you are here? Obviously you found some value in coming here, and so do the rest of us. Slashdot filters out interesting stories and allows us access to a great base of commentators (some not so great :). This is of value to many people, some of which already seem to be willing to pay for it.
I do however see the point of letting high karma people off a little easier, and making non-contributors pay for just reading, which is what I think you're pointing out is a problem. At the same time though, people who participate like Slashdot the most and are most likely to pay, don't you think?
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
I for one completely understand and agree with Slashdot for doing this. After all, we all sneer at those other bandwidth/machine-deficient websites who can't handle the slashdot effect, but we rarely think about the fact that Slashdot has to handle the slashdot effect 24x7. That sort of bandwidth and machine-power cost money, a lot of money. The only way a popular website can recoup its costs are through advertising OR subscriptions. We, the users of slashdot are fortunate enough to at least have the OPTION of which we want. Personally, I'll take advertisements, because quite frankly I actually like and sometimes click on them. Unlike other websites, slashdot advertisements are geared toward me and present me with things I'd like to buy or wish I could buy. I probably won't even filter them, unless they start using popups that are really annoying (never seen a good popup ad).
After This aand a few rather horific stories including payapal being sued by like 13 states for running an unregistered banking business I wonder why they chose payapl?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The rates are currently set at $5 per 1000 pages. To put this into perspective, $20 (typical magazine subscription) will be enough pages for 82% of our readers to view Slashdot without ads for a year. Another 15% will need to spend $5 a month to accomplish the same thing. 3% of our readers would need to spend more than $5 a month- but they could choose to see ads on comments and in almost every case, still pay around $5 a month. (As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into this 3%)
It;s the poster who make Slashdot what it is. Your fee setup essentially penalizes those people. Without the posters, Slashdot would have nothing to read!
I'd much prefer a monthly fee subscription setup rather than the $5 per 1000 pages.
> There's only one banner ad at the top
What part of "Slashdot is about to start accepting new ad formats. The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here." didn't you understand?
rant
What's the point of this? There's only one banner ad at the top, which is non-intrusive and I don't really notice it. Heck, I even like to see some of the cool stuff at thinkgeek once in a while (although I never buy anything). I don't know how much money you'll get from this.
According to the article you didn't read (even though it's at the top of the story)...
To understand why the system works like it does, you need to first understand that Slashdot is about to start accepting new ad formats. The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer.
That means we'll start getting the huge ads you see on Wired or Salon or whatever. They want to give us an option to never see them.
...that the annoying ad campaigns don't work and never did? Has anyone told them that bigger, longer ads in the way of the content is the cause of the demise of network broadcast television?
The business model they're operating under isn't in touch with reality and isn't sustainable.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
But the servers and pipes cost $$$. They have little choice.
As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into this 3%
So you're saying that the very people who make slashdot worth reading are the ones who will have to pay most? Isn't this...backwards?
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
People who want something for nothing are usually the first to bitch and moan when the entity providing that something for nothing is no longer able to survive due to lack of cash flow.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
100% factually correct news articles, which are just articles from other sources?(exception: Ask Slashdot)
Un-biased against MS and non-open source stories?
Pre-mirrored websites that can't take the slashdot effect? If someone's little page gets featured on here, and gets pummeled with hits, and possibly a much higher charge for the month from their hosting provider, do they still have to pick up the bill?
A "never randomly log you out" feature?
More than 5 moderator points every month?
Wow, the list can go on and on!
Am I interested? Sure as hell am.
I hate ads, and Slashdot is only one of three sites whose ads I don't block at this point (because I want to support Slashdot). Interested enough to use Pay pal?
Certainly not.
Hopefully there will be a link on the front page with how to use my real credit card or send a money order before the really intrusive ads that I have to block show up.
You see, I'm not adverse to supporting a site I like -- but if Slashdot only offers a choice between using Paypal and being inundated with huge ads? Freeload I will. And if they start using Flash in their ads? I'll vindictively click reload just for spite.
Does everybody forget WHY /. is doing this? Seems to me people think that this is an evil scheme to take over the world when I'm sure that this is the only way for /. to actually survive.
/. of either the $20 or the hard-earned ad-bucks that would make /. survive.
/. does not get the money it needs to continue to exist.
/. IMHO you should either pay or endure the ads.
It's interesting to see how many readers are willing to "screw"
I mean, if you're willing to use measures such as turning of images, javascript or blocking ads in other ways, just remember that you might be a contributing factor if
The capitalist idea works when users are willing to actually pay for services they like. If you like
Indeed. There's still junkbuster, anyway... Or for those of us with Galeon, `right-click / block images from'... which already works wonders on images.slashdot.org and theregister.co.uk.... ;)
In fact, why not set up a local version of the slash code and suck the news RDF down yourself?
Isn't there some philosophical difference between "hey, pay us to get this many readers" and making the readers pay??
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
1. Paypal has some serious issues. They're facing a class action, have screwed over enough people to warrant a hate-website, and its only going to get worse once they go public. Slashdot shouldn't be supporting them.
2. It will be trivial to filter out the crappy big ads. The people who use slashdot all the time will filter them out, and the people who look at the site for the first time will say, "YUCK!" and go elsewhere. It sounds like slashdot doesn't know its audience.
3. Would it have been so difficult to try unobtrusive google-style advertising, "membership" drives, or a subscription model that didn't involve dumping large ads everywhere to the "regular" site?
I don't have a problem supporting slashdot financially as it is now. Strangely enough, by stuffing big obnoxious ads in the comments I will be less likely to financially support the site. Too bad.
Unless this is a spec-fucking-tacular troll, what your advertisers want aren't what I want.
Buh-bye.
Shame about the PayPal thing, though. What's wrong with my MasterCard?
mt
I doubt many will pay for viewing /.
/. propose some solid plans to improve the quality of discussion, lower the signal-to-noise ratio, or at least listen to our opinions?
Could
Why would I pay for someone to mod down entire threads, and take away my ability to metamod as they wish without providing a reason?
Imagine all the noise that would dissapear (like this post. He's an Anonymous Coward, why should I care if he sticks around?).
Anyone who can't stand an ad now and then isn't comfortable dealing with the Internet reality. I shudder to think about what other ideas are bouncing around that brainpan.
Bring on the ads. If I can't stand 'em, and if I'm too lazy to use Mozilla to block images from this site, I'll cough up the $5.
My father is a blogger.
Institute a method for people who subscribe to vote one of the slashdot editors "off the island" for a month at a time. :) :)
Maybe we'll increase the signal to noise ratio on the front page if a specific editor can't post a story for a month.
What about the people from here, you know, the ones that help Slashdot the most by submitting the stories you publish. We get any bonus for that?
What about the people that put in a lot of comments, to make the stories have more depth or meaning? Do we get something besides an insult by a slashdot author to the people that indirectly line his wallet??
I've put a lot of time and effort into slashdot, is that gonna matter at all?? I try to help the site become more than a "regurgitated stories" site, but I have to pay to avoid ads?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What is the definition of a "page"? Is a page a URL? What if a "page" loads images and content from another page, do you pay for that as additional "page"-views?
What if I click on a "page" and bang the "Stop" button right away. I haven't actually viewed the "page", although I did request the link the content was not viewed or for that matter perhaps not even retrieved.
Even worse, what if my connection temporarily times-out and only part of a "page" is downloaded. When I'm forced to reload the page, then I'm paying again for something that I didn't get the first time.
I understand the concessions you're making, but I seriously think you should reconsider something more along the lines of a magazine subscription that provides carte blanc access to all Slashdot content.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Now, I am faced with an ethical question. For over a year I have been using WebWasher to filter out all the ads from the internet (it catches over 99% of them, including popups and cnet style big-ass-in-your-face ads).
:)
Now, slashdot offers a way for me to support their site, but at the same time tells me that their ads are shifting to annoy-ware. So, do I just continue to block the ads, or try a free site or whatever, or do I pay slashdot?
While people think the internet is free, it isn't. SOMEONE pays. In this case, it's the company that controls slashdot. I value having this site up on the net, and I value all the time and effort that has gone into keeping everything running and happy.
I've decided, I'll keep blocking with webwasher but I'll also donate my $5. Think about it, $5 for something you check twice a day is worth the cost of a single lunch.
P.S. I'd love to see some recognition to people who donate though, a little star would be cool and discourage AC's
Why does eveyone whine about having to acutally PAY for something ? How many people here are professionals, and how many are starving college kids ? [And why are some of the professionals ACTING like starving college kids?]
.. $5 isnt a lot of money. Hell. thats going without my daily Star-Crack(tm) coffee addiction once a month. Hell ! its only 1/2 a pinball and i replace like 1 of those a month!
.. cool. I mean .. i read /. almost daily ..so ..
.. they don't spend a lot of time on /. It not gonna scare the casual reader .. the only people i *do* see it bothering are the people 40+ karma ... who post alot, and are actually providing content for free.
.. people come here just as much for the commentary as the articles (and in the case of John Katz or the current report on the newest star wars trailer that is 2 seconds longer than the last one .. maybe MORE for the comments than the articles.)
.. is /. gonna get 'dumb-ed down' ?
sieriously though
For something that adds value
My big fear is what its going to do to the 'constructive' user.
Its not going to scare away trolls
I mean
If a large number of 'interesting' posters stop posting as much
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Not today. Not ever. I don't even like to *register* for free web sites. I don't trust PayPal either.
I am shocked that Slashdot would try something so foolish. It won't work. The audience is socialist for gods sake.
The day you start selling Karma is the day I never visit Slashdot again.
Some ideas -you should take away the karma cap for those who pay. -you should clearify what counts as a page view (refreshes, checking posts later, checking my settings, etc) -you should give us a "bonus" or priority when posting, since most of the payers will probably not be trolls or 37337 H4X0R5.
mod_gzip works wonders on Slash based sites, so I have no idea why they don't use it here.
The typical Slash home page is about 50K or more. mod_gzip literally gets it down to less than 6K!
It would literally cut their bandwidth costs by more than half!
Of course, they may need another server or two, but it would pay for itself quickly.
and read...
Currently we only accept payment via paypal. It was simply easy and fast. We intend to offer other options as time permits and readers request.
Dude, what Taco needs to do to raise money is to sell a "License to Troll." Basically, you pay X dollars a month, and get to post Y troll posts at Score 1 without fear of consequences.
A bad idea? Hell yeah. But it would probably raise a ton of money.
Steve
I don't think you read the actual post perhaps? They're going to start having larger, more obtrusive ads. I'm sure you'll start to notice it when they do.
This took forever to come up, I think this topic is causing Slashdot to be Slashdotted.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
You mean, like providing all or your content to you for free so you get loads of page impressions?
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I have no problem paying for slashdot, in fact this is one of the few sites that is worth paying for, but I have one question: Will there be any form of customer service? I have not had moderation points for 2 months even though I've reached the Karma cap. I have e-mailed taco twice with no reply or explanation from him. I was just about to transfer the funds from my paypal account when I realized that I should not pay until I have the ability to moderate. What is slashdot going to do assist it's customers?
Of course I will again moderate up things that are funny/interesting that you think are offtopic.
Also, I think that it is pretty strange that the people who post are going to be the ones that have to pay the most. We are producing your content Rob! Don't you think that accounts that have a certain amount of karma should be rewarded for giving you good content for free? Or are you relying on the fact that these people are adicted to your silly site and will be the ones you can milk the most lucre out of?
I propose that every post that is archived at either +4 or +5 give the user a $0.40 and $0.60 credit respectively. Also, editor moderations down shouldn't change this calculation.
You don't want to annoy your posters Rob, THEY ARE THE SITE!
Lasers Controlled Games!
I'm pretty sure the large quantity of Paypal horror stories I've read recently have been posted on Slashdot.
Perhaps they need to read over their recent postings and find an alternate payment method that doesn't leave their customers with that "I've been anally reamed" feeling.
A I was logged in
B will you still criticise NYTimes for daring to have free registration?
C goodbye. it was fun , but not that much
I don't mind paying for a site that the content is created by the site manager BUT since /. content is created by the users - they both submit the story as well as all these replies then the users need to get paid for thier work. Do I get a discount if a story I submit is accepted? What if my reply is a good one (earn Karma AND get a rebate)? I would rather have something like I have with prohosting-I pay a flat fee and no ads for a year NOT per view.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
It wouldn't be too much hassle to automatically cache sites linked from a story or a submitted comment. For paying users, links on stories and comments will be redirected through the /. webcache for e. g. $0.01 per redirection or $0.05 per megabyte of traffic.
/.ed, saving quite some bandwidth and traffic costs to their providers. What is more, paying users could even view /.ed sites through the cache.
As a first advantage, target sites get less
So what that says to me is that you will be changing the layout of /. such that we will see only two or three comments "per page" rather than loading up all the comments in a single page as happens now.This reeks of the worst practices of some online magazines and their ten page "top ten" lists where 80% of each page is advertising.
I am less than enthused by your subscription system. Lose the metering, make it a flat rate for an ad-free slashdot, then you'll see some of my money. But putting it on a meter really puts me off and noxious advertising will drive me off.
If 20 bucks a year would handle 80% of your visitors, then charge 5 bucks per quarter. Someone mentioned allowing moderation of the reject bin. Do that, and while you're at it, allow moderation of selected stories as well. If you want to have paying customers, give some serious thought to what we want and how to implement it.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Pay Pal is a mess, and I obstinately refuse to do business through them. I give $10/month to Penny Arcade, but I'd give them squat if they forced me to use Pay Pal.
"Comments are owned by the Poster."
/. worth reading.
/.. I know we don't have a right to the forum that Taco et al are providing for us. We post our thoughts here freely, and get back more ideas than we give, also for free. And if ads, subscriptions or whatever are needed to cover the costs, so be it.
/. would remain a great site.
And the comments are what make
Something feels wrong here. I know it costs a lot of money to run
I think three main things are behind my unease. One is that my cheese is being moved. Secondly, VA/OSDN are for-profit. If subscriptions are successful, and they get more than they need, will the subscriptions be extended? Or will Taco, Hemos, ESR & Larry Augustin pocket the money? Thirdly, the posters are being asked to pay more than the lurkers. Hello? The people that make the site what it is have to pay more than those who merely use it? That seems wrong. If I could trade in 25 of my 50 karma for a hundred page views I think I would. Then I could keep posting witty and insightful comments, and
--
E_NOSIG
yes we all work for free with donated bandwidth and servers. *cough*
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Imagine this:
Today's Slashdot has been brought to you by the generous donations of:
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The Annenberg/CPB Project
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
etc.
This
I dunno about pay-per-page on slashdot, but I'd certainly be willing to pay for sourceforge.
If you added something to user info showing us how many pages we've viewed recently, it would help us decide. (And yes, I'm not a paypal fan either...)
See signature.
This is not a troll. I seriously think this issue should be addressed before anybody pours their money into slashdot. Money talks.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
I think we should get gift certificates for beer, so we can remember what it was like to have "free as in speech" and "free as in beer" while avoiding "free as in puppies" BigEvilAds
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
If screen-names can now be tied to genuine paid-for products (page views), maybe the login's should be a bit more secure than plain-text. This means no more "You can automatically login by clicking This Link and Bookmarking the resulting page. This is totally insecure, but very convenient." I wouldn't pay anything until some sort of login encryption gets put into use.
I don't know if it is in the plan, but one thing that I would like to see is that if you are doing moderation, it doesn't count against your page views. I know that sometimes I am selected as a moderator (which I am guessing most people are), and during those times I probably do alot more page views (looking for the good comments and such). I think that I would be less likely to spend the effort moderating if I knew that it was counting against me. Or maybe something like 25 free pages for every moderation point used - something where you would gain something through moderation? I doubt I use 25 pages for every points, and it would probably put me ahead a couple.
So what happens if you refresh a page or hit an article a few times? Does this count as a single hit or will each hit count as its own page (and reduce from your 1000 page bank)? I guess the question is pages vs. page hits.
One the one hand, since chances are the comments associated with an article will change on subsequent views, I can see the logic that individual page hits are counted.
But on the other hand, Slashdot churns out a lot of news stories, so hitting 1000 articles will happen relatively quickly for some users, so I could see where this might actually discourage them from continuing in discussions (well, only if they think it's too expensive).
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
If Squid+SquidGuard works here, I will send you the work around, CmdrTaco, as a wedding gift...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
That said, let me also add that I think this is yet another example of one of the major flaws of Free software - its utter inability to be self-sufficient and sustainable. Ironically, as Free software (and content, in Slashdot's case) grows more and more popular, it becomes less and less able to remain viable under the "Free" model.
People will give away their time, as long as they get to control how much, and on what. That's why small projects like Apache succeed, and why toy projects like Mozilla are still kicking around (but not really making any mainstream noise). But, when a project's popularity demands a person's full attention, they're suddenly faced with a decision: abandon the project, or try to make money from it.
I value Slashdot. Do I value it enough to pay for it? Frankly, yes. However, I won't be forking over any cash until they offer more payment options (I don't/won't use PayPal). $5 a month is peanuts. I spend more than that on far more frivilous things. But that $5 will go a long way towards keeping Rob employed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to request that none of my subscription dollars go toward keeping Jon Katz around. In fact, I'd pay money for him to be FIRED. He's never once posted a single commentary or editorial that has actually made me think. He just states the obvious, exaggerates it, and makes it sound like it'll spell the end of the world. But I digress.
Presumably, most of you reading this have a job, or will have a job someday. This is Rob's job. We've seen that the "free content" model doesn't work (and a few of us even got burned pretty badly in the dot-bomb fallout on the stock market). This is evolution. This is reality. Suck it up, or take your ball and go home, continuing to live in your fantasy world that there are a wealth of people out there lining up to donate their time to entertain you for free.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
no real difference with the yahoogroups ads, I think, maybe some colorfull big pictures (or applets, or whatever) about some products I won't be able to order from Switzerland...
This is nothing new so, I guess I'll stick with Slashdot while junkbusting whatever I can.
If that appear, well, as long as I don't have to wait until the complete ad has been shitted to read the tro^Wcomments, it's okay.
In a case, I'll have expectations if I pay to read an ad-free site, in the other, well, I guess we are becoming used to it.
After the numerous campaigns against pollutions (air, then water, then noise) I guess one will soon call these visual pollution and finally totally ignore ads as a cow ignores flies.
Good job, guys, if you don't change anything else (btw, I disable javascript, so don't put popups).
Trolling using another account since 2005.
However, slashdot should be forthright about how the page views will be accounted. Is it a simple HTML page load, or something more complicated? What about requests for RDF? HEAD requests? Requests without images? Are there any other special cases? Also, slashdot should give non-subscribers a way to count their page views, so they can tell how expensive a subscription would be, based on their viewing habits.
Finally--every slashdot reader who subscribes should learn their browser's caching behavior--and maybe swith browsers! Does your back button reload slashdot (watching the "generated by a team of purple midgets" text is a quick way to check)? If so, you'll probably be throwing away your (half-) pennies on worthless reloads (unless you use such kluges as tabs and new windows).
Non-ancient mozillas prior to 0.9.8 would reload (as a result of bug 112564). I think (secondhand information) that IE does and Opera doesn't.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
While the pay per view option is problably fairer it's not very fun, as you can tell not a lot of people here would want to have to feel like they're counting clicks (regardless of how much a single page costs). In addition even fewer people like the idea of paypal (not to mention the story a few day ago on paypal (once more I'm not the first one to have mentioned this and you also say you were aware of the problem but you still went ahead with it). People also just don't like to pay when they can view for free, the $5/1000 sounds like a nominal enough sum but people are unsure of how many clicks they actually do. I think it would be an idea to tell a person how many "pages" they've viewed somewhere in the preferences, not only do I think it would be something interesting to look at but if people realize how little they click they may figure that the payment is worth it.
By the way, anyone wanna bet the comments reach at least a thousand;)
I stole this Sig
Predictable, I know - but does this mean that Slashdot will actually be able to afford a spell-checker for CmdrTaco? Oh, and throw in a grammar-checker while you're at it. Probably a two-for-one going on somewhere ...
----- rL
$5 is an excellent price point. I signed up immediately because it was so little -- and tossed in an extra $5 to be a swell guy. :)
No matter what you do with this system, you should always have a $5 price for some level of subscribing. It's so little as to be immediately spendable.
-Waldo Jaquith
What happened to information wants to be free??? :-) Hope this works out for you guys.
main(i){(10-putchar(((25208>>3*(i+=3))&7)+(i ?i-4?100:65:10)))?main(i-4):i;}
Forget this tiered approach. It's confusing and silly.
/. reader that comes here specifically for his articles. He is fat. Cut him away and gain instant efficiency.
$12 per year, $1 per month, for unlimited access. Cheap, simple and should be profitable.
Even if you keep only 100,000 readers, that's $1.2MN per year. If this scruffy site can't survive on $1.2MN in revenue per year, you have other problems. The easiest remedy to which would be the firing of Jon Katz. Seriously, there is not a single
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
No, Slashdot charges for the privilage to read Slashdot without nasty banner ads. Since you are posting here, you obviously see that Slashdot provides some value and you read it. If you think it has very little value and ads are too much hassle then you can leave. I suspect though that you'll either view these adds are pay a couple dollars so you don't have to see them.
Now look, before we go chopping off Rob's head, perhaps we need to look at this logically:
:-)
1) Slashdot uses A LOT of bandwidth. Bandwith ain't cheap.
2) Traditionally, Slashdot has provided very decent advertising that actually does catch my interest from time to time (IE, ThinkGeek).
3) More stable income for Slashdot would mean more resources for Slashdot to be improved... not to mention just stay around.
4) I agree on PayPal being a poor choice for getting Slashdot paid -- but I have a feeling that PayPal is just a temporary measure until a permanent solution is found.
Not to mention...
The only thing that costs more money than our little hobby is women, and Rob just got hooked by one
On the negative side:
1) I agree that a "per page" system will not work -- a system based on time, not page counters, would be more fair for those who do the most to make Slashdot great.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Provide a service that many of us Nerds/Geeks really need.
Start Running Better Polls
you may want to consider ProPay. I have no association with the company, just have used it for transactions as an alternative to paypal and have not seen the same criticisms of ProPay which paypal receives.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
I'd like to suggest that moderation and meta-moderation pages are free. If not, you immediately remove a significant reason for bothering to moderate or meta-moderation. I tend to spend a few minutes a day moderation each day - say 250 days a year. Use up 1/4 of my pages? I don't think so!
If you keep these two functions free, then we can maintain the value added by the community, and people will continue to contribute, because they fill feel that they are benefiting. We currently avoid the tragedy of the commons, because we can all contribute, and all benefit - let's not lose that.
If we want to be even more sophisticated, how about allowing people to trade in a certain amount of karma for a certain number of pages? Maybe 10 karma points = $5? That would encourage people to contribute more intelligently, and add more value.
ok:
Let's say you get past robot security.
Let's say slashdot leaves you alone.
Let's say freeslashdot.org is popular.
Well... freeslashdot is going to get SLAMMED by hits just like slashdot... and not long after freeslashdot is either going to be shut down for not paying their bandwidth fees, or it wont be free for much longer.
Besides, Slashdot has been good to us. The least you can do is look at some extra ad's to keep them in buisness. (or better yet you COULD subscribe)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
If I pay the fee, do I get to moderate again? Or is the blacklist impossible to get off of?
Slashdot is trying to increase the advertising revenue by passing the CPM rates to YOU instead of the advertiser. So now instead of getting $3.00 per thousand adds slashdot will be getting $5.00 per thousand "adds" from you by removing the adds.
I'm sure instead of adds for services i may actually use, it will be new adds saying "refill your time, increase your level, buy this new feature, subscribe to this partner site, choose this system over someone elses". Atleast with slashdot the adds were targeted and somewhat of use to the general slashdot consumer.
The simple fact it isn't a monthly, yearly, quarterly subscription is very dissapointing. I bet this will be posted as add revenue to
increase your overall CPM rate and not a subscription revenue.
i say bah humbug to that.
oh well. slashdot was fun while it lasted.
Let's be real, have you ever really clicked on any Slashdot ad with the exception of ThinkGeek ads?
... why didn't this story slashdot itself recursively?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
So, those of us who read large numbers of stories, comment on them, refresh, re-read the thread, comment again, refresh, etc...
And by this I mean your content providers, since that is essentially what we are (others much more than myself), will be paying more for your service than the lurkers?
Hm. Flaw spotted.
-l
Does this sound familiar?
I love Slashdot, I really do, and I know this was inevitable. But it's sad, because it indicates that Slashdot has burned the last of the venture capital and has now slipped into the realms of desparate self delusion.
Please understand that this isn't a troll. I truly want Slashdot to survive, but I can't help but think that the people who will pay up tomorrow are the same people who are already clicking through today. There's no new revenue stream here, there's just a deparate gamble that the ads can get bigger faster than the readership goes elsewhere. There's no evidence to show that this happens. We're fickle bastards, us net users.
Before you mod me or retort, please understand one thing: I'm not talking about you. You are one of the good guys, as evidenced by your finger hovering over the "Moderate" or the "Submit" button. You care about Slashdot. You're one of the ones contributing, one of the ones who will stay after the ads (or the missing images from blocked hosts) take up half the screen. But you're not the problem. The problem are the quarter of a million casual viewers who turn up, get served a small banner or two, then wander off to Tom's Hardware or The Register. And I'm not saying bigger ads will drive them away overnight, just that the announcement of bigger ads mean that Slashdot needs to make more money... and they simply won't make it from the vast majority of casual users. They need to make it from a small hardcore minority, from the posters and the responders and the modders, from you and me.
And much as I love Slashdot, I don't want to end paying for (guesstimate) 0.02% of it. Do you? :(
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How much do you think it costs to send say 100 gig of data down the pipe? Cmon "Mr.Bandwidth doesn't grow on trees". How much? I'll tell you how much. After the hardware is paid for (which it was in the 90's for the most part) It costs fucking pennies, if that.
I highly recommend you sign up for "Economics 101". If someone puts $1 billion of hardware out there, they expect a RETURN on that $1 billion worth of hardware (if you believe that is evil then please pony up that billion yourself) that at least equates what they could get if they invested it in the general markets (i.e. at least 6%), and that's ignoring that the internet today is VASTLY changed from the infrastructure put in place in "the 90's for the most part" : Want to back up that?). Don't like it? Build your own friggin' system.
..why can't website.
this is stupid, very very stupid.
you have 300,000 eyebals a day, and your banners are animated.
all over the US there are newspapers who have much HIGHER expenses, yet they can produce a paper on just ad revinue.
why can't web sites do this?
nobody has ever been able to answer that.
I have, sent to my door, several magazines that are free to me. They seem to be making money through advertising.
Increase your ad costs, 300000 eyeballs is a lot to loose for any advertiser.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You don't get any ads in you use the plam version of the site, and you don't pay 5 bucks.
Ask for it by name!
http://slashdot.org/palm/
I'm a big fan of Slashdot, and read it all the time. Given my reading habits (and that I post fairly frequently) I'm positive I fall in at least the top 15% ($5 a month) and pretty sure I'm in the top 3% who would be charged more than $3 a month. I'd love to support Slashdot, but not on these terms.
1. Your heaviest/highest rated posters should get *discounts*, not have to pay extra. Remember, your most interesting content comes from those 3% of your audience -- the ones who actually post.
2. Page views are a *terrible* way of measuring site use. Changing settings (like viewing thresholds), double-checking stories before posting, refreshing a page to see a continuing discussion -- do these count? Can you tell? I don't want to live in fear of wasting my page-views, *especially* if I'm wasting page views by *contributing* content to your site.
3. I'm sorry, but the cost is too high. You have a circulation of 300,000+, and employ fewer than 10 people. You have hardware and bandwidth costs too, but 300,000x$20 = $6 million a year, not counting the 15% who are paying more than that. You can't advocate open source and free software and then overcharge for your website.
So, my suggestions:
1. Flat monthly fee with discounts for annual subscriptions.
2. Karma-based discounts, too, so people have an incentive to post meaningful content, which would boost your signal-to-noise enormously.
3. Lower prices.
I would just like to thank you, slashdot, for reminding me to install Junkbuster.
No offense, but those giant monster ads are just too much for me. Banners I can deal with... I might buy a subscription at some point, after you have some of the issues like "What else can we give you for your subscription" worked out. I hope you'll use it as an opportunity to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. It worked extremely well on the SomethingAwful Forums.
Random and weird software I've written.
I can't complain too much about the subscription, and will probably subscribe. I do have two requests before I do:
Anyway, best of luck with the subscription model. I hope you guys can provide enough value that people want to subscribe. Thanks for a great site!
.sig: file not found
Some people have knocked Paypal and while I'm sure it has it's problems, let me give the other side of the tale. As a webmaster who's looked into ways of accepting credit card donations for my site, I looked into Paypal and the only other service like it that I know of: Amazon's Honor System.
Paypal charges a fee of 30 cents + 2.9% of the payment. This means for a $5 payment, Slashdot would only see $4.56.
Amazon meanwhile charges $0.15 plus 15% of the payment. For that same $5 payment, Slashdot would only see $4.10.
A $0.46 fee might not seem like alot, but it can build up over time (especially with a high traffic site like Slashdot). For my site, I'm planning on looking into adding an Amazon payment option (along with a "snail mail check" address). I'd also fully inform visitors as to how much of their donation actually goes to me. If anyone knows of any better options out there, I'd love to know what they are.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Now that you're charging, if I donate can I expect to see a higher level of quality? Everybody has excused the typos, the factual errors, the double-postings, because, hey -- this place is free!
Now that this place ain't free, or ain't for some of us, will you be living up to a higher service level?
Oh, and if I sendja my money, will my $rtbl be removed? (Click Signature For Info)
leem
So, why not make proxies that accept all the ads, "view" them, then just /dev/null them to oblivion and simply not send them along to my browser?
I can see this not being as good for dial-up users, as the ad will still suck bandwidth, but for cable/dsl users it won't be an issue.
That way, everybody's happy (except the ad people, but who cares?) Slashdot gets their revenue, and viewers get ad-free slashdot.
Heck, you could even have an "ad-laden" option for users with such an ad tarpit - load up every page with 50-100 ads to maximize revenue, and then have the tarpit proxy "view" them and take them out of the final rendering. Maybe even offer kickbacks to users that do it! :)
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
And already, the OSDN has played with the usage and privacy policies at sourceforge enough that the GNU project has taken an old snap shot of sourceforge and opened their own alternative, Savannah. As much as I've enjoyed using Slashdot, I can't help but worry that down the road we may see more of the same issues cropping up here. Hopefully not, hopefully the use of a subscription system to bring in revenue will avoid the need to resort to anything more draconian.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
And dont forget anyone outside the USA who wants ad-free slashdot has to pay in dollars, and hence is subject to the vagaries of exchange rates and rip-off currency conversion commission charges...
Baz
let's do the calculation, 1000 views for $5.00 , or a penny per two pages... that's the homepage plus one comments page.
two pages of bandwidth (mostly text) = a penny?
two revenues pages for advertisers = a penny?
Runnin' On Empty
Right now, lets be honest about the subscriptions. The only benefit is the lack of advertising on the screen. IMHO, for a subscription of this nature to be of value, the advertising needs to be extremely annoying. Perhaps something along the line of gigantic moving flash ads that obscure the screen, or the infamous "wait here for 1 minute before proceeding" ads.
/., I don't see the ads. Hence, the current "subscription" doesn't have much value.
/. merchandise?
The current slashdot advertising isn't annoying. Its a little banner ad on the top of the screen. So what!! Once I start scrolling down to the comments where I spend 99.99% of my time on
So, here's the deal. Either sell some extremely annoying advertising, or hurry up and ad more value to the subscriptions.
Idea: would it possible for paying subscribers to cash in karma for
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Let's all do our part!
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
I realize that this is most likely just going to get lost in the noise, but....
/. is going along with the ad companies and their new methods, but with the methods themselves. Is it just me or does "new advertising technology" seem synonymous with "more annoying to the consumer"?
/. Every once and a while there will be something that looks interesting, and it's targetted right at me. And I much prefer *effective* ads than the "lets make it more annoying and in their face to annoy them until the love us and buy shit" ads that are becoming more and more popular. I guess when you can get the 1% return via spam or banner or flash ads, you don't give a fuck right?
/., Rob, Jeff... please try to make sure that as you fill up your page(s) with more and more ads, that you are doing something good, not just bending over and spreading your cheeks for the brainless suits at the ad companies.
I don't have a problem with ads (much). They are a PITA, but a needed evil for the sites on the net to stay around until "free" bandwidth becomes a reality. My problem is not that
I'm not going to pay, just out of principle (yea, I'm a bastard), but I'm not going to block either... yet. When ads start becoming flash animations, or javascript images that float over top of the web page, well, that's the point where I'll either stop reading or start turning on junkbuster, turning off javascript, and disabling plugins. I'm not really going to loose a whole lot am I?
Why don't advertising companies realize that they are just annoying people more and more. I don't like ads and don't click on them simply out of principle, the exception being the thinkgeek ads that get served on
So in conclusion,
So payment is per page, not per page served (viewed)? If I come back to the same story 5 times over a period of time, does that count as 1 page, or 5?
Could FreshMeat make money by offering premium d/l service? I know I'd pay good money to be able to download the latest kernel patches and distro releases in a timely fashion. FreshMeat is in a unique position that for a small fee they could offer up the LARGEST collection of OpenSource downloads in the world. Note: They could also offer a premium, developer-site-cacheing, so that subscribers can see the dev-site even when they are down or defunct.
NewsForge? Same as slashdot I guess.
Sourceforge could also charge for premium d/l and maybe even advanced features, like nightly CVS/RPM builds, or automatic notification of subscribers when an update is released.
OSDN's job site could always make a good buck in the (I hope) recovering economy.
A Slashdot PAC would also be a good fundraiser (so long as some of the money is spent to counter bribe M$)
Heck, they could even sell tickets to TacoBob's wedding!!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
They listed it as item # 666
nice move. kinda like the price for the original apples.
And yes, of course I paid. I don't use linux, and am a MS guy, myself, so I'm used to paying for things. Hello, you need money? Have a large sum of cash. I get used to it.
Let me first say that there's a lot of belly-aching that has always occured on /. That's a fact of any popular web site.
/. that the editors never bother to respond to. There's the whole moderation suppression conspiracy, questions about mysterious stability problems and other honest issues that people have questions on. However, when people raise them via the only method they can; in a story, they get modded off-topic (and, if you believe what quite a few folks have been saying, occasionally banned from being moderators)
/." post where folks can post questions/comments/concerns and editors will ACTIVELY participate. I know there's a /. topic for this already, but it's been so long since anyone has used it that I plum forgot what it's called.
/. survives or not. As several other folks have pointed out, they've ceased being unique and innovative -- I can get the same information from any number of other web sites who *do* actively interact with their user community.
However, there are also some very good issues and questions that get raised regarding
The only problem is there is no place to post these questions and comments and, even if there was, the editors have shown little to no interest in participating or interacting with the user community at all. Sure, Taco created some obscure discussion thread that few people know about, but I haven't seen any editors participating there.
So, what's our avenue for interactive discussion with the editors? Or are we not worthy of their attention? Sure, they're busy -- we're all busy. That's not an excuse. You could argue that most of the crap that gets posted is nothing more than FUD. OK, fine, but how about some editors telling us, at least once in a while, that it is, in fact, FUD. INTERACT with us, for christ sake. Isn't that what the web is all about?
So, you want me to pony up my $5 per month, start showing more of an interest in the user community. Start some sort of active, weekly "About
Otherwise, I really don't care whether
Gentoo Linux http://gentoo.org/
There have been some people wondering what counts as a page view.
If you subscribe and go back to the subscriptions page, you have the option of seeing "Ads" or "No Ads" on pages in each of these categories: "Homepage", "Stories (usually with reader comments)" and "Comments". It also tells you how many ad-free views you've used of your total.
From my initial test of a single page view, if you have "Ads" clicked for a category, it doesn't count towards your total. So, if you compusively reload the front page, you can choke down the ads there and not get charged. Loading a page for which you've selected "No Ads" counts as a page view on your subscription total.
There is a note that says: 'Set "No Ads" anywhere, and you'll get ads disabled for free on other pages too.' So, apparently, no ads on the preference, submission, etc pages are "free" if you're a subscriber.
Greg
Gentlemen, start your bidding!
I see the necessity for this, but at the same time, the most positive contributers will end up payong the most. This seems counter productive. Why not do something like reward positive moderation. So, for example, at the end of the month, add up all the moderation points on my comments. If I have a positive balance, credit me with banner-less page views. You'd have to figure out a good "pricing" system, but I think this would be beneficial in (at least) two ways:
1. Positive contributers get rewarded.
2. Everyday users may work towards more positive contribution for reward, resulting in even better content!
Seems like there is no reason not to try this!
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
Once I can get to https://secure.slashdot.org, pay with a CC, and have my account immediately upgraded, I'll pay most generously.
As a sidenote, page views?? I assume more people are going to be viewing comments flat or nested to reduce the number of clicks, unless the staff decide to make it clear viewing low level comments does not penalize the user one view. Hell, throw metamoderation on the free list. Helping the site out shouldn't subtract a paid view for the user.
Real magazines pay their contributors -- but somehow, I don't expect to see a check from VA Systems if one of my comments is highly rated by the moderators. ;)
You might consider some sort of karma-based subscription service, where you lower prices for those who provide "good" content (as moderated). That way, people have an incentive to post quality material, and they don't feel cheated by paying Taco's web bills. ;) Everybody wins (except the trolls, of course).
I also expect professional journalistic standards from a site I'm paying for. If I'm giving away content, I'm not that concerned about spelling and punctuation -- but if I'm charging people to read what I write, I have editors and such who make sure the content is clean and readable. If Slashdot wants to move beyond amateur status, it needs to act professional.
I have no problem with Slashdot trying to recoup its costs -- but I (and lots of other people) expect value for thier money. Getting rid of ads isn't enough incentive to make me pay for Slashdot.
Good luck guys.
All about me
Is there a way to see how many pages I'm currently viewing per month? A histogram over time would be really nice. Now if only you could count the amount of time that I spend reading Slashdot when I should be working... wait, do I really want to know that?
Instead, it's "pay more to get exactly what you get today, and maybe later we'll add some perks". Those that don't pay actually get penalized with large ads. Seems like you guys ran out with the stick and forgot the carrot.
314-15-9265
I'll pay for a comic I enjoy reading. I'll pay for access to IGN, maybe. But paying for a site that's effectively a news filter? Why? Slashdot produces Zero content I'm interested in. You can read book reviews elsewhere. Slashdot doesn't provide quality content. It provides tech-oriented filtration. That's a fine thing, but it doesn't warrant cash. I acknowledge that it needs it to survive, but the idea of paying for a service that's fairly mediocre, rankles. If you want Slashdot for the commenting, there are tons of fora out there. (Of course SA does charge now.) Sorry, no dice. Funny how I was just saying yesterday that I need to find another website to be my home page. Well, not like any of you guys care. Adios guys. It's been a nice lurker run (3 years).
Yahoo groups have ads, and I no longer can view the archives in any graphical enabled browsers. I don't mind ads, I accept the nessicity of them to support a service I use, unless I pay for them directly.
In the case of Yahoo I've seen one too many ad selling something indecient. Sex might sell, but it is a turn off to many people as well. (Even people who like it otherwise, often don't want anyone to know they do)
Techie adds are okay, and there hasn't yet been a problem with /. ads. Consider this a friendly remindeder to keep the ads clean.
Sure, one site subscription is no big deal, but how could anyone possibly afford paying for every site they visit on the web? Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Ars Technica, and more to come. Not to mention the fact that I've already paid big bucks for the computer and internet access necessary to view the site to begin with. It starts adding up quick. It just won't work, and it's not what the web is about. I'll never buy a Slashdot subscription. I'll filter the ads if I can, and if that's not possible I'll go someplace else.
Check out AbiWord.
This creates the illusion that people are viewing the ads even if they are not. This makes it so you don't have to see the ads, and the sites you like will get advertiser supporting.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I don't know if this has already been suggested, but surely you could make a lot of cash by selling @slashdot.org email addresses? I'd definitely be willing to pay for one of those!
Will Collins
The present moderation system where all posters are created equal is nearly perfect! Please do not make the posts of people who pay stand out from those who don't pay, it would ruin the whole fun of slashdot. I'll glady view a few ads and even click on them from time to time, but I'm not going to pay for something that I've been getting for free. I think it would be extremely harmful to the nature of slashdot if divisions in representation happened because of this system. Removing ads for people that pay, hey, that's fair. Elevating their "worth" on slashdot, that's just not right.
For an example of how bad it gets, check out www.thetigernet.com
~ now you know
All of the arguments that the announcers on PBS or public radio pound into your head during pledge week apply to Slashdot as well. It costs money to provide the service. They have some sponsors but that doesn't cover the entire cost of providing the service. You enjoy using the service. How much more do you spend on things that provide less value each month? Once you get past the idea that anything made of electrons should be free, which is pretty ridiculous if you think about it, twenty bucks a year is a laughably small amount for the service provided.
It adds value to your life, or else you'd go do something else, so why not kick in a little something?
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.
I know I won't like it if I have to pay for every site I visit. Imagine paying for every site you visit, and paying for the sites from a search engine the takes payments for placement! So essentially, you pay to to garbage in those cases.
As far as slashdot subscriptions, I will hold out and see what happens.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
To post a message, it requires at least 3 page views. At the very least, they must view the story page, then the reply page, then submit it. If they're good little posters, they'll read the other comments (as I did, though the signal-to-noise ratio is rather low on this topic) which may require viewing multiple pages, and they'll preview their posting before actually submitting. It probably takes between 5-7 page views to post most comments. Many posters will then check back for replies, possibly replying again.
It again requires several page views to moderate. They must click on the story, then submit their moderations. If they're good moderators, they'll probably view more. Meta moderation also requires extra page views.
Since the above actions are all necessary to the vitality of slashdot, it would seem unfair to count them as page views. I'd rather see one of two alternatives:
The pages that contribute to the site(comment|moderate|story submit) don't count as page views for paying people, possibly still containing the small (unobtrusive) banner ad slashdot currently uses. Keeping this for all users, or just the paying users, or paying users getting no ad at all as a bonus for paying and contributing, would all make sense.
Or going to a flat monthly rate. I understand that you want to those that use slashdot more to pay more. But your frequent users are your frequent posters - those that make slashdot what it is.
Charles
Seriously, I'll pony up some cash just to keep him off the site! Just like Mariah Carey! I'll pay to not listen to techno-troll!
my $.02, or maybe $5, who can tell these days!
Why not require a subscription for anonymous coward posts? Seems a good way to make sure the trolls are paying their fair share.
In the interest of not selling us a "pig in a poke," why not let users see their own usage statistics? Before they risk their money with PayPal? Even a simple "You view X pages a month/week/day" would be helpful for people to know how much they're going to have to dish out.
-----
Klactovedestene!
Well, not for a few months anyway.
Best Slashdot Co
can I get a Slashdot that doesn't have trolls, irrelevancy, karma whoring, spammers or just plain stupid braindead timewasting noise mixed in with the signal?
It would be a much better Slashdot but I can't help thinking it would be very strange to no longer see my own posts.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Alterslash - the unofficial slashdot digest. Shows the stories, the top-ranked comments, and no banner ads, no trolls, etc. It also has neat signal-to-noise graphs. It is an excellent replacement for the slashdot front page.
see shy jo
I really have no idea how many pages I hit at /. per month. However the stats listed above indicate that /. can or does track that. I wonder if they could provide that info in your user stats so you could calculate how far your subscription dollar would take you.
Ideally, they could show hits on the main page vs the comment pages and provide a calculator to show how long 1000 hits would last you with the specified settings. Plus, I'm just a stats junky and would be curious to see how I'm wasting my time.
I somehow doubt that all of those 300,000 will pay. I reckon about 1 in 50 of those people will pay, which makes $120,000.
Even if you get 1 in 10, it's still only $600,000 with 10 people and hosting costs...
I can't help but think that the administration of this system is going to end up costing them more than the income they're going to receive from it.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
In the article you say
"As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than half of all comment posters fall into this 3% (that will have to pay more than $5 a month)"
Lets look at what this means...
The people that produce comments worth reading ARE your content... So, you will be charging those people that PRODUCE for you... This seems backwards to me, and if the people that normally comment are turned off, the quality of slashdot will suffer.
I fear that you will just become "another example of how websites can't make money". Noone will ever anlize the fact that you turned away the people that actually made your website worth reading... I certainly am not going to PAY you for the privledge of posting to your website so you can make money off of it.
Turn the concept around the way it SHOULD be. Do something like, "the top 20% highest moderated posters get free access" or something like this. This will, in effect, almost become like a payment to your authors.
But it is probably too late for anyone to read this... There are hundreds of posts already by upset people, and this will just get lost in the noise.
-db
A one week old Grilled American Cheese on White.
Best Slashdot Co
I think it is fine to charge for viewing slashdot free of various advertisements BUT I HATE the idea of micropayment and paying per page. If I pay xyz to have access to slashdot then I don't want to think of how many times I have reloaded the page or to suddenly get full fledged adds after xyz months. A yearly subscription is the simplest and best. If I get a subscription to an advertisement free magazine, no matter how many times I look at it, it will still be free of advertisements. Slashdot should think of itself as an electronic magazine and act the same way.
I miss the Karma Whores.
.org is for non-profits; it seems to me that as soon as you start charging for admission, you're moving into the for-profit sector. Of course, the whole idea of non-profits is a joke to begin with - the CEO of the typical non-profit makes very nearly as much as the CEO of the typical for-profit. The for-profit/non-profit distinction is just an accounting fiction that allows marxists to pretend that they're superior to the rest of us. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy of charging admission to a .org is startling.
.com domain as well. Secondly, I don't see the .org being a part of the name anywhere, certainly not in the logo, nor anywhere on the front page, nor in the headline of this article. Lastly, I'm not sure I see them raking money hand over fist with this scheme, perhaps breaking even or losing less is more likely for as much page views as this site gets.
Well, first of all, they own the
So although your comment is interesting, I do not believe it to be valid.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
Just like the people that talk about how great /. was before the trolls, I'll be able to talk about how great /. was before the ads.
Perhaps people who don't pay shouldn't be allowed a .sig or be allowed to view the story icons.? No reasons people not paying for bandwidth should send anymore data then neccessary.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I support a subscription-based site if only to achieve a better concentration of quality posts and fewer trolls.
I await the abuse from the trolling community.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I actually don't have much of a problem with ads here because they're often for interesting products, even if I've never bought any of them. I hope someone buys from ThinkGeek, even if I haven't so far.
Now if you start selling toothpaste, beer, cars, soap, soup, condoms, potrzebie or Russian mail-order brides, you'll end up running afoul of my adblocker.
Well, OK, maybe not the beer.
Someone you trust is one of us.
To understand why the system works like it does, you need to first understand that Slashdot is about to start accepting new ad formats. The large ads that you see on many other sites are coming here. We really don't have an option: these are what advertisers want, and if we don't provide them, we won't be around much longer. But we want to give you an option to see Slashdot without these ads. Second, you need to understand that Slashdot readers fall into a variety of types, and charging the same flat fee just isn't possible.
If advertisers would prefer that you post stories about thier products because "that's what the want" would you do it? I should hope not! Give the advertisers a smack across the head and tell them: "We will put text ads, you know, the kind that annoy no one and actually provide enough information for people to click on. The kind that Google uses to stay in business AND keep it's integrity."
NOTE TO SLASHDOT: BIG ADS DO NOT WORK! In fact, they actually do the opposite, which will make your advetisers even MORE desperate, and foolishly request even bigger ads! Use small, text based ads. They work!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
This isn't to say advertising is the end all be all -- because, honestly, it's not. Some advertising is pure crap (like the flashing "You've got 1 new message" ad -- annoying as all hell and I'm just glad Mozilla has a "max_animation_repeat" option). The kinds of ads that try to deceive people just end up pissing people off -- and sure they get their CPM numbers, but if they're deceptive in their advertising, what's to say they're not deceptive in their business practices?
I'm not knocking the subscription idea, I think it's a really good one. Some people truly hate online advertising and some even have enough chutzpah to put their money where their mouth is.
My point is that I'm choosing to stay with the giant-ad sized slashdot because I actually find slashdot's ads useful (except for the VisualStudio crap). And no, I'm not using Mozilla's image blocking to hide the ads. Good luck with the subscription site, I'm sure you'll do well!
There are already a great deal of posts, but I tried to find anyone suggesting this, and haven't. I know the premium feature that I would like would be the lack of the 2 minute post separation rule, that prevents you from posting too soon after your last.
As I mentioned in a different post, I'm obligated to not cache my pages due to the nature of some web applications I use, so that means that when I hit back after being told that "You just posted 1 minute 30 seconds ago", my whole comment is gone. I have started copying and pasting before hitting submit every time now, just in case, but it's still a pain.
I think this would be a good feature for those paying. Or at least decrease from 2 minutes to 30 seconds or something. Very frequently in answering different posts I get tripped up by this.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
This is typical of having a large site, offering it for free, yada, yada, yada. Always happens and we've been seeing it happen for a few months now. Seeing it happen on Slashdot is just something that was going to happen as it will everywhere.
However there are two problems to the subscription gig. First there's a huge issue with page views vs page count vs whatever. I can configure my threshold and viewing preferences so that any story I want to read, and complete comments, shows in one pass saving me a page hit but we all know that by the time you get to the bottom of the page and reload it, they'll be 10-100 new comments added and this can go on for several hours (depending on how popular the subject is). Also pages like this one where I'm entering my comment and will preview it and then it gets added, do all those count? I think you guys clearly need to define what is and what isn't counted.
However I don't believe that charging by the page is reasonable for a site like this. You get 300,000+ users so asking for even 10% of them to pay means a return of about $600,000 a year. You've been spinning along for quite some time now without having anyone foot the bill so why is now any different? The gravy train has run out. OSDN execs are saying "We want to make some ROI on this Slashdot thing". And 600K a year can't pay for the hardware? I'm no expert and I don't have the numbers for this site, but I seriously doubt 600K a year wouldn't cover the hardware, bandwidth and staff costs.
liB
I have slashdot set as the homepage in my browser. Guess that makes me one of the three percent? And this makes me a troll how? Not to say I won't ante up the bux, but come on, saying that everyone who loads a lot of pages is a worthless turd is a little extreme.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
at least the ads are likely to be for Cool stuff, If I was on a slow connection, I'd consider subscribing just to speed things up by not downloading the ads, but I'm not. Plus, this way I'm sure to get updates about what's new at ThinkGeek.com.
As long as there aren't any ads about keeping my hair, growing my genitals, or getting rich working from home, I'll be OK with it.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
everybody seems to think a "tip jar" approach wont work, but no big site seems to try it. I'd like to see /. incorporate that into there plan. I look at a story and say, hmmm good story, heres a 25 cents.
of course I'd need a tip jar so you could pay me everytime there a Jon Katz story...
sorry couldn't resist the Katz dig.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Consider this a request. Find the time.
I had already dug my wallet out of my back pocket to get my mastercard out, before I saw that you only took paypal. Then I put it back.
I think what you're doing is Right. But you got one important detail wrong, and it is in the way.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Thanks - the WAP stuff does need more work.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
For that matter, regular advertising doesn't work either. How many of you actually watch the ads on TV? Which the exception of the Superbowl, not very many. For most, the TV ad is time to get a snack or go to the bathroom, or similar non-ad-watching activity. How about a magazine or newspaper? Unless you are specifically looking for an ad (like the flyer for CompUSA or such) you flip right past ads.
Web advertising is a real bargain. Usually the advertiser doesn't even have to pay for the ad unless the user clicks the add. The advertisers are getting a lot more than traditional media for a lot less, to the point of ripping off webmasters such as yourself. The reader seeing the ad aparently has no value anymore. And as I said above, for TV and print, the viewer/reader probablly doesn't see the ad either.
I have been getting really ticked off at advertising. I've gotten to the point that if I am baraged with a pop-up or pop-under ad, I will actually decide to NOT ever buy that product. And kudos for spam as well.
And to be honest, I've clicked some of the Think Geek banners because the stuff I saw looked interesting.
It might be smart to exempt people who are moderating from the page count, for the duration of their moderator status.... People won't want to have to root through the comments to find the good and the bad if they know that each one is reducing their page count. And hey, it lasts for only three days, so it's not that much... if it becomes a problem, reduce it to 1 or 2 days.. it's sort of like giving something back to the reader for taking the time to weed out the comments. Just a thought...
If I submit a story that gets posted, will I get a discount? or no ads when I view the posts to the story?
don't forget, the people you want to charge are the same people who make this site popular.
Why should I post a comment if I am getting charged for it?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I use Lynx to view Slashdot, and I resent not
having the opportunity to view the larger, more
intrusive ads. Posting ads in GIF or JPG format
does for Lynx users what posting Word docs does
for Linux users. In light of browser
heterogeneity, I would appreciate it if the
editors of Slashdot would kindly include ASCII
art ads for those of us who opt to use text-only
browsers.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
Okay, I understand that /. needs to make money in order to keep going. Sell ads. Just don't expect me to look at them. I've used Webwasher on and off for a while now, and if the ads on /. get much beyond where they are right now, I will go to using WW 100%.
/. has an internet-savvy audience for the most part. If the editors think they can sneak one past the majority of their readers, I'm afraid my shield will be quite operational when their ads arrive! ;-)
OTOH, I think I can count on one hand the times I've intentionally hit a banner ad anyway, so perhaps I'm not the best example....
The issue is that
Ben
So, now that /. is going to be charging subscriptions, will readers be compensated for having highly modded stories?
.
This is done in the magazine business. Readers digest does this for their "Humor" section. Family Handyman does it for their "Tips" section. Almost every major magazine out there has a "Readers Comments" section and most pay the ppl that provide content. That being said, there are always alternatives to slashdot
Fark.com has a brilliant model whereby users can pay a fee to see ALL stories submitted to the site, not just those approved for frontpage. I think this is a brilliant idea that would work even better on Slashdot and make a TON of money. I know I'd pay 20/year for it.
.
There's a good review of this idea and discussion of how it might apply to Slashdot here
To get an idea of what this would be like, look at the preview.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Mostly because slashdot actually has good ads most of the time. They're not at all intrusive (a single banner ad at the top of a page) and they're generally for stuff I'm at least marginally interested in. I'd probably consider paying if all the ads I saw were for "herbal viagra" or online casinos, but I really don't mind the ads on slashdot as they are. Not to mention the fact that if you scroll down a little, the ad is gone. I only hope that the ads don't get more intrusive as they try to provide an incentive for people to register (though I doubt this, the backlash would be too severe with this audience.) I might sign up out of mere principle, but it wouldn't be to get rid of the ads. I don't wish death upon slashdot, and I don't think it's a bad idea to offer a pay-for-premium service, but until there's the promised extra "subscriber only" content (extra from what's free, don't pull an IGN ;) I don't see there being a ton of value provided to the reader. Anyway, $0.02.
How does this affect the xml feed they have? Can I still grab slash.xml from the root directory for free???
Have a Happy.
I don't know about you, but I can ignore any ad*. It's an ability that anyone who has spent much time on the internet learns.
*Except perhaps the ones that float over the text you're reading and don't have a close button. And they lead me to make a mental note about not ever buying anything from that company.
.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Slashdot could auction the right to accept, decline and post topics on Slashdot for one day. Fark.com has done it a couple times with relative success. The auction winner obviously gets to promote himself with an article posting on that day. How much would that be worth on Slashdot? Fark got a few hundred dollars. I imaging slashdot is worth quite a bit more for the right business.
people who can afford the extra money, probably have braodband, so the ads are a minimal inconvience.
those of us who can only afford dial-up, the ads are a much bigger pain, and we can't afford a susbsrition to remove them, great.
why don't you charge for bandwidth? someone logs on, not a paying member, there through put is limited.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's like everyone at Brothers all going to Red Shed because Brothers is too crowded and no one can get in. While it is true that the Shed does serve some wicked Long Islands, you're not solving the problem. An actual solution would be for everyone to split up and start hosting smaller house parties.
dinner: it's what's for beer
So what you're saying is "We've got 1/3 million users per day and we've got to do what the advertisers want"?
Well, Jesus, how many readers do you need before you start telling the advertisers what they have to do to get on?
If that really is the state of on-line marketing then you'd be better off getting out of it and selling blank discs on street corners because that situation is not stable.
What happens if the advertisers say "Dump the no-ads pages or we walk"?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
How about letting us moderate adds? If I were to subscribe (which I haven't yet...) why not let us moderate adds as well? That way we can have a say in what's targeted at us. Besides if the adds were well targeted I might not even mind leaving them up and running if I was subscribed... provided of course they weren't those huge nasty things :)
It seems that trolls and retards don't like having to pay $10 to get their login back after they get banned for being an idiot.
.5e, so I don't know what kind of people are considered "idiots" there.
/. or other "open" forum are open for open discussion (no puch intended). In an open forum, there's always noise to signal. Or am I too optimistic, and geeks are just a bunch of self-promoted elite? So all these talks about pro-democracy and pro-openness are just crap?
Hmm, I do not subscribe to
So I'm talking thru my behind.
Mind defining "idiocy" here? Think differently? Take an opposite stand againts the mainstream?
Or just saying something the "elite" consider stupid? Not knowing the Linux/BSD kernel inside out to participate in discussion?
I hate trolls too, but not all trolls are like those FPs and goatsex(?) or whatever. And sometimes the difference between "trolling" and "thinking on the edge of the mainstream" is a very fine line. Yeah, how many thinkers and scientists have been considered "trollers" and "retards" in the history? Go ask Galois (who has "failed" so many exams and been refused admission to Paris Polytechnique, just because the examiners thought he trolled. He died at 21 at a duel), who gave us an important foundation for modern computer science and cryptography.
I thought most people on
Quite a few of my posts here have been modded as troll too. Yeah, and go ahead, this one is also a real troll.
How about selling a raised cap, instead of actual Karma?
Then cap non-subscribers at 30 Karma, first-time subscribers at 50, and every $5 you spend after that gives you more of a cap, whether that's 1 more, or 5 more, whatever.
Furthermore, I'd point out that this article contains forward-looking statements about the performance of VA Software's business, and as such really ought to have a "safe harbor" disclaimer attached to it.
Yes folks, "Open Source" appears to mean that I'm doing the job of the VA press office for them, for nothing.
Streetlawyer disclaimer: This post is of a general and journalistic nature and should not be construed as a recommendation to take any course of action with respect to investment in marketable securities.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
3. I'm sorry, but the cost is too high. You have a circulation of 300,000+, and employ fewer than 10 people. You have hardware and bandwidth costs too, but 300,000x$20 = $6 million a year, not counting the 15% who are paying more than that. You can't advocate open source and free software and then overcharge for your website.
What planet do you live on? I doubt even Playboy.com gets that kind of money from subscriptions. Frankly, I'll be amazed if even 1% of Slashdot's readers actually fork out the cold cash, and I expect most of those who do will start off with $5, just to see how it works. That's $15,000, which probably doesn't even suffice to pay for a single month of Slashdot's bandwidth, never mind the salaries of 10 people.
I considered keeping up with the field a part of my job, and that's why I've checked Slashdot at least one a day for the past two years. Sure, ./ is not perfect, but
neither are there any adequate substitutes.
I just subscribed for $20 worth
of articles, and I think this is a tiny
price to pay for the privilege -- my subscription to the Economist
was 5 times more, even after a 50% discount.
Cheers,
-j.
Slashdot actually brought some real information to the table. Unfortunately /. rarly posts anything that I haven't seen somewhere else hours or days earlier. Then the article poster slants it all wrong and flames ensue. John Katz articles are yet another source of flamage rather than thought. The only real reason to come here at all is to participate in the daily arguments. And in fact the only reason I'M here is to try to interject a little sanity when the "Everything but Linux, Open Source and Free Software suXors", FUD slinging reaches saturation. So there really is rarly any value to /. at all worth paying for. In fact /. may actually be a disservice to the overall community with amazingly high noise to signal ratio. /.'s existance should be subsidised as a community service by another OS company (as it used to be) or just go away.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
This would be inaddition to the current subscription system. It would be so that positive contributers get a break. It would not be a replacement.
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
The subs page shows how much I've paid for and how much I've used. Why stop there?
Involve us in the process. Show how many other subscribers have paid, and how much. Show how much Slashdot has pulled in through advertising this day/week/month/quarter, and how much you've payed out in bandwidth and in salaries in various areas, i.e. $A to editors, $B to admins, $C to lawyers and $D to whatever the hell Jon Katz is.
You want us to be understanding about the need to pay? Fine, but I need to understand. And as with software, "Just trust us" doesn't cut the mustard. Show us how buggy the source is, and we'll gladly help you fix it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I don't think that I was abusive. You are free to disagree. I should have modded up The Post of Doom as under-rated and saved my skin.
But I continue to insist that off-topic is the most consistently misused moderation. Moderators need to read both the entire article and all parent posts to determine if a post is truely off topic. As far as the PoD is concerned it was more funny/interesting than off topic in my mind. The fact that Taco disagrees with me about ONE post should not have led to me being banned from moderation.
Regardless, I consider myself a good member of the /. community, currently have a karma of 49, and I don't troll or post crap. I think that if I contribute to the content I should get a "member's discount".
Lasers Controlled Games!
I, for one, was happy to have the chance to help support Slashdot, and I bought a lot of page views. No, Slashdot isn't perfect, and I'll be the first to admit that some of the content is marginal, but some of it is really great. People have compared the subscription rates to those of newspapers, but Slashdot is worth much more to me than any newspaper.
Now where's the subscription option for Segfault? :-)
really.
there is a demand for prebuilt slashdot service like this. many companies I've talked to recently are looking for ways to impliment this sort of thing.
google makes money by selling is search engine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A lot of people are asking, what qualifies as a page view in the subscription system? If I post a comment, is that a page view? If it is, it seems like this system will discourage the most active people from further contributing to the site.
To me, it makes the most sense that the front page (and all news sub-pages, like the apache or science sections), comments (articles) pages, config pages and so on should all count toward your 1,000 page limit, but comment posting pages should not.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I'm up on the paid site thing. In fact, I just paid for 10,000 page views.
Then I promptly went and turned all the ads back on. Why? Because a) the ads aren't annoying yet.. in fact, since they are no longer just the OSDN ones, they're actually more interesting these days, and b) because I don't think I can afford to pay a half cent for each page I view on the entire web.
And that's what we're really talking about, here, isn't it? If slashdot goes pay-per-click, why shouldn't every other web site do so as well? If every web site did so, and each was a half-penny per click, I imagine that would easily amount to 15 bucks a day for me based on my current browsing habits. That could be as much as $450 a month.
Psychologically, I'm happy to pay a lifetime subscription to Salon for only $50. And I have an all-you-can-eat yearly subscription to The Economist for only $125, which includes an actual magazine I get delivered to my home every week. I don't mind those because the expenditure is controlled, and the meter isn't continuously running at such a high rate as a half penny per page.
Does it really cost half a penny for each page impression served by Slashdot, Taco? Were the ads making anywhere near that much?
And I see that I'm getting new ads for each step in the posting process (preview, etc.). Does that mean that it could a couple of cents to post to slashdot?
That would be one way to tune out the trolls, I guess. <smirk>
Now, what about our profit sharing? ;-)
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
So another high-profile "community-based" site implements a subscription system. The Motley Fool also moved to a subscription model recently. There's is an interesting twist: the editorial content continues to be free, but if you want access to the boards, you have to pay the money.
I didn't pay the money, even though I frequented the Motley Fool for almost three years, (and speculated endlessly about who the brilliant and mysterious HowardRoark might be on the AMZN board.)
The problem I have with the Fool's approach, and Slashdot's apparent decision is that it violates an implied ethic between the business and the community. TMF touted its "free" boards for years. Slashdot reminds you that all comments belong the the poster. Both sites encouraged people to give freely of their time and mental energy, and both appear ready to hold access to "the community" hostage in exchange for money.
It's only a matter of time until Slashdot blocks all access to non-subscribers. Is the issue really "survival", in the sense of paying for bandwidth and salaries? If that were the case, Slashdot could put up an itemized target number, and the community could match it. But that isn't the case. The "survival" argument is a facade. Slashdot is a business, Andover/VA is a business, and all of these entities seek to monetize the community.
You can take as many newspapers as you like?
The "flat rate" refers to the concept of paying a certain amount for something that you can take without limits. Note: Phone companies would looooove to switch away from flat rate. They started making noise about this when people got modems and started using their resources for much, much longer than they used to...
"Metered" means something that has a fixed per-unit cost. Cable tv doesn't count because they aren't giving away things that have a certain cost, they are giving away access to content whose cost has is (relatively speaking) limited. Look at it this way. The cable company doesn't care if you watch TV 24 hours a day, because it doesn't cost them more if you do. They are selling something that doesn't cost them more if you use more. So it's not metered. If you ride in a taxi, it costs them more (gas, etc) to go further, so there's a meter in the cab. Your ride is metered.
How about adding a user pref to allow adding/subtracting a fixed amount to a comment's level based on subscription status? That way, I could knock 2 off anybody who's not a paid subscriber, and probably eliminate 90% of the crap on /. - it might even make reading at <3 bearable again.
Also, I'd like to be able to selectively ignore the moderations of [paid subscribers|freeloaders] - once again, I'd ignore the moderations of anybody too cheap to pay, and probably remove 90% of the bad moderations.
I'd buy that for a dollar (or $20).
www.eFax.com are spammers
First you take away my ability to influence what the site is about ($rtbl'ed for moderating a comment 'interesting' - which means I cannot moderate or metamoderate anymore), and then you want me to give you money?
Somehow I don't think I will.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Really.
--Blair
We bitch about the **AA all the time here at /. , saying things like "Why do CD's cost me $18 when they cost far less to make?" and listening to the **AA say "But it costs us a lot of money to develop the content and give the artists their fair share". Then we whine about how $.0023 per download is not a "fair share" for the artists, and we go around in circles.
/. team, I'd be more likely to donate directly to a future Taquito's college fund than to subscribe. But that's just me.
Why do we do this? Because we don't REALLY know how much money is involved. We think the **AA is laughing at us all the way to the bank, but they insist there just one download away from poverty. We simply don't know the amounts of money that are involved.
Now, we have the same situation here. Taco and Hemos say "We need more annoying ads to pay the bills, and subscriptions to prevent people from being annoyed by the ads", and all the trolls are saying "How expensive can a web site that just has links to content be to maintain, we supply all the real content...",etc... There are only a handful of people on this planet that really KNOW how much money Slashdot is making. Or not making, as the case may be. As evil as some of us think profit is, the site has to at least break even to stay in business. And the editors have to eat.
Wouldn't it be great if we had a slashbox that told us how much it really cost to run the site from day to day? And how much of our subscription money went to keeping the site up, and how much went to Taco's bachelor party? It's probably impossible, because there are some details that need to be kept confidential. But they've said that open-source software would never work because some things would have to be kept proprietary, and yet it's been proven that it could work in many areas.
This way, when Slashdot raises their rates, the Management can reply by saying "We had no choice, Look at all those red numbers on the Cash-O-Meter!", and we can all see for ourselves what the need is.
Personally, since I have a high tolerance for being annoyed by ads (and even clicked on a few), if I want to improve life for the
Because I actually participate on /. and provide content for you Rob.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Paper mags and news aren't paid for by their subscription - they're paid for by the ads placed in them. No difference here. I can deal with the ads here just like anywhere else. At least so far they're faily topical and appropriate. Start listing viagra and credit card offers and my tune may change...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I suggest you find some added value to your site rather than just killing banner ads for your paying masses. I for one won't be hanging around if I'm subjected to big ugly white space all over your site simply because my 'hosts' file is sending all requests to the "evil empire", as you editors refer to it, of ads.doubleclick.net, straight back to my loopback address of 127.0.0.1. I'll be starting a $5 pool in my journal for anyone that wants in on it in relation to the various possible negative directions this will take slashdot.
They already deleted the entire meta-moderation discussion, what's to keep them from deleting other things that you'll be paying for?
That's not meant for the subscription service. What it is meant for is this:
A 'Gold Star' in your comments header? Karma? (I think that would be hilarious) We really don't know. We'll decide and implement what makes sense as we have time to do it.
Turning Slashdot into a sytem where the payees get additional perks that increase the chances of their comments and thoughts being read is beyond admissable. It's just outright wrong and I hope you don't do it. It may seem funny to be able to buy Karma, but to me it's completely against everything this site stands for. How can you have an open society when the thoughts and ideas of the "rich" are more visible than those of the "poor?"
Will Slashdot become like the Internet Search engines that offer better search result standings for their paying advertisers? I hope not.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
If you encourage people to stay at Slashdot, since it sucks in your opinion, the more they stay here, the more they will become frustrated with it and look to Kuro5hin and thus, you will still be peeing in your pool.
;)
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
I've never heard of mod_gzip before. Which browsers support it? How can we tell if we have downloaded a gzip'ed page?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Exactly what those plums are remains to be decided: Access to the rejected submissions bin? A 'Gold Star' in your comments header? Karma?...
;-)
Brings a whole new meaning to 'karma whoring'
Seriously though, Slashdot is probably the only site i'd actually pay to use!
Maybe we should get some kinda 'troll rebate' or something...
To get a feeling for how many pages someone with an account has loaded, you could display that number on top of each page (x pages this week = USD k).
/. "premium" would cost me per month, but I'd like to find out. And I'm sure as hell not gonna count myself! :)
Frankly, I have no idea how much
You seem to do some statistics anyway, so that shouldn't be too hard.
I hear you, and agree with the sentiment of your comments. But for me, it's like this:
/. had never been bought out by OSDN, would we even be at this point? I can't help wondering if the awesome creative people that run /. wouldn't have kept going somehow. What about:
/.ing! :) Some sort of DC effort - all interested parties install a slashcode client which mirrors a part of /. and provides access. The main /. site merely redirects requests.
/. would instantly see the bandwidth savings of serving less content to millions of readers daily.
There HAS to be a better way than advertising.
Advertising pervades and destroys everything. I'm utterly sick of it, but I'm even more sick of it being taken as a "given" in any case where a site needs support.
Advertisers are like a form of parasite...
They attach themselves to a previously "free" site, often with promises of revenue, and slowly their needs grow, until it reaches the point you see on some sites where it's 80% ads, 20% content.
Often, this is because the ads have driven away many of the readers, and so their figures drop off, leading them to believe the ads are "too small", or "not numerous enough"...so they make them bigger/more frequent/more irritating. This of course drives more people away...and so it goes on until all that remains of the original site is a dead, drained husk.
Just consider the following: If
1. Voluntary subs - people pay simply because they appreciate the work that's being put in. This would work here in NZ, but not sure about the "free for all" culture in the states. Actually, on second thought...we are getting just as bad these days...
2. Distributed
3. Scale back... All the features are awesome, but I for one don't need them all. If things were turned off by default, and a reader had to enable them,
These are just a few (possibly not properly thought out) ideas. Anyone got any others?
Prisoner #655321
Why don't we work on a GPL decentralized hosting scheme for Slashdot? Then the hosting burden could be distrubuted over a larger number of machines (thousands, if not more) and you could have a sorta GPL Akamia setup. But maybe that is too socialistic, and wouldn't let anyone really be in control.
I believe I've been $rtbl'd, and whatever the reason(or glitch) might be, its a mistake because I've never abused posting or moderation. Yet, from what I understand, its a lifetime ban from moderation. I'd feel kind of weird subscribing to a site I'm not allowed to fully participate in.
Would you consider lifting a blacklist mark for a subscriber?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
We hope people will give it a try- the system has enough options to let a hardcore two-hundred-page-a-day user chip in $5 a month to suppress ads from Articles and maybe the homepage... but again, this group is by far a minority. 82% of Slashdot readers read 10 or fewer pages a day.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
- Bandwidth
- Hardware Purchase, Maintence, and Upgrades
- Backups (especially on a site as dynamic as \.)
- Support
- Facilities (Air Conditioning, Power, etc.)
Plus, quite frankly, if the owners of the site want to make a little money on it, I can't really begrudge them that.Recently, I've seen signs that the free-as-in-free-speech software community also expect things to be free-as-in-free-beer. The whole thread about StarOffice started to make y'all come off as a bunch of cheapscapes. Add to that a recent editorial on ZDnet that basically called out the open source community as such, and I think a PR effort is lacking.
Now, one of the major resource of the Open Source community realizes that need a better financial footing. So, they exercise a two-step process: greater ad support, plus the option to opt out by directly contributing. There are basically four responses that can be taken:
- Politely deal with the ads, and accept that it is a payment for the service you enjoy.
- Pay the money.
- Start your own site elsewhere
- Use an ad filter.
Option #1 shows that there is an understanding of the real world that, by and large, is usually lacking here. Option #2 is a step beyond that--that the Open Source community is willing to support what they value. Perhaps if enough sponsorship from readers exists, the ads will die off.Option #3, on the other hand, basically says that, now that you've stopped giving us a handout, we'll take our ball elsewhere. Sorta the attitude that has been taken with Sun. Until someone asks for money, you are the hero of the Open Source Movement, standing shoulder to shoulder with Stallman and Raymond in their battle agains Redmond. Ask for a few bucks for the product you value, and all of the sudden they are evil evil evil!
(A practical problem with option #3 is that you wind up being locust. Fly in and use the resources of a site until they are gone, and then move on, leaving an empty shell behind. Specifically, move from slashdot to, say, dotslash, and eventually, dotslash will need to find funding.)
Option #4 basically says that you are absolutely a cheapscape. You want the service, but don't want to give anything back to support the practical matters (servers, electricity, bandwidth). Perhaps you rationalize it by saying that because you post, you make \. what it is, and therefore shouldn't have to pay, but, lets face it, without the servers, electricity, and bandwidth, there is no \. to post to.
Why should you care about being perceived as cheapscapes? Because it limits the credibility of free-as-in-free-speech. It turns off people who might want to develop for your platform. It basically is a perspective you don't want to be associated with you.
I don't know which way I go, though it will likely be option #1 or 2.
CmdrTaco, I have a question.. Will there be true freedoms for paid users who moderate? I haven't really tracked the "official" policy, but I understand that many high-karma users (including myself) have had their moderation privileges revoked because of some posting or moderating or meta-moderating action they performed. (ie, modding up something controversial the editors didn't like, supporting controversial posters with meta-mods, etc.)
To be honest, I'm not sure at what point I lost my mod priveleges, but I haven't had them for quite some time. Yet I continue to try to post informative or insightful or funny things.
To CmdrTaco... what is your position going to be on revoking mod priveleges to paying subscribers? If I pay, will I be able to freely post and mod and meta-mod like I thought I could before?
Someday we may in fact give free pages for accepted story submissions. As always, one step at a time.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Looks like the day when $lashdot costs more than M$ Windows is coming soon :)
Because of that you won't get modded up. The people who still have mod privs don't agree with you.
Lasers Controlled Games!
You can't make money giving shit away when it costs you money. Hence, the dot-com crash.
ISPs sell flat rate service and have for years. Yet we have thousands of ISPs still in business. Bzzt, try again.
sulli
RTFJ.
sysadmin skill
server power
storage space
code upkeep cost
bandwidth cost
I remember back when
Amazing magic tricks
Well, we all know the answer to that one now, don't we? It seems everyone seems to be forgetting that Slashdot has ads right now. They're just going to get a little bigger, but content and the free nature of Slashdot isn't changing. However, if you REALLY hate ads, you can pay $5 and get rid of 1,000 of them. Everyone that keeps suggesting $5 for a year seems to forget that they would probably be losing money on that (I'm guessing $5 is the going rate for 1,000 ads on Slashdot, so you guys break even on the deal), which doesn't help anyone out.
I'm not going to pay the money for removing the ads, since after growing up reading newspapers, magazines, watching TV, and seeing billboards everywhere, I'm used to them, and don't pay attention to them anymore. If they start to run popup or pop-under ads, however, then I stop visiting. Don't complain about them giving you the option (not forcing it like Salon) to pay to get rid of ads, though, it's a nice option to have.
Can someone answer me a simple question, though: If ads are blackholed thru my OpenBSD NAT, do those still count as hits for Slashdot? I'm pretty sure they do, but I've never gotten a real answer from someone.
To maximize benefit for the advertisers, this is what I would suggest.
1) Ask users to supply basic demographic information, like age, sex, and general job description. Users could lie, of course, but, it would help establish an overall profile.
2) Require that users log in to view the site (like the NY times site does). This would chop bandwidth by a fair margin, get rid of annoying Anonymous comments, and allow better statistics to be gathered so that advertisers know who their target market is.
3) Precede the current front page (which is the list of articles) with a big ad page which must be clicked through before the list of articles is reached.
4) Reward good content providers (posters and submitters) somehow. They are your "authors" after all. Enter them into drawings for swag, or give them ad-free page views, or something.
In the end, its all about survival. Slashdot must change or die. There is no use whining about why it can't stay the same. If it is to survive, it must be beholden to its advertisers by providing them a good platform to sell their products.
Does this mean slashdot has to give up it's .org address now that they are generating a probable profit?
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
There was a situation a little while back where posts (in the same thread) were all modded down to -1 by the endless points of the employees of slashdot. The exact thread escapes me at the moment, but think about this:
What if those users had active (paid) subscriptions? Now they actually have some stake in things... does slashdot itself have the right to effectively censor them? What kind of rights come with the payment? Can people request a refund if that happens (and is the subscription fee refundable at all)?
I wonder if you could tell us what your expenses are (itemized so we see what Katz gets paid) and how much money you take in. I would find it very interesting to see if your subscription service is making you all rich off our comments.
How much better do super-annoying ads pay? Have you thought about allowing users to do small low-cost text ads?
Lasers Controlled Games!
Till I see how annoying these new ads are. As it is, I'll probably fork over the cash, but if I don't notice the change...
:)
Ok, I'll STILL fork over the cash. When I get paid in two weeks.
Triv
I'm not sure about this -- not that I refuse to pay, since I understand the web won't survive on a free-for-all basis forever. What I don't like is the fact that you pay for a number of pageviews, not for a period of time or some other flat rate.
Flat rate pricing has two advantages: simplicity, and comfort. It's simple to say 'Okay, no ads for a year for $x.' No need to count the pages you visit, or wonder if reloads count, or if changing the threshold settings to go from 500 posts to 15 is going to count as an add-free counter item.
Comfort, because I hate nervously watching a meter deplete and trying to optimize my web viewing habits in order to make sure I don't run out. When you say 82% of folks are covered... don't forget that this site caters to the hardcore sorts that participate the most and are likely to fall into the 18% that have to worry. I've never counted my page views, so I can't even tell if I fit that 18%.
And all things considered, I'd rather browse with javascript off and image loading off than worry about depleting my ad-free views. It's less hassle. Which means less profit for you, but that's free market in action... maybe when you add those value-added feature you're thinking about we'll be getting somewhere.
I also think I ought to be able to get credit for what I post. People who are reading the comments are reading for the comments, especially for the highly-rated comments; they are your bread and butter. If I am contributing to your bottom line I ought to be given some kind of credit for it. I don't even read comments on ZDNet any more because their system refuses to let me read comfortably (piles of ads and links on every response), and if Slashdot becomes as hostile to good posters as ZDNet is to readers, there will be no point in trying to contribute here any more.
And don't you dare count moderation or meta-moderation work against page-views! You won't have anyone left who's worth a damn.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Well folks, it's only a few bucks. In the end, I'll probably just leave things as they are, and if the big ads drive me nuts I'll make a decision then whether to cough up, or make another site my homepage. That's life in the big city.
:)
However, what about Google? Assuming I'll always be online, they're something I cannot live without, yet the ads are absurdly small and never interfere with it's usage. It's free. Is it because so many more people use Google than Slashdot that the advertisers don't give them as much flack? Perhaps the answer is to broaden the demographic - perhaps Brittany vs Linus online voting?
DT
We all know that pay-per-view or micropayments don't work. This is because users just don't like the idea of someone standing behind them metering the pages they view. If any payment system is to work it should be 'fit and forget'.
I'd happily sign up for a reasonable *fixed fee* per month, but being charged more the more pages I view seems, well, unpleasant. OTOH if the Slashdot crew can justify it from bandwidth costs I might pay up.
FWIW, I think the karma money exchange is worth considering. As long as users can opt out, that is tick a box saying 'monetary considerations will have no effect on the comment scores I see'. But personally I'd be happy to sell a bit of karma (can always whore it back again), and I'd like to see a comment promoted if the author thought enough of it to put some money behind it.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Not good enough. Providing a reward for accepted articles is one facet, but not all valuable content comes from accepted articles. +4 and +5 comments count too. Their submitters should be rewarded because they draw readership.
You could've hired me.
Okay, I see my user # is in the form code on the HTML page. So I guess email has nothing to do with it. Yes?
Hmm, I guess that means if I really wanted to, I could pay for someone else's subscription?
Done something like "When we reach 20,000 in pledges, we'll fire Jon Katz."
for submitting an article? after all, thats where most of your stories come from...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Access to the rejected submissions bin? Yes, please -- with the opportunity to moderate or rank them, so the most interesting rejected submissions float to the top. If a story gets a very positive ranking, maybe the editorial staff can give it a second thought. And if it goes the way of the troll, nobody is the worse for it
Definitely, I grab the syndication feed every time I open a new web-browsing window. I don't spend the time reading every article, just the ones that interest me the most. I want to see when things change, and if there is something that is interesting to me. Otherwise, I find I'm wasting my time.
Do you read every book in the library every time you visit? (didn't think so)
One could easily make the argument that charging for headlines info would drive viewers away, instead of drawing them in.
- passion
This is the only time since I started reading this site in '99 that I remember the editors posting comments in such numbers. Naturally, it is when they want our money.
Two things;
First, what do you mean by large ads? Those big square ones? Interstitials? Columnar? All of the above?
Personally, I like receiving the little banner ads; people that advertise on slashdot are much more likely to be selling something I want.
But can I use this system to just suppress the big ads? Is that what "only view ads on comment pages" means?
Also, can I still view ads and have the money go to paying original content authors? I like the reviews and whatnot and would like to pay for more of 'em.
~mindlace
It's advertising free, and actually contains useful content!
How ironic - the granddaddy of those weblogs is being trashed by the rats who decided it was cool enough to read . . .
Slashdot was a weblog almost before the idea had been invented - it's rather more now, and for the better, I think.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
So what does a 2-digit UID get you? I'd settle for Natalie Portman and a bowl of hot grits.
BTW, now that Taco is getting married, does that make me Slashdot's 71st-most eligible bachelor? :) (Although, considering these results, I'm not convinced that's a good thing.)
Speaking of Paypal, your Paypal link doesn't show up in the latest nighlies of Mozilla. No graphic is shown and there's no link where the graphic should be. I have no clue if its your bug or a Mozilla bug. It works fine in Netscape 4.7x.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
Your charging plan is exceptionally fair, and I wish you luck and success.
It is demonstrably less evil (anti-consumer) than I would be given free tyranical reign, and I believe this is an important ingredient in the success of internet commerce.
I don't know if I will subscribe to slashdot, but I would be more intested in MMORPGs under similar financial terms.
I would be willing to continue to view the ads as they are now. Can I get a version with some ads, but not the big square ones? Those that take up half the page, jump spin, and in general ruin a site? Would I get a cheaper rate than people who choose not to view all ads? That's what I'd like to see.
Options, give us options!
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
...but I could use some cash...
Makes one think.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
no really. They have a billion dollar open sours intiative going on. They can sell there Linux uses via banners, and the cost would fall under marketing.
This would be a good move for IBM. They could use it to test there Linux Web servers,show people that they work in a "real world" enviroment, and Give IBM that added coll geek factor there going after.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You fire my friend cxreg then you start charging for the site. Did you guys hold a "How can we suck total shit" meeting this week? Fuck yeh.
From: J. Nagle
Over the last few years, I have posted 1700 comments to Slashdot. (Current karma: 162)
I do not authorize the unpaid use of my copyrighted materials on the pay sites of others. Please remove all my previous comments before your site becomes a pay site. Failure to do so will be considered a copyright violation.
John Nagle
Menlo Park, CA
That said, while I don't mean to dismiss the value of comment posters, the percentage of readers that read comments is small. Yes comments draw readers, and keep them coming back. But half of readers don't care! An accepted story submission provides a benefit to hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers. A Score:3 comment is read by 1/50th of that. So if we decide that an accepted story submission is worth 1000 page views, you would need to post perhaps 50 Score:3 comments to affect the same number of people :)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
beginning of the end of Slashdot.
This might be proof the editors don't even read the stories that they post.
First it starts with the advertisers. Than it goes into the WSJ or NY Times "subscription model." Eventually this starts snowballing into eventually to "stay around" it no longer becomes Slashdot.org rather Slashdot.NET.
It sucks that bandwidth costs money.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Let me first of all say that I've been reading slashdot for several years. In fact I remember when it was moved from a pretty low bandwidth site at some ISP in Michigan. I understand there are probably ungodly costs associated with running it, and ads don't bother me too badly (in their current form).
:)
However, what bothers me is the subscription thing. I think this is one of the worst ideas yet. Why not use ads similar to what Google uses? It could work in exactly the same manner; the ad would be associated with the story to which its attached. Advertisers could pick which categories of stories it wants its page displayed upon. The ad would still be small (text only would be great for those of us forced into using modems), and could actually be imbedded, say, between the summary and the actual comments. That's a little more pervasive than regular banner ads, but *much* more likely to work. And, yes, there are issues--like what if the article posted is negative about one of the advertisers? One solution is to have the moderators turn off certain advertisers for certain stories. This shouldn't be too difficult, and, IMNSHO, probably wouldn't alienate either side--at least as not as badly.
I'm not saying we won't do that. I'm saying that "This is how it works for now". We broke things down by perl script. Comment viewing and posting happens in the same script.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I've never understood why ad-supported content providers (particularly radio stations, and now, perhaps, Slashdot) always follow this model:
1) Start out providing good content and very few ads thus becoming popular.
2) Once popular, start playing - or inserting - many more ads, to the point of extreme annoyance.
3) Drive listeners - or readers - away and fade into oblivion.
Why can't these guys just charge MORE for the small number of ads? Why not auction them off to the highest bidder?
-- The reader anything less than completely failing to not misunderstand this sig is cursed.
I have to admit... I never thought I'd see the day that Slashdot became a stratified service site. The same Slashdot that strongly supports free (as in beer) OSes over the more traditional pay type. The same Slashdot where people strongly object to free registration to read NYTimes articles...
Its reasonable, of course. Someone has to pay the bill for bandwidth; and I shudder to think how large that bill would be for Slashdot. I have no objections at all to selling advertising... but to be honest the bit about 'Eventually we intend to offer additional features to subscribers' kinda bothers me.
Lots of people here are big fans of Linux. Do you get 'extra features' if you pay Linus $5/1000 lines of kernel code? Not the best analogy, but this just looks like a slippery slope.
Its not that I have no faith in Slashdot; its just that this scene has repeated itself on SO many once-free websites. It starts with a few harmless extra features for subscribers but the 'free' service eventually erodes into uselessness.
Again, I'm not questioning the addition of ads to generate revenue. I also think its pretty swell that we're being given the opportunity to buy our way out of ads. Its just the extra-feature thing that worries me. It seems so... contrary to the overwhelmingly cyber-libertarian feel of Slashdot.
Slashdot is moving from a fairly egalitarian 'society' to one with a class structure. Who saw that coming?
Except, Slashdot is not becoming a pay site. You're just paying to have ads removed. Only if your comments ended up in a 'subscriber-only' section would your statement be true. Also, by merely posting on Slashdot, you have granted them a limited-use license to store and display your comments as they see fit. (They had a story about it awhile back, when they were wanting to use comments in a book that I don't think every actually came out.)
Just like usenet. If you ever post on a newsgroup, guess what, someone's making money off your post. There are companies that charge for usenet access, so you'd have to send a letter to each and every one of them, as well.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
They are free.
They are ad free.
They are more efficient, bandwidth wise.
Oh, and they are more stable. Slashdot has been unavailable far more often than my trusty newsgroups.
Yes, it's funny how the TANSTAAFL crowd ignores advertising costs. Advertising is the hemoragging wound of capitalism: the only way to compete with advertising is to advertise in response. The net result is higher prices without value, a completely useless sector of the economy, and a lot of cultural pollution.
okay, and it's not just because I use webwasher. It's because even if these slashdot guys got any money, they still wouldn't improve the quality of slashdot. Hire someone to do spell checking? Not gonna happen. Hire someone to check dupe/old stories? Not gonna happen. Hire someone to weed out the blatant commercials (Hey geeks check out this cool new product that you can buy now!) that's news? Gimme a break. Slashdot quality has continually declined since I've been reading it, and it's only occasionally I see something worth more than the usual JonKatz movie review.
I'm really confused by that assumption. Most of the ads that I see on Slashdot DO work for me. I find myself clicking through to the ads on Slashdot BECAUSE THEY INTEREST ME. Ads like ThinkGeek, California Digital, Sourceforge, etc. They're targeted to the clientele of the web pages they're on.
I'm afraid of, however, is what the ads in the "free" Slashdot will be like... Metabolife, X-10 Cameras, Match.com, Free Credit Reports, 5 DVD's for the price of 1, 0% Visas....I've gotta stop, it's making me woozy. But the "bigger" ads to me mean non-targeted ads, with OSDN taking ads from anyone who is willing to pay. So much for the whole theory of Slashdot - "Stuff That Matters".
Oh, and by the way, the first time I get a pop-up from Slashdot is when I pull the flush cord!
These prices are insanely low by normal standards. While we'd all prefer that it stay free forever, we don't have that option. Slashdot has three options:
1) BLow off the advertisers, get fired by Andover, and Slashdot loses all independence when the current crew is replaced.
2) Blow off the advertisers, be forced to buy back Slashdot, and slashdot is stuck on a far lesser net connection and hardware(less reliability and speed) or folds entirely.
3) Accept the ads.
Thankfully, Slashdot managed to do (3) while still giving us options to avoid the ads, at an extremely low price.
How about a little dollar bill next to their name and their comments? It would be the "Sell out" indicator! Seriously though, it's too bad that slashdot has come to this, but at least we can still see it for free (unlike so many other sites). Hopefully this won't be neccessary by this time next year.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
... /. will probably disappear from my list of frequented net destinations. I used to visit salon.com often, but no more ... I understand the need for revenue sources, but I think it's wrong to accept free submissions and content, then turn around and charge folks for access ... if you want to put up a tip jar, go ahead - I would drop funds into the hopper, but to enact a subscription setup ... bleh ...
AZspot
... User submissions are the lifeblood of this site. As I'm writing this this particular article is the only one on the page that is not from a user submission. I suggest that the submission link should be ad free and not cost a page hit, it should in fact add a free page hit for the subscriber who lost a hit going to the main page to submit the link. It's bad enough a corporation is going to try to make money off of voluntart public submissions and comments, but the subscribers shouldn't be charged with contributing.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
If I am to pay by pageview, I'd like to know how many I have consumed recently. I'm sure I'm one of the frequent 3% (fuck, I read trolltalk and journals regularly!) but I would like to understand what this really means. Would I pay $5 for .. a month? two weeks? more? less?
sulli
RTFJ.
As another possible slashdot subscriber-only feature, how about a weekly (daily? hourly?) statistical analysis of slashdot activity, a la the Google Zeitgeist?
I'd be interested in statistics such as:
etc...
What do other people think?
Slashdot starts Subscription Service
anonymous coward writes: today Slashdot announced their new subscription service
Hell it would have made me laugh, not to mention the coolness of the self-referential factor.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I think 20 for no ad's whatsoever is a little much. Especially since most folks who pay that seem to be the ones who actually post and stuff. I am also starting to wonder...one day I was checking out Slashdot and I saw an ad for Windows XP. Kind of funny seeing that here. Oh well.
;))and the sites could stay ad free (with exception of the words an IBM supported community site on every page). I think IBM likes Linux enough that I could imagine them doing just this thing. Come on IBM make VA an offer they can't refuse.
Personally, I think VA should sell the websites to someone like.....IBM. Think about it. IBM supports Linux A LOT. IBM could setup Source Forge, Slashdot and all of VA's sites on 1 zSeries machine. The cost for IBM to run it would be minimal (in IBM's budget anyway!
In any case, as much as I would like Slashdot to succeed, I realize (and I hope Taco and Hemos knows this as well) that this is not going to work. I will not pay right now. If the ad's get real obnoxious, I will then consider it. Knowing Slashdot's audience and favorite Distro (Debian), it seems, to me that many won't pay. They'll just leave.
Gorkman
How long before someone carefully screens through /., filters out the crap, enhances it on their own with some research, and simply publishes a condensed version in print form and make some cash off of it? Probably not long.
I've heard several people echo this sentiment. How would this work exactly and who the heck would buy it? How would you filter false posts from the true? Online, we pretty much accept that a +5 Insightful post might be blatantly wrong, because moderators can make mistakes. But that's ok, b/c we're used to it. In the print world, even editorials are subject to a higher standard of veracity, I think. For someone to publish it would mean assuming responsibility, and I don't see that happening.
Not to mention that this would not exactly sell like hotcakes - how many letter pages do you read in the magazines that you subscribe? Most of the time I tend to ignore opinions of readers in the print world, and skip directly to the people who should know what they're talking about, the authors of the articles. Although the community model may work for some small publications, I cannot see a large scale republication about comments about what (by that time) would be old news, achieving any popularity. Call me a cynic.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
If it's the former, then make it so that the only people that can post anonymously are paying customers. Sure as hell cancel out the trolls in a hurry. How many people will be willing to pay for the right to be an asshole?
Lowering the number of trolls lowers the garbage on the site. Which lowers bandwidth. Which lowers operating cost. Which lowers the number of ads that the rest of the good guys have to see.
So you end up with three categories of people : anonymous and not paying, for whom the site is read-only. Registered but not paying, who see ads, but can also post as themselves. Registered and paying, who don't see ads and can post either as themselves, or anonymously.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
It actually looks like a pretty good system, as these things go.
I particularly like the idea of paying for pages, rather than for time. If I go on vacation or just take a break from Slashdot, I'm not wasting a portion of a subscription. That's very good. Not putting an expiration date on the 1000 page views is even better. I wish my cell phone company would sell pre-paid minutes that way, instead of having them expire after 90 days.
Deciding where to spend your 1000 page views is also pretty cool. I hope that it's eventually possible to add options like "show ads if I'm refreshing a page" or "show ads on the lameness filter page" so that people who want to conserve their page views for "new" pages can do that.
I also like being able to put only a small amount of money ($5) down. I paid $30 for a Salon subscription, but probably won't renew. I paid $5 for LiveJournal with almost no hesitation because $5 is a very small amount. Deciding to spend $20 would take much longer than deciding to spend $5.
Overall, it looks cool. I hope it works out for everyone.
If half of that 1.5% who will have to pay over $60 a year to access
Sorry but I just don't see how charging people who are content producers as well as the heavy content consumers is going to help the site? Perhaps people should now be paid for each submission posted to the site, after all a good story will increase the views, and thus the revenues incoming to
...You are the same people who spend $300 to get a TIVO ...
Yes, in my dreams I have $300 to spend on something like a TIVO. I listen to the radio for music. I drive 8 extra miles each day to bypass the turnpike.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
This is really ironic timing considering the journal I wrote yesterday called Roll your own ad remover. Everyone take a look. I don't agree with ANY subscription based site, simply because I can't afford to pay for all the sites I frequent. I already pay $45/month for high speed internet access. That really is all I can afford to spend on something that is as much entertainment as tool. I don't blame them for doing it, and I'm glad these guys can make a living doing what they enjoy, but it seems to me that /. is doing well. This is (and I'm just speculating) corporate greed, brought about by VA Whatever's desire to increase the bottom line. I doubt Taco had much of a choice. He probably had to fight to get the subscription set up in this way. I know how corporations work, and I've been the brunt of these type desicions before. I just hope /. doesn't suffer because of a management dscision. Then again, I could be wrong, it has happened on occasion. ;-)
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
The sad part is that slashdot is the best model as far as being inexpensive to run.
They don't have any large graphics that take up bandwidth.
They don't have to pay for their content.
A large amount of the editorial work (moderation) is done for free.
Any yet they can't survive off the banner advertisements even given that most of the banner advertisements do a pretty good job of targeting the audience.
With 1000+ comments, the chances of this being read with any attention is small. And it is likely to be redundant. But here goes.
With a Slashdot subscription, I had hoped for something a little more. In fact, something even innovative. Instead, it is asking people to pay money to keep what Slashdot is currently like. Even worse, it has metering tied to it. How many times have we seen how popular an unmetered service is, versus a metered one?
GIVE us something for our money. And if you can be a trendsetter and do something new and innovative, all the better.
And I had such a nice low ID number. Oh well.
Slashdot used to be really interesting and frequently educational. The last year or so have been mildly entertaining. It's just not worth it anymore.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Bandwidth is actually more expensive than you think. A full t1 loop can cost up to 900 dollars. With the bandwidth that slashdot pulls, I would expect that you would realize that they probably have a ds3 or the like. Those are not cheap. So hence, your bandwidth=pennies theory is disproven, and my karma will go down most likely, just because I wanted to point out the obvious.
:)
For many years we have surfed the internet with ads. The fact that the obviously annoying one at the top is there proves that it can be eventually annoyed. Another website, www.opendiary.com went to a paid format such as slashdot is proposing, and it turned out that they had 16000 people subscribe the first week. Of course, the people who subscribed recieved no ads. It is everyones own opinion, but I would rather be bombarded with advertisements the size of Cowboy Neals resume than have to pay for something that was free at one point. Others do not, and are annoyed constantly by them. So this allows for another solution for those people. So why would anyone have a complaint after this is all resolved, except for cheapskates like myself who will not be paying, but get these larger banners.. (maybe the ones that move, I love em
The FTC did studies about twenty years ago and found that prices were lower for eyeglasses in states that permitted advertising of prescription eyeglasses. One thing that gets advertised is prices, which results in more competition.
Also, although much advertising is image and puffery, there is also a lot of valuable information conveyed in ads. I've learned a lot about new products and product features from ads.
"We're not selling content, we're selling a community." - generic dot com talking head, 1998.
OSDN doesn't care about you, they care that they can say "our community is so popular that X members were willing to pay $5 apiece to get 1000 pageviews without ads on them". Revise the demographic, revise the ad rates for the rest of the site, still charge the suckers money.
Spare me the finger-wagging about TANSTAAFL and the sanctimonious bullshit about never getting a good thing for free and tell me how much you paid for your copy of Debian which you supposedly run on your machine which is inevitably (80%+ of the time here) actually a Windows machine. You're improving the demographics of a site devoid of editorial contribution past green-lighting inflammatory subject matter and linking stale material that you can get elsewhere.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
You obviously have the $ to spend on an internet connection and a home computer though.
At work now. K6II 333 from clearance rack parts at home. I'm much cheaper than you can imagine.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Doh! Freudian slip. Meant "privacy killing companies"
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I don't see you offering a better, or even different solution at all, so it's hard for me to take you seriously. You haven't even experienced the new format yet and you're already bitching. I assume you're pretty heavy handed with preconception in other aspects of your life as well. No really, it's OK. Most other people are like that so why shouldn't you be?
Seriously. They could've just posted "Slashdot is now taking subscriptions" and everything below that really wouldn't matter. Everyone has already come up with their own idea of how much this place is going to suck before it has even happened. What a waste.
By describing your own living situation you actually help justify the case for subscriptions. You admit yourself that with your allotted income you can only afford so much and live so long. That happens to be exactly what the SlashOps are saying. You can't yell at someone for relying on monetary income because you have to do the same. And that line "that information and news should be free, just like code"? Please. You act like you won't be able to view Slashdot unless you pay. It's not the news and information you would be paying for, it's the services of Slashdot itself in putting it all together. A service which I have been more then pleased with for quite a while.
Honestly, I too am skeptical about the new system, but I'm keeping an open mind and waiting to see the actual product. It's my opinion that everyone else should wait-n-see as well, because untill then it's all just preconception.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
It seems to me that the $5/1,000 ads is basically just enough to cover the lost ad expense. So, it seems like /. makes the same amount of money whether I contribute or not. The only difference is whether I see the ads?
Ironically, I would pay to support Slashdot, but I am not sure that I'll pay to avoid seeing the ads.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Thus, I find that I actually ... >gulp< ... use the ad banners on Slashdot as a resource to find out what products and services are being marketed to Slashdot's audience. Particularly I'm interested in seeing what companies see that audience as being a valuable market segment, and how they're tailoring their promotions or corporate strategies to suit that segment.
Breakfast served all day!
that right , sell karma.
High id, karma = 50. any bids?
but then remember, karma is just a number.
I was thinking of +4 and, particularly +5 comments that get seen (by default) on the main article page. Heck, I probably post close to 50 +3 comments during an active /. month.
The concerns about earning something of economic value are warranted, of course, but I think they are less worrying if they earn discounts, and not outright credits. As for karma whoring, what's the issue? I'm not suggesting discounts for karma, but rather positive moderations, and I think the feedback between the two is damped enough for this to not be a problem. If someone gets karma becase of positive mods, don't they deserve it?
Anyway, it's your site, not mine, do what you will. But, I'd hate to see the posters who have the most valued comments leave because of an ad or subscription policy. I'd be surprised to learn that half of all readers don't care about comments at all -- do that many never click beyond the headlines to see top level +4 and +5 posts?
You could've hired me.
On this thread!
I know, because I do that with ThinkGeek products all the time: ThinkGeek will advertise a cool product, I'll go to pricescan.com and find the same product for a fraction of the price, so ThinkGeek's advertising actually cost them a sale.
If you want to introduce a subscription system, offer additional features instead. But be prepared to deal with users asking for money too, when they submit stories, because capitalism works both ways.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
ha, like being first means anything
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
How much do Taco, Katz, Hemos, et. al. make per year? How much is their stock worth?
And what, pray tell, do they actually do to deserve this money?
The content on this site is provided by the READERS and the editors don't know an adverb from a participle. Any news story on this site can be had for FREE elsewhere, EARLIER! The software is open source, undoubtedly most of the people who wrote it never got payed for their efforts.
I like the comments. Many are informative. If there were some way to pay the people who actually provide me with information, I would.
If I were actually buying into a cooperative community, where I had a vote on things, could elect a board of directors, editors, etc. then I would not hesitate. Why should I pay some nerd to do a job they aren't even doing well.
Let me reiterate, it is the community here at slashdot that I appreciate. The editors have been getting more and more on my nerves for years.
I know that it takes money to provide bandwidth. If I had a say in things here, I would pay to be part of this community. But for the same amount of money, I can get a subscription to a print magazine with articles actually written by staff writers as well as pretty pictures and diagrams. Part of slashdot's appeal has always been it's amatuerishness. I think certain geeks heads have gotten too swelled to realize that this isn't a professional operation, it's not a real magazine, it's not even a real web-magazine. It's a discussion forum with links to other news sources. As such, it's not worth paying money for.
If this money went to paying for a professional editor, if some of it went to pay the people who submit stories and comments, if some of it went to pay back people who donated hardware in slashdot's infancy, then I might reconsider. Until then, this is my last post. I won't moderate, I won't metamoderate. I will read slashdot with graphics turned off (not like I'd miss an actual picture or diagram, anyway.) Goodbye, chumps. Sad to be leaving, it's been fun.
But not $5 a month worth.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...do I get my moderator privileges back? I seem to have automagically lost them after modding up "the post."
OK Slashdot Children, it's like this:
You are NOT the nexus of this site. The idea that your feelings/opinions/rants are the reason people come here is, while correct in a narrow sense, wrongheaded in scope as far as costs are concerned. You're only providing Slashdot content inasmuch as they're providing you with an opportunity to state your opinion and be part of a community, so call it even on that score. How much you decide to use that opportunity is your concern, not theirs.
But the fact that you've decided to stand on the Slashdot soapbox to state your views creates no requirement for Slashdot to give you any concern or compensation. And in a social sense, I think that just the fact that we get to put our opinions in front of 300 THOUSAND readers is benefit enough to us, no? My point: stop bitching about wanting discounts or a cut of the pie because you fscking post here. So do a few hundred thousand other people.
Slashdot content, through news events and user posts about those events, has always been free, and is going to stay free, with more (and more intrusive) ads. The tech expertise, hardware, software development, content control, and power costs have never been free. VA's been shouldering that from the get-go for ALL OF YOU. God forbid they ask you ungrateful bitches, "Please, please, let us remain solvent so we can provide you this service!?!?". How repugnant of someone to seek to cover the costs, no less get some profit, from a forum that's obviously popular as one of the widest-read tech/geek forums in the world.
Discounts for highly moderated posts? Whiny flames about how 'net ads don't work? Fsck all of you.
Sorry to pull a Johnny Cochran, but if they can't make it pay, it's gonna go away. Me, I'll be paying as soon as they get a credit card account going. If you, the internet user, want the internet to thrive you need to realize that the content you're interested in has value and is worth paying for. If you can't put up for what you want to see, then don't expect anything of value for you to look at on this fancy info superhighway thingie. Go on, be a cheapskate. Go ahead & leave it to MS, AOL & Amazon to become one big high-tech fscking mail-order catalog. For you cheap bastards out there you'll just be getting what you deserve.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
* Ability to filter on comments based upon moderation...(All responses "Funny")
* Access to the reject bin
* Track specific user comments (There are a couple of people who put thought in and I would like to be able highlight there comments or have them return in my sort no matter there moderated comment value)
....More to come
Errr so you want to pay for higher ratings?
;o)
/. $5 for 1,000 pages just to provide the news, but the banners don't bother me.
Why don't you just generate an HTML page with your story submission added to it, and then stare at that. That would be free.
Seriously tho, the value of Slashdot is that it provides news, not that it provides moderator points.
I'm willing to pay
"Derp de derp."
Granted, I wasn't reading slasdot back then, but just look at it now. Controlled by VA Linux, forced to do big annoying banner ads that none of the users want to see, and editors slamming their biggest users for using the system. *sigh* - I guess perfection will never be achieved online. So much for that dream utopia, huh Jon Katz?
Slashdot is an interesting news service, definitely one of the more interesting ones out there. I'm willing to pay $5 for 1,000 views, banners or no banners. I think the news I get out of it is worth paying that.
/. closes it's doors one day, you may wonder if $5 was too much to spend on it.
It's comforting knowing that they have a revenue stream to keep them alive.
I would suggest that some of you adjust your attitude a bit. If
"Derp de derp."
Interesting idea, but I think it would work the reverse of how you suggest. Have you ever, in your life bought anything from a banner ad? I think most seasoned web surfers are so jaded that they don't even see banner ads anymore. Hence the people who pay to remove the ads are likely the people on whom banner ads are already ineffective.
Meanwhile the monkey punchers will keep on being baffled by how their bank account continues to dwindle and wireless webcams keep appearing by FedEx...
I think you're exaggerating a bit.
/. more than any other site so I think it's fair - you wouldn't catch me spending money on CNN or NYTimes, but here, I've got no problem with it.
If you do the math, that means you'd reload slashdot every 57.6 seconds in a 16 hour concious day to use up 1000 reloads. Maybe you're on the extreme fringe, but I reload every 30 minutes for the 8 1/2 hours I'm at work. That comes to 51 loads per day assuming I load 3 pages per view.
Besides, I don't think there's anything wrong with compensating someone for a provided service. I visit
Triv
So who's the guy between us?
serious:
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
... or maybe I'm playing the Devil, but check out my reasoning:
Slashdot is soem very large percent users. Basically we use the tool (/.) over the web to create content. Wow, isn't this an ASP subscription based application thingamajig. You know the concept that get's booed into oblivion every time it's mentioned.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Slashdotters,
...)
I would pay for NNTP access. Gate the stories and submissions
into a NNTP server. Post comments as threads. Gate postings
via NNTP into the weblog.
NNTP is capable of using login and password validation schemes
and is much easier, more efficient (saving bandwitdth)
than using the Web. Plus, setting up mirror sites is a snap.
I would pay for NNTP access. And don't be afraid of people re-gating stuff,
because they could just as well publish their Web login passwords,
and there aren't many people doing that, are there?
(I've heard freshmeat does it as well
Home Page
We're only talking about $5, huh? Yeah. $5 to this site. $5 to another. $10 to another, $3 to another, ad infinitum.
I'm not going to pay every site that I go to. I don't want the total cost, the hastle of paying a hundred people, and I don't like the idea.
So you realize that I'm not being a hypocrite, Besides the web site that I work for as a day job, I run a couple of sites on the side that make money. Even the ones with quite a bit of good, quality content don't charge the end-users any amount of money, and certainly not for subscriptions. That's just not how I want the net to work.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Not to mention the fact that subscribers are generally going to be the ones who post the most, provide interesting comments and provide the content for Slashdot. The demographic is going to swing. Advertisers are going to have to go after trolls and lurkers, not real tech geeks.
But the scoop engine is great at what Skim123 is talking about: the users select the stories, and the moderation system is superior to slashdot. So instead of going to kuro5hin where you don't like the split technology/culture articles, create a slashdot clone from the scoop code.
Scoop is a wonderful engine, and quite easy to administer. You could easily have a slashdot lookalike up and running in days. And I have heard that the server requirements for scoop are lower than slash for a low-end machine -- but don't quote me on that one.
501 Not Implemented
Wouldn't your bandwidth bills increase by having to serve ads from your own servers? Unless you're telling me that ads pay for their own bandwidth plus that of the content...
/. without ads doesn't help me.
/. for it's own content. i visit it because it's a convenient dumping ground for links to many things i find interesting.
/. is a collection of links to stories on -other- websites who -will- have ads.
i don't read
the forums? hah! those are mind-numbing.
if the ads were intrusive (the page-top banner is thoroughly tuned out on just about every site) then i'd just stop visiting.
try a different model.
subscription didn't work for PCXL and it -had- redeeming self-generated content.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Other people have faced this problem
Before the advent of the World Wide Web, everybody who was anybody in the computer world was on CompuServe. And each CompuServe forum competed for members (and the connection time revenue that the member paid) based on the help, support, community, files, or messaging that it provided. It was--explicitly--pay-for-content. It was precisely the business model that you guys want to adopt.
Savvy forum operators knew the statistics: only 5% of forum members ever posted a comment. And roughly 1% of forum members posted 90% of the comments. The more commments (particularly the more substantive comments), the more forum members there were--95% of whom were "read-only" lurkers. Thus, it paid to encourage people to post comments.
This policy discourages people from posting comments
Think of what you have to do to post a comment:
Are you done? Nope. You'd better hope your comment doesn't get mod'd up--because you'll get "messages" telling you that. Link to that page? (1 hit). You'd better hope you haven't contributed something provocative that produces replies--because you'll have to read each reply (1 hit apiece), and possibly post a response (3 hits per response, see above).
In short, contributing to SlashDot, writing interesting comments, getting mod'd up, and responding to replies now will cost you money. That is, all the things that you (SlashDot) want people to do (desperately need people to do) you are going to charge money for. You're creating disincentives to provide you with content--and that content is what you're trying to sell to subscribers.
What smart forum operators did was to issue "free flags". Each forum contractor got a certain amount of free forum time to award to forum users who helped out in one way or another. There were sysop accounts for people who did administrative things--but there were a lot more free flags for regular forum members who just participated in a lot of conversations. It would make a *lot* of sense for you to do the same thing.
In the ultimate geek world you'd be able to automate a process to identify people making significant contributions. That's what moderation is, after all. But automated processes can be manipulated (i.e. karma whoring)--this probably requires some individual discretion. Identify significant contributors (you can start with high-karma users, but I'm sure you can identify other factors to consider) and grant them free access. You want them posting comments all the time--those are the people whose peers have voted to indicate that their voices should be heard. The very last thing you want to do is get those people contributing less, because each contribution now costs them at least 3 page hits.
Oh, yeah--Paypal?
Be serious. If OSDN and VA Software is on such shaky ground that you can't get a merchant account through CyberCash or someone else, you have serious problems.
> (As an aside, it's also worth noting that more than
> half of all comment posters fall into this 3%)
Stop and think about that, fellow posters. That means comment posters comprise *less than 6%* of slashdot viewers [according to some means of measurement].
What are those other 19 outta 20 people doing? Just reading the articles and surfing to the links? Are they bothering with comments? If so, why are they so interested in reading things but not saying anything?
Seems like you could charge the silent majority, if they're truly surfing the site for content and not merely curious homepage clickers that don't care enough to pay, and still make plenty without bothering to levvy a fee on the people who make the content come proverbially alive.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Nobody with an ounce of sense would rely on a forum like Slashdot - mainly a place for people to bitch about their favorite hot buttons - to be a solid source for news. Hell, the editors can't even spell a great deal of the time, much less recognize proper grammar; hardly the recommendation for any sort of serious news provider. And how many times has slashdot been completely fucked on little things like facts and details?
That said, the fact that Slashdot pretty much just repackages the efforts of other sites when it comes to news means that the $20/year they're thinking about isn't to cover journalistic efforts (there being no such thing) but to allow people to rant on their favorite forum sans ads. That's all it is.
Will it work? I doubt it. As you said, this sort of business model just doesn't cut it on the internet. But hey, if that's what someone wants to do then more power to them. If my refusal to subscribe means that Slashdot goes under or I get booted, well, them's the breaks. I like Slashdot, but not enough to put money down on this horse.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I'm not _worried_ about it, I just want to know how pervasive its use is.
And yeah, I know what gzip is. I just wasn't aware that some (many?) web servers were autonegotiating its use behind the scenes.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
But pleeeez shut the fuck up.
This is evidence to me that the following is possible:
Imagine a BOD meeting (21st century style with bottled water, not in a smoke filled room). In this BOD meeting sit those who own, and those in control of slashdot.
"Rob, you've got to change the script to remove any anti-microsoft content as it as posting. And the goat.cx stuff has got to go too"
"Uh, yeah. Well, um.....but slashdot is about freedom of speech, power to the people, communication of the masses"
"Sorry Rob, I know how you feel. But Microsoft is buying a lot of advertising with us lately and, quite frankly, they spend enough here to have earned our respect"
"But what about our subscriber base?"
"Look at the numbers guys. Subscriber revenue is one millionth of what advertiser revenue is. And Microsoft is now paying eighty percent of that advertiser revenue. And all that revenue is what's keeping your new bride living in luxury"
"It doesn't make it RIGHT"
"But it's what they want. And if they don't get what they want then they are pulling their account with us. We'll all be looking for jobs and the dot com thing is over. Your next job will consist of asking the customer if they want fries with their lunch"
"Oh. Well, um......will this afternoon be soon enough for those script changes then?"
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I remember when PC Magazine first came out (in the 80's), it was mostly advertising and that was its primary value. Everyone wanted to know all about the latest hardware and software that you could add on to your PC, and the respective vendors were best qualified to talk about them.
I think the main reason most people despise today's web advertising is that it sucks. It's all about making an impression, and contains little interesting content. These "in your face" ads are also created with the assumption that you really don't want to see them, so they have to force you to look.
This, and Slashdot's new approach, are all horribly misguided. What /. needs to do is play a major role in the production, appearance and categorization of the ads. Make them a resource, not a nuisance. Make them informative, browseable and searchable. Reject products with no real value.
Slashdot should raise the bar for web advertising, not wallow in the mud of its current state.
I'm insulted!
Lynx! The stories are important for two things: Links to the sites that CmdrTaco commands we destroy, and the comments of the community. Lynx can handle links, and the comments are made of text. Lynx is a text only browser. Done!
[o]_O
Of course, I personally think that modding down for spelling ("loose?" "flaimbait?" - the words are "lose" and "flamebait") and misuse of the apostrophe is quite appropriate.
You forget that the company that bought Slashdot wants to earn interest on that investment.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I suspect if you did the same study today you'd find that advertising actually does more to bring up prices. Companies realized that competing on price was detrimental to them, so they switched to branding as the primary form of advertising.
To see this in it's most obvious form, look at Nike. Their ads don't even mention their shoes. Heck, they don't mention the name. It's just a sort of video art piece with a nike swoosh and maybe "just do it" at the end.
The thing is, people buy Nike, not because the quality is better but because of branding. Thus prices can be raised because people will pay more for what may in fact be an inferior product. That's on top of the fact that price is raised anyhow because they need to spend so much on building their brand through various advertising channels.
When was the last time you saw an ad banner adverising a product being cheaper than the competition? It's rather infrequent, non?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Great job, you guys! I've been waiting for the web to work out good micropay oriented subscription solutions since 1996. I'll gladly pay you my $20 / year, and I hope that you become millionaires -- seriously. If you can make it work, others will learn. And that means less ads for me.
This will probably get lost in the noise, but something I've been thinking about is a "distributed /." Think of it as /. over Freenet. Hell, even use Freenet as a way to distribute bandwidth costs across an entire spectrum of users. This would help the Freenet folks, as well as keep /. alive.
/.
Of course, this would have to be an independent movement, because I'm sure VA Linux (or whatever the hell they're named now) wouldn't want to lose out on a cash cow like
I'll pay up with a smile. Do we have a deal?
(Dang, my .sig never seemed so apt....)
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I worked for a company called Thruport and one of our products was a spam^H^H banner-serving program. The long and short of it is that I came out with the realization that Internet advertising is deceptive, futile, and a dead-end.
In such a business, everyone is trying to screw over everyone else. IE, inflate your impressions and click-throughs, track down to geography of users, and place as many banners on a page as humanly possible. I would get calls from irate porn-peddlers and weird clip-art pushers. The second they lost an impression, you would get a call holding whoever was in the room responsible. Nevermind that our sales team sold all sorts of unrealistic promises.
There is wonderful content on the web that simply could not survive without ad revenue. I would love to just use Junkbuster or block images with Mozilla, but I do want my measly page-view to give some $0.000000002 to the kids that make Slashdot possible. I wish Slashdot luck. Its certainly an issue I have no idea how to solve.
Seriously though, what is the big deal? All I hear is people bitching about how awful this is and how slashdot isn't good enough to pay for. If you don't like the ads, then pay to get rid of them. If you don't want to pay, then quit complaining and live with it. It's not like a couple ads is really going to kill you. Personally, I think ads are annoying, and I also love reading slashdot (even with the supposed grammatical errors and lack of original stories which some people seem think is some huge deal), but I also do not have the money/want to spend my money on getting rid of the ads...so instead I'll just live with it. It's not that big of a fucking deal. Quit complaining and get over it, slashdot needs to generate some profit and this is one way to achieve it. Can you blame them?!?
Two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do!
Yeah, right. Kindly ask your ISP to give some of that money to the sites he allegedly charges you for.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I posted this earlier but I haven't heard from anyone that can explain why /. is thinking this way, so here it is again:
So what you're saying is "We've got 1/3 million users per day and we've got to do what the advertisers want"?
Well, Jesus, how many readers do you need before you start telling the advertisers what they have to do to get on?
If that really is the state of on-line marketing then you'd be better off getting out of it and selling blank discs on street corners because that situation is not stable. What happens if the advertisers say "Dump the no-ads pages or we walk"?
If you have the traffic you say you have then you should be telling them to get into an orderly line and, while they're waiting they can read your advertisement restrictions. I repeat, if you can't do this then you will never have a stable business model that includes advertising.
Dumping the adverts altogether and making posts a subscription-only facility (read and write) would be better. Why arse around with people that want big adverts on the site for next to nothing in the first place? Tell them where to stick it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Of course, at home I've got Linux running on everything, so Lynx is a viable option for viewing the **new** advertising-cluttered /..
But at work I've gotta use W1nbl0w$, and what to do, what to do about /. and ads and Lynx?
Well, here's what:
Go to http://jim.spath.com/lynx_win32/ and pick up Lynx for W32!
Took me about 5 minutes to download it and put it on, including editing a batch file (Wow! does that bring back the memories!!) and setting up a shortcut and switching to a custom Lynx icon for the shortcut...
Ya'll ought to try it: it may be the first experience some of you get with the way the Web used to be, a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
1) I was being serious about thinking that modding stories would be a good thing, I have in fact suggested it before.
2) The comment was a joke, as whatever unholy hold he has on the other editors of slashdot have kept him here this long, he will undoubtedly be kept until the end of slashdot.
3) Even if it were not meant as a joke, it is completely valid as the fact that Katz is allowed to 'publish' here is brings this online forum to the level of tabloid IMO (He uses inflammatory and dramatic statements to make his points rather than facts, he states opinion as 'fact', and when he does use 'facts', he does not back up his 'facts' with sources). I freely admit that I resent the association between Slashdot and Katz, as he is in no way a responsible journalist.
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
I've been basically thinking that for a while now anyway. It doesn't matter what the topic is, it seems like plants for the other side's company just come rushing in to flame on. It's just so predictable. Doesn't matter if the story is pro linux, windows, apple, p2p, anti-p2p, dmca, 2600, etc, etc... the arguments that will crop up are just too damn predictable. It's not even worth it.
Slashdot has just gotten too fat to sustain itself and this will just send it to hell. Not that I'm against people making money but hell, this is the net, there will always be free alternatives, and if not, there's always trusty usenet (which, btw, is reverting back to the old days. No newbies even know what usenet is now, I do believe spam is going down, and conversations are *almost* intelligent again...)
I can't quite give a rundown of which browsers support it, but the browser will advertise its capability to support it in its request headers (for example: "Accept-Encoding: gzip, compress"). This is part of the HTTP/1.1 compliance standard, so it should be in any browser from 1999 or later.
It's quite simple to install with Apache. Also, the logging options of mod_gzip allow you to see just how much bandwidth savings you're getting and/or if the requesting browser will support the request, so just a little homework will give you all the information you need to know.
Anyway, most of your answers are here.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
A few things that might be worth $5:
- an exact count of the mod points handed out that day and who got them.
- a page that shows what posts were modded by which slashdot editors.
- the ability to refuse editorial mods in an effort to avoid idiots like Michael Sims.
- the ability to actual mod, since this seems to have been stripped from me right from the beginning.
Just a few things that might be worth $5. Finding out what the editors are doing would be enough on curiosity alone.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
But paying for every 1000 pages? What this leads to is every time I'm going to have a look at something in Slashdot, I have to weigh whether or not I *really* want to, because every time has a cost.
Ah - it gets worse. You load slashdot (1 page hit), open a story (2), read the comments, decide to respond to a comment (3), preview your response (4), decide not to post and go back to the story (5,6), read a long comment (7), go back (8), but accidently hit back twice so your at the home page (9), so back to the story (10), read the extra comments on the next page (11), respond to one of these with preview (12, 13, 14), then go back to the story (15), and decide to look at the level zero posts (16), then you go back to the home page (17).
Then you check you messages (18) and see there is a new reply you click it (19) and then click the link (20) then hit reply, preview and post (21, 22, 23) then back home.
You decide to metamoderate (24, 25) and end up back at the home page (26).
Wow - that's a lot of pages. Admittedly there are more efficient ways of doing things, but these are my browsing habits.
The galling thing is that it will cost you money (if you chose to subscribe) to metamoderate and to post. Even submitting a story will cost you money.
Best wishes in your future careers guys, this site is dying.
Well that's a good idea. I am a "fan" of about 10 posters here on slashdot, and I would drop a buck into each of their buckets, if I could. In fact, I am more inclined to give each of them a buck than I am to pay out $5 for myself.
Also, it would be easy and useful for slashdot to use Amazon's donation system. It's a lot like PayPal, but Amazon takes about 10% more or less than PayPal does (I can't recall the rate off the top of my head). I'm waiting for that, as I don't use PayPal.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The day before yesterday Hemos posted a link to Piro's insightful analysis of why the #1 dot-com strategy didn't work. Diluted to it's essence, "There's an inherent part of human nature that just makes you bristle at having to suddenly pay for something that you didn't have to pay for before." I would like you to know that this new policy does makes me bristle a bit. I won't pay for Slashdot; I feel that I have given nearly as much as I have received. To the decision-makers behind this advertising move, I respectfully recommend you read this article, toward the bottom left of the page.
/. has been successful because it's free entertainment. I honestly hope the increase in income from each page view outweighs the drop in the number of page views /. will receive.
Depending on how annoying those ads are, I may go elsewhere. I'll probably check back now and then, to see if the new ads have gotten any less annoying. I like Slashdot quite a bit, in spite of the fist prosts and the "dude, what if we made a beowulf of these" comments. It's all part of the fun, part of the culture. I like interacting with other people that have similar interests. Honestly, though, I'm not going to pay for something that I can get for free somewhere else.
My "karma" rating has stayed right at 50 for a long time. As a contributor of content which is apparently valued by your other readers, I hope you will at least consider my opinion.
include $sig;
1;
I like thinking along the lines of the above post. Thoughtful advertising makes money and is a benefit to the reader, not an annoyance. Consider the Google ads, for example.
Unfortunately, one thing is abundantly clear: Neither the Slashdot editors nor the parent company have any detectable business sense. Did they expect to make money from ads for high-caffeine tablets? A sensible person would never buy most of the things they already advertise. A lot of the ads are subtly offensive toward the reader, as are some elements of Slashdot, such as "News for nerds". Apparently they aren't aware of the negative connotations of that word. There is no need to have two slogans. "Stuff that matters" is enough.
The Slashdot editors are communication-challenged. They are people who cannot be bothered to run a spell checker, or learn English grammar. They are exactly the type that runs a successful venture into the ground.
That's unfortunate, because Slashdot is an extremely valuable resource.
As I write this, there is a blinking banner ad for RackSpace. RackSpace should definitely advertise on Slashdot; that's good thinking. But the ad says, "Win a Gift Certificate" for $300. This is an invitation to you to embezzle money from your company. Apparently the people who designed the ad feel comfortable with this, or they are just plain ignorant of the implications.
Bush's education improvements were
I would almost certainly reduce the number of times per day that I look at /. from about 10 to 1 or 2. It would reduce costs for /., while not seriously affecting my enjoyment of the site (I'll just browse at a higher level).
Things that would make me likely to pay for subscriptions:
- remove per-user limits on karma (keeping per-article limits); allow high-karma users to get discounts - the higher the karma the better the discount - so that someone with a karma of 100+ would only pay $1 for 1000 views, for example
- be very clear on what constitutes a view, and do not charge a view for posting stories, moderating or metamoderating
Things that would make me leave:
- too annoying to read slashdot any more - big intrusive ads, popunders, spyware ads, etc
- punished for contributing (with higher cost or more intrusive ads)
- ads which appear for some number of seconds, as the only content on the page, between clicking to get to a story and getting there
Frankly, I have no problem paying for the site either by having advertising or directly, as long as I feel I'm getting something worthwhile for it, and getting more than karma in return for contributing to the site's success.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Will we be able to see how much money you guys collect from this? Will it be in your SEC filings as "Slashdot subscriptions"?
rooooar
If you are at liberty to say, CmdrTaco, exactly how much money does Slashdot make from ads? If it makes $5 CPM (cost per thousand ads) then the $5 to eliminate the thousand ads doesn't give you much additional income. I was thinking about it this way because many people are giving you money to eliminate the thousand ads in the hope of helping out the site, but wouldn't it be a better way to help the site to just give to a tip jar in addition to giving you the ad revenue (and viewing ads is relatively painless, I might add)?
NO pop-ups, pop-unders, pop whatever.
NO Flash playing, Java Applet, MID playing ads.
What it will be is the messaging unit ads (the big square ad in center of page) and sometimes, a bigger banner ad where the current banner is. That's it. Still GIF/JPG ads. That's all. And yes, one ad per page.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
I dunno. I wouldn't pay $9.95 a month to read Something Awful, but I don't get to Slashdot very often, so I like the pay per view as an option.
Though I agree it shouldn't be the only option.
Okay, WTP is with the damn lameness filter? Ye gods, people, sometimes LESS IS MORE!
sometime seventeen
syllables ain't enough to
express a complete
(c) poster
UNLAME ENOUGH FOR YOU?
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
I fail to see why so many people are freaking out over $5/1000 page views. Even at $5/week (thats one pageview EVERY 10 minutes) its not a bad deal.
Yes, everything is the world should be free. But, you know what? The world doesn't work that way. If /. has to have bigger ads to keep the advertisers happy, then so be it. The fact that they are offering a way around the new, bigger ads is commendable.
$5 isn't going to kill you. Besides, its a tax write off (in Canada, anyways)
There was a day slashdot was about open source, free (as in speach and in beer) and getting to know the way around the web... stuff that matters.
Today, they (there's a lot of them) announced the end of all this. Today it got announced that I have to pay to see slashdot the way I want to. Today I got told that filtering advertisement is bad. The next thing will be, they tell me not to skip the commercials on my taped tv programs.
I sit in my little web enabled corner and cry.
It is not that I am not willing to pay for good services. It is not that I am not able to pay about $30 a year. It's about my loss of faith. It's about an announcement that almost makes me not to believe in free (as in freedom 'cause I don't care about the beer).
It's about a mentality getting lost
It's about using old-fashioned management tactics in new uncontrolled environments.
It's about the loss of what we believe in.
I know there is a need for money, bandwidth and costs. But from a recent mail about some marriage I read there is also a 250.000 readers on slashdot. Multiply that with $20 and I think you can buy all the bandwidth you need + get yourself a nice honeymoon (which I wish Rob will have).
If this is going to be the goal slashdot wants to reach, I would like to cancel my subscribtion now.
Trip
The site where: "I'm right, as long as you ignore the things that prove me wrong", became a valid method of debate.
I don't happen to know how much we make off ads off the top of my head, but I do know that we only sell a relatively small percent of the 2 million pages we serve each day. Subscriptions are fairly similiar to a tip jar... we're just giving you banner ad free pages instead of a tote bag or whatever ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
First of all, you don't need to bludgeon me with ads to get me to pay, Taco. This is my favorite web site - if you just posted an article explaining you really, really need money or you will go under, I'd be happy to pay my $10 to help keep you afloat.
The problem is that, as with many other people, I really don't like to conduct purchases online. I don't trust paypal, and I don't want to give you my credit card number. What I AM willing to do is send you cash or a check through snail-mail - and that is the ONLY way I (and probably many other people) am/are willing to pay. I'm sorry, but until you add a snailmail option, I will not subscribe. Add that option, however, and I will subscribe promptly.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Thanks - we'll check it out.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Oh ok, I didn't realize that. I figured a popular site like Slashdot would have no problem selling its ads. :-) Anyway, I earlier posted comments where I was guessing that it wouldn't give you more money (assuming you got $5 CPM for the ads), but I posted replies retracting those statements and am now considering donating a bit. Sorry for spreading any misinformation. (-:
/. T-Shirts at think geek but a /. tote bag would be slick.
Also, a tote bag you say? I know of the
Use lynx.
Let me get this straight. You want me to pay for the priveledge of not having advertisements being crammed down my throat in an obtrusive way?
What happens when subscriptions don't make enough money? Will you then have "premium" subscriptions? Normal subscriptions will now bypass all but the smaller ads, and premium bypasses them all. But wait, eventually that won't work either. You'll have to have "Gold" subscriptions. *sigh*
The internet is a means to an end, not the end itself. There's a reason the dot-com economy went bust. This plan reflects a lack of imagination, and a basic misunderstanding of the *new* new economy.
Okay, that was more than two words. If you want the two-word version, you'll need to subscribe to my new "Rant subscription service." Currently we accept cash.
People are posting to visit http://www.kuro5hin.org/ as an alternative to Slashdot. Here was the first story when I visited there today:
Female Circumcision - Basic Information
I think I'll be sticking with Slashdot..
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
"..I just see it as another option that people can use.."
Micro$oft:
"..It's another feature our customers have requested.."
Why do both of these phrases leave me feeling uncomfortable?
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Maybe you should get some real advertiser will pay the price it takes to run /.?
ThinkGeek hardly qualifies as a money making advertiser.
Get Coke-Cola,Nike,Budwieser. compainies that can afford higher rates.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This change will change the whole site dynamics. For the worse, I think, in its current form.
Slashdot offers two main things:
Both of these things rely heavily on "community involvement". Most of the links for the clipping service come from contributions; all the discussion, and all the filtering of the discussion (moderation) comes from the community.
People got rewarded for sending in link suggestions with their name in lights; people got rewarded for good posts with karma; people got rewarded for moderation/meta-moderation with (some) karma. The efforts/rewards were reasonably well balanced to produce the current Slashdot.
Now there's a new factor. Annoying adverts. (I'm assuming they'll be annoying because of the way this is approached, the "we know you won't like this, so here's a way you can buy your way out of it" approach.)
Which changes the whole dynamics of the site. Suddenly people get "charged" for seeing their name in lights (with annoying adverts, or actual money). Suddenly people get "charged" for reading the comments so they can post. Suddenly people get "charged" for reading the comments so they can moderate them. And perhaps people even get "charged" for reading moderations so they can do meta-moderation. Incentives not to do these things. These things which make Slashdot what it is now.
If Slashdot wants to make a major change like this, and not dramatically change the "feel" of Slashdot, then it needs to be made balancing these contributions/rewards. Sending in article links needs to be rewarded; posting good comments needs to be rewarded; doing moderation and meta-moderation needs to be rewarded. In the context of the new change.
Some things Slashdot should consider:
Without these sorts of balancing rewards all the things that make Slashdot good will be discouraged by annoying adverts (persuading people to go elsewhere), or by the knowledge that if you load the comments to contribute/moderate it's going to cost you, so why bother.
I've no problem with contributing to Slashdot, even money if the framework for the contribution is right (the current scheme is not). But all the contributions which make Slashdot what it is need to be recognised in the new framework.
Ewen
Here's why:
Our posts!
We, the readers, are what has made /. into what it is.
We should be charging *them* for our contributions.
Without us, the readers, /. is nothing.
Got it, guys?
Nothing.
Zero, zip, nada, zilch...
Without us, there is no /.
Pay for a subscription to what *we* are creating?
Hell no!
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Distributed would be great. If you could get ISP's to run their own local servers, or even regular people running a peer on their own machine, you could reduce the load on a central server to a huge degree.
After that, you would need to create a protocol that allows people to post messages to their local server, and then make those messages propagate to the other servers all across the land. If you had a simple enough protocol, people could even write their own custom clients, instead of having to use a web browser.
And since everyone is running their own little server, we could allow anyone to post stories; not just the Slashdot Editors.
Hmm, maybe we should start up a project on Sourceforge. I suggest we call it USENET.
-Mike
Personally, I've been looking for some way to give back to slashdot, so this is quite fine by me. This kind of things happens eventually to any site that amasses a good-sized following. There just comes a point where moving to a subscription-based format is the only fair way to defray the costs of running the service. I think Taco and Hemos have come up with a rather decent way to address this issue. Its not like they are taking away something we used to get for free. (*ahem* say like Activestate did with Komodo)
;-)
For those who grumble that the editors might turn a profit, I ask only why they shouldn't. If their efforts are used daily by over 300,000 people, maybe they deserve something for thier trouble. I congratulate them on the ongoing success of slashdot, and I also commend them for trying to approach this issue in a mature and intelligent way.
On the other hand, now I finally have to get a paypal account
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
You know, I wasn't going to do it your way, I was going to just pay up. I think /. deserves it for the bandwidth if nothing else.
You think I actually got to do that though?
Nope.
They have my address, my phone number, my dog's name (no shit!), my credit card, etc. and they still wouldn't take my damn card. Why not? Because they couldn't VERIFY it! Never mind that Amazon takes it. They want to put a temporary charge on the card with a verification number in the charge description, and then have me use that verification number to prove to them that the card isn't fraudulent/cancelled/from Mars.
Cripes, I hate this crap. I try to support something I use and they just get in the way!
I hope they find something besides PayPal...
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
I learned a lot when there were still a lot of techs around. And when that was the focus of the stories.
I've submitted a few stories (all but one rejected I think, I never said I was GOOD), and I got my karma honestly, back when I cared to spend time in the threads here. I took the karma hits I deserved, too, for being a fool, or when I voiced my (relatively moderate and reasonable) opinion on given subjects and someone disagreed with me and had mod points that day. I have read your site for a long time, I was ALWAYS reading threads at -1, and I have never used any of your author filters, or anything.
And it isn"t like I can't afford to pay for your services. When OMM had their little "forum naming rights" game I bought two, which is $100, for a site that never even updates. So it's not like I feel like I should be getting the things I value for free. I don't steal with napster or whatever, either.
But now here it is:
- For continuing to allow Jon Katz to post stories to this website...
- For wasting your time half-coding a lameness filter that's yet to work, and would be better off without anyway...
- For using a fucking phone company "buy shit in advance" model...
...you're fired. Clean out your desk, these gentlemen will escort you to your car. Thanks for the GPLd code and the heads up about a bunch of stuff back when I needed a clue. Thanks for defending the anime discussions back when we first started, and eventually branching it off into a whole other website. Thanks for not showing bias against folks at other sites when they clearly called you the enemy (...kuro5hin). Thanks for the moments of clarity when you had people like Clay Shirky or the occasional other good QA post.
I will now join the ranks of your 1000s of former readers who will not come here unless a link is offered specifically, and even then I'll have to think about it. With or without harsh economics, in the end you and yours are no better than IGN, and no one sucks like IGN.
/jpowers/jeep/etc/
-jpowers
With all this metered crap, if I mirror some section so I don't use up my meter, is that legal? What if I let me friends see it?
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Comment removed based on user account deletion
*You* create /.
The readers/posters create /.
Without the readers/posters, there is no f*cking /.
What are they going to use for content, the poorly-formed, grammatically challenged (and that's being charitable..) snippets that Taco writes?
Any you want to *pay* for creating the content that makes this place what it is?
Ya gotta hand it to Taco and the guys, they came up with a hell of a business model: get your workers to pay for the privilege of creating your product!
Even Micro$oft hasn't figured that one out...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
It's the money...
"Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment..."
Ouch..
It hurts to care so much...)
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
by Anonymous Coward on 16:04 Friday 01 March 2002 (Score:1) (#3094890)
being extorted by corporate theives, be it for $5 or $5000 is still giving in to their threats.
"Pay us $5 every month or two or we're gonna put big nasty ads everywhere! now pay up bitch!"
Nah, how 'bout this, i block you fucking ads and keep my $5.
When the school bully tried to take my lunch money in exchange for not getting beat up i took a big stick and broke it over his head.
I'm not gonna start giving in to extortionists now."
Let's have everyone hear from all sides... ;-)
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
At least, for the first 1000 pages. Remember, you get $5 free just for signing up at paypal.
Why should I pay for no ads, when I've effectively filtered out all the ads you currently have?
I already have this feature for free.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
The big question is, is anyone listening?
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Unless ThinkGeek owns the other store too. If you're in the retail business you want to own both the highest and the lowest cost outlet. Advertise the highest so that if someone feels that it's worth it you get all the cash, but own the lowest cost generice and you'll get the volume without directly advertising. It is precisely for this reason that Cambles puts the same soup in many different brands of soup can. Branding is an important business tactic.
I have no problem putting up with the ads. But do I ever click on them? Almost never. So seeing what CPMs are these days, /. wouldn't see a lot of cash for my perusal of the site as a free user.
:)
So you'll be getting my money. Damn you. Damn you to hell!
AAAARGH! I am not advocating free, I'm advocating TEXTUAL ADVERTISING. Text based ads produce HIGHER sales per hit than graphical ads. They are smaller and allow for MORE advertising in the same space as a typical banner ad. They produce more REPEAT CUSTOMERS.
/. were to actually follow through with it, no matter how much money they were offered, it would be a *bad idea*.
Just becuase the current advertisers want X does NOT mean they know what's best for them. Nor does it mean that one must bow to thier wishes. I'm sure Think Geek (or whoever) would go gibber happy if Slashdot changed it's name to SlashThinkGeekDot, but if
Text ads will not only make more money for the companies selling goods, but it will make people happier in general with sites that have them. It is a good idea and one that can work if people don't sell it short.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I just don't see myself paying /. to put up content I create. There are many publishers out there that will happily take your money to finance their publishing your book -- it's called self-publishing and as any author will tell you, a self-published book is rarely anything more than an ego stroke for a wealthy writer wanna-be. Now the idea sending someone my words, who aggregates them with a bunch of words written by other people who have paid or not, and then paying them to see what I wrote sounds ludicrous. There just isn't enough value added by the intermediate party (slashdot) to justify my dime. If, on the other hand, contributors get paid, like magazine writers, out of the revenues generated in part by their contributions, that's another story.
Look at the first and second stories on this Wired story.
Bwahahahahahaha!!!!
Feel the burn babeeee!!!
Anyhoo, it's been interesting I suppose. But I guess concentrated zealotry, st00pid "editorial work", JonKatz and overall high suck factor will only take you so far. Count me along with the zillions of trolls and flamers that will leave this pace in droves. In any case, /. is nothing more than a big collection of links to other sites that have... wait... Ads! Hehehe.
In passing, I'd like to say I cannot freaking believe that anyone would even contemplate charging for this. I mean, sure. It's funny sometimes. Informative once in a while. But absolutely not worth it, not by far. Not even if you guys all leave, OSDN hires two amateur bloggers and then puts up one of those "Under New Management!!!1!!" signs on the front page. Nope, not a chance in hell I would ever pay for Slashdot.
Oh, and not only that - since ya'll have been giving away the code, ya'll can now expect 1,000 little Slashdots to pop up all over the Internet. Here's to giving away the crown jewels! Really mad #props for that!!!
So it was indeed karma (the bad variety) that eventually took this place down.
But - I'd like to propose a toast. Raise your glasses along with me.
Here's to the howling masses, demanding everything be free because they deserve it for some strange cosmic reason. Here's to all the open source "geeks", punks and 1337 h4xx0rz that think the most important thing in the world is to have a kewl mod case, 20 /. karma points and be able to compile a kernel. Here's to companies run by people who don't have a goddamn clue of how to run a business. Here's to all the times I saw an interesting thought being censored and sent to the troll bin because it gave a different point of view than all the kiddies and weirdos with mod points to burn. Here's to the ending of the "dream". Here's #props to ESR saying that "cheap PCs will kill Windows" while the "free software and beer and everything else has to be free" "movement" is slowly killing itself without help from anyone else.
So long live... whatever.
You may now start wasting mod points on me. Ta-ta!
Why are you willing to *pay* to produce a product that *others* are selling to the advertisers?
Taco and Hemos don't *make* this place happen, you do, as do all posters.
Without us, they're nothing.
Other sites create their content; here, the content is created by the very people who are now going to be charged for the privilege of doing so..
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
The level of donations is covering my hosting costs and some people have even donated twice -- which is very encouraging.
However, I have been regularly pestered by companies which want to advertise on my site (it's the most popular Net-news/commentary site in NZ) so in order to accomodate them without burdening regular visitors, I've created separate page that carries the ads.
The idea behind this is that those who want to offer a donation can do so and get the warm fuzzies that come from such philanthropy -- while those who can't afford or don't want to pay can, if they so choose, visit the advertising page and generate revenues for the site that way.
Of course that still leaves those who will neither donate nor support the advertisers -- but hey, you'll always get people who fall into that classification.
My philosophy is that if you provide good quality content in a fair and resonable way, you will end up being paid what it's worth to those who use it. If you find you're not getting any donations then obviously you need to improve your content to increase its value.
I'm a po' ass college student. Are there any discounts? Maybe give credit for meta-moderating and submitting stories?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
if /. does it, that sucks, but if it is a different server, then i am only going to use mozilla (right-click on ad, choose 'block images from this server').
append to /etc/hosts:
/etc/hosts somehow illegal/immoral? Or is it justifiable consumer response?
127.0.0.1 images.slashdot.org
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
LOL!!
Is banning ads in
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Remember, there's a difference between the 'aura' (in Walter Benjamin's sense) of the product and that of the reseller. If Advertised Sexy Brand X is available from Not-advertising Unsexy Reseller A at half the price of Advertising Sexy Reseller B, then I 'enjoy' (or am manipulated by) the aura of X by purchasing from B, and the cost of the Sexiness is picked up by A. This is an advantage the only the internet consumer enjoys -it's been demonstrated that poor people are likely to pay more for the same goods - like cars - as rich people, and it has been hypothesized that internet access is a primary factor in that fact.
I hope Taco will use some of the $$$ he'll get to buy a spellchecker.
Is there going to be a Poor College Student toggle switch so those of us with no money do not have to look at the ads?
:)
After all it COSTS the advertisers money to show those ads, and well. . . . why show them to people who are not going to buy them?
I'll even e-mail a copy of my student ID if necessary.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
It seems that we get lots of volunteer sites on the internet and it seems the cost hasn't ripped a hole in their pockets. Think of all the FTP sites...when one gets flooded with requests you to a mirror with faster access. Whats wrong with a mirroring system for slashdot?
If someone would set up a system where they mirror slashdot and half the slashdotters go there instead of the original, it makes sense to me that both sites would require half the bandwidth. What if their were 3 mirrors, 4 mirrors, n mirrors of slashdot? Do you think then that running a popular site would cost so much?
The difference is that no one would get paid. It would actually be a volunteer activity. But the problem is with the internet itself. We've learned that it would be so much better if the internet could provide resources based upon need. If a site gets a heavy load then it should be given a majority of the resources. I think the FreeNet Project is experimenting with this sort of thing.
As for myself, I'm not gonna pay money to read other people's comments. We have newsgroups for that, we have IRC for that.
In my opinion, the Internet economy demands that we spread our communities into more diverse locations rather than suck everyone into a single web site. The later is the AOL-ization of the web. Everyone using one provider is gonna cost money. But I think we got to spread out. The internet is too large a place for just one web site.
The question that i would ask myself is what is it worth? The answer I'd give is between $20 and $50 per year. This sounds like about 50000 pages per year or 136/day, i'm in!
Please tell your advertisers, bigger is not better, associating a company or product with an in your face annoying experience does not help sales
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Yep. Notice the mod-down on that one, no rating applied, just reduced from 2 to 1.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I'm all for paying to have a slashdot free of obese ads. I'll probably pay more than average because I do read quite a lot regularly. I think I can live with that. Of course this will only happen once there's a way for me to pay giving my CC number or sending my check to someone I trust (see my sig if you want to know what I mean).
Anyway, I'm a bit concerned about the moderation process. Periodically I do get some moderation points. Sometimes I don't have the time to do anything with them (fortunately they last a few days, so usually I eventually do). But when I do, I pick some current topic I don't really have any need to post on, and start reading to see who's on topic with real contributions. By picking a topic of less interest to me, I think I can be less biased than I would be for some other topic that interests me greatly. But by so doing, I'm reading a lot of comments that I otherwise would never have seen ... page views I otherwise would never have made.
CmdrTaco ... I recommend that moderation be changed slightly as follows. When a user is logged in and has moderation points, it gives them the option to make an election to moderate whatever thread they want to, much like it does now, but via a separate link. Confirm they really want to, and really understand they won't be able to post there. Then that thread can be viewed without ads, without cost, for the first 100 pages viewed. When a moderation point is used, add 100 again to the number that can be viewed on that thread. When all moderation points are used up, let the moderator keep their free ad-free views for that thread so as not to discourage delaying moderation (the moderating should be done because a comment is worthy, not avoided because it might mean the ads come back or the pages have to be paid for again). In other words, up to 500 free views on threads elected for moderating.
While I would pay to access /. ad-free, I would end up not doing any moderating any more if I had to also pay for the moderated pages. I'm not interested in paying to moderate just like I'm not interested in paying to vote for politicians.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Let us with high karmas, and do thougthful moderating get grandfathered. Otherwise, all you'll be left with are trolls and flamers, and Slashdot will be dead.
Basically, I am not going to pay for a service where I am providing the content.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
If you want me to pay about $20.00 a year, and I will, then I want to have full moderation. At least 5 points a day. Let the people who pay decide what they want to read. If I'm paying I want "something". Trolls are not going to pay so they won't abuse this. Let people who don't pay still "earn" their points but damn it I feel that I will be in a group of similar people willing to pay (those that love this site so much and want to make it as good as it can) that we can help each other sift shit stories. I think the trick to having a pay iste is to give me something "real". Anyone object?
"Allez Cusine!"
Slashdot: If you want to stay afloat, you should do this as gradually as possible. If you dump lots of changes on us all at once, and we don't like 'em, that might be enough to make us unhappy, and make us stop visiting -- and there's nothing like a lack of readership on a user-driven site to send it spiraling down the drain.
If you're going to make *negative* changes like these, you might consider making *positive* changes to offset it -- clean up the design of the site (you don't have to get rid of the green, just streamline it for all of the old obsolete stuff), implement some features people have been asking for forever (submission queue), etc.
Despite all its problems, it would be a shame to see this site go. This change could really do it, so be careful!
With people paying for metered access and therefore a "per click" fee, why would someone want to visit my journal or personal page? I think you may be killing some of the cool features of /. by making people "conserve" their clicks.
/. the most are generally the ones contributing the most. Therefore, it really all comes out in the wash. Flat rates work for the telco companies, and they will work here as well.
Plus, as many others mentioned, those that use
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
You can find out about OSDN's ad pricing by following the "advertising" link in the left navigation bar. Rates for the current banner type (468x60) start at $40 per 1,000 views.
How about this for a tiered membership option. Make it easy enough to buy a 'banner' membership. Say you pay a premium like $50 for the year and slashdot randomly inserts you banner 1,000 times over the course of the year for your membership.
It'd be easy enough to do and you could highlight user sponsored banners( a gold border when they display), maybe then the site users would even make the click through to support this idea.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
I have no idea what Slashdot draws in bandwidth, but during peaks usage I could easily imagine it drawing a full DS3/OC3 based on some rough calculations I did. A DS3/OC3 worth of bandwidth for a year is not that far off $600k, and you haven't payed any salaries yet! I have no issues with slashdot charging for a service. It's a service, if you like it, pay for it, because before long there aren't going to be any free news sites left. The only problem could be that Slashdot charges, and then so does the news site that it links too! Double Whammy! That could be really nasty. Perhaps slashdot should contemplate getting some kind of cost share program with other sites, as I'm sure that even some of the most stalwart sites like the BBC will soon charge once everyone is going there because they are the last free site left!
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
The cornerstone jewel from a company who had stock hover near 200 bills per share and you want me to fucking use PAYPAL to send you money. (I have never used a cuss word on /. before) Paypal is ok for Aunt Edna peddling tumbleweeds on Ebay --- But did not someone pony some cash away back in the glory days that can to fronted to sign up for a fucking merchant account? And bandwidth.....300 GB a month for 100 Bucks at Rackshack ... A couple of these boxes should be able to sustain a semi busy geek board....And for a few single geeks making 100K a year spewing out c++ code for a fortune 500 company that would equate to beer money....
/. and I will pay a fee (not through paypal though --- it does break my "any company who has the urge to ask me to pay to provide my mis-spelled bits of whino knowledge and opinion should at least have the balls to set up a merchant account....") Hell -- maybe enron and VA could get together and have a fucking garage sale or something.....
I do like
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
a) First of all, you're paying for ad-free page views. If you can't load a page, seems to me that...surprise!...you wouldn't be charged for one of your ad-free page views.
b) Grow the fuck up. Do you think bandwidth is free? Do you think those really hibby rack-mount servers are free? Do you think that when one of those two fail, CmdrTaco is just gonna sit around, thumb up his ass, waiting for someone else to fix it?
Read CT's above comments: this is like a pledge drive for PBS. Instead of a tote-bag, you get ad-free pages. And remember: if you don't like it -- or Slashdot -- you're always free to fuck the fuck off.
Goddamn, but your comment has made me angry. I'll get modded down for sure, if anyone sees this in this field of 2000+ comments, but I don't care. I'm signing up because I like this goddamned site and I want to know it's going to stay around. I want to know that /. isn't going to sink beneath the waves because of apathy and "Where's my five-nines uptime guarantee?" clueless whining from idiots like yourself. I am honestly quite unable to understand what the fuck why your idiotic demands should seem important to you.
(I'll probably wake up tomorrow and regret how angrily I replied. But I won't regret that $20.
Carousel is a lie!
I have a hard time understanding what *so much* of the whinging I just waded through (browsing at +3!) was about. Yes, we create the content. /. provides the means that allow that comment. We provide the stories. /. allows those stories to reach all of us, quickly and easily. Like (fortunately) a fair few) have said, it's not cheap. Something I haven't read yet: it's a symbiotic relationship, /. and its readers/posters (two diff. communities; read CT's constant statements about how many don't post). Neither one of us goes anywhere without the other.
If you don't like it, look at the ads or leave. If you like Slashdot like I do, stick around. I've paid my $20. Have you?
(Left here for posterity...there's no way this'll get read now.)
Carousel is a lie!
Yeh, K5 has really lost its focus. It's no longer about tech and has become a politics page. I think it has something to do with the fact that people are only going to sit down and write long articals for free unless its something they really care about or if they have to (school assignment)
Anyway, the k5 software is free and really nice. Download it and start your own tech-based site and request short articals. See how it goes, I'd probably visit.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Mods go to middle of the roaders, not the 'hardcore'. Not, even, the people with high karma. Slashdot is not a meritocracy, it's a mediocracy.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
But I COST SLASHDOT MONEY. Possibly quite a bit. All those posts, pageviews, flames, trolls, song parodies, karma whores, and failed submissions take up bandwidth. Sure, I click on the ThinkGeek links and have bought a t-shirt or two - so I have sent them some bucks. But I am quite sure that, dollar wise, I'm a net negative.
By your analysis, should I subscribe? Slashdot *depends* on me, and 100000s of people like me, by your definition. Yet I cost them money. What to do?
My decision: I'm going to fork over some cash. The slashdot experience is worth it for me. Maybe I'll be paying to get pissed off - but sometimes that's worth it too. To me, it's participation, and sometimes that costs money, and that's okay!
(My troll accounts will see the ads. No need to burn cash on those.)
Am I off base?
sulli
RTFJ.
This business model is almost never used in the real world, and there's a good reason for that. people don't want to have to worry about things like reloads, comments changing, etc. You'd probably make about the same amount of money charging everyone $6/year rather then having a lot of people worry about not waiting their allotted HTTP requests. You're going to end up with a lot of people not signing up for this or a lot of people just blocking the ads because of the inherent complexity.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Only like the first two thirds or something of the users get modds. So you'll have to be around untill /. gets x users were x = 1.5*u where u is your UID.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sponsored stories! (once in a while)
:o)
With yellow background instead of the white usual, like googles hit's.
Wouldn't that be far more profitable than this flashing images, or paypal subscriptions?
Imagine the hitrate a side gets with "hit this monkey and win" almost nothing, 1 in a few tousend or so. Now imagine the hitrate a site gets when it's allowed to write a small story? It's not called the "slashdot effect" for nothing
And I would suggest simply branding "sponsored stories" with a different look and feel. (i.e. yellow background) I have also no problem to distinquish "sponsored links" in google from real hits.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
People would rather be ripped off for a dollar a year then have to worry constantly about how many pageviews they're wasting.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
For those of you who are complaining about Slashdot's newly announced subscription plan, things could be worse. CmdrTaco and company could have attempted to charge you for access to "special articles" written by "Slashdot's in-house journalists."
That's right. Slashdot won't accept your refund when you figure out you've just paid $30 for archives of JonKatz.
Then again, it's not a bad idea; it keeps those who worship JonKatz away from the general Slashdot population while ensuring that the unpaid weblog is devoid of all things JonKatz. After all, his articles are "special," you know.
Do you like German cars?
Everyone was expounding about the Google analogy today so I thought I would take it a little further. Slashdot already categorizes its articles by content...so smack some sense into your VA salesforce and sale based upon that. Have a couple of links that appear on the side "SPECIFICALLY" related to the article and you have a real winner. I have already taken the first step if I am clicked into an article plus advertisers aren't paying for untargeted. If wanted to get even more specific, search on keywords inside the comments of each user and if they mention something have it pop an unintrusive text link out to the side. There is a load of ways to think about this. Slice and Dice it. Even if you wanted to get creepy those UINs who were not paying for the site begin a collecting ONLY clickthough on articles. I would think in a pretty short time you could gather what they liked to read and serve better targeted ads that way WITHOUT intruding to much into personal privacy.
;), scientist. I LOVE reading explanations in the cryptographic articles. I have nowhere near the comprehension of high-order mathematics but I always know where I can read an intelligent rebuttal to a fluff piece on CNN or Wired and that's right here. Hell give these people a break on pricing...perhaps even bring them into the fold and require them to comment on specific conversations. You trade a subject matter expert's expertise for a free year of Slashdot. It's a real win-win.
One last thing about content moderation...meta moderate for Karma Whoring and allow for moderation of "Good Link of Info". It would keep the karma whoring to a minimum and would also allow you to give breaks on pricing for people who actually take the time to write an informative article. The question becomes should a +5 funny posted early in a conversation be worth as much as an +4 Insightful...my thought is no. We have some damn smart people that read this sight, physicist, lawyers, wannabe lawyers
Rob, you and the boys need to go through this entire article and read some comments. Stay away from the wars of whether or not to do this and focus on those of us who want to help you. I am not adverse to paying just make it worth my while. Slashdot is great right now, but with some tweaks and enhancements its going to get that much better.
HT
In almost any meta story which incites me to comment on the slashdot state of affairs I deride it. I don't see how paying them would be "putting my money where my mouth is"
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I go a long way toward agreeing with what you said. However, in advertising, what is important is not what you and I think, but what other people think. Even a minority of 10% is important.
To some, the word "nerd" has the negative connotation of a person who is less socially skilled, as an earlier poster said. Part of good marketing is avoiding the many small mistakes. Using words with mild negative connotations is one of the mistakes to avoid.
Understandably, advertisers don't want to advertise in venues that would associate their product with something even mildly negative, for even a small minority of people. Advertisers must care for the quality of their branding. So, it is time for Slashdot managers to take a larger view.
I should have said earlier how much I value Slashdot. That's why these issues are important to me. I want to see Slashdot grow.
Probably partly because they are intelligent themselves, and because they have been willing to do the work, the Slashdot editors have created an intelligent and valuable forum, which I have often found very useful.
Bush's education improvements were
So who really cares when slashdot goes to subscription? not a big deal right?
. com?
maybe not...
First (or close to first) is Slashdot.
Then what?
CNet?
zdnet?
freshmeat?
tomshardware?
Linux
RedHat?
chicagotheband.com (ok, I just threw this one in)
But seriously. How many sites are we gonna pay for? Especially at ~$5/month. That alone is $60 a year for ONE SITE. I don't want to have to pay for information (other than the cost of actually getting online).
If we give in now, what's going to stop all of the other news sites from doing the same?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
That's helarious, it would be funny if twix and snickers wern't made by the same company. but still, I laughed out loud. :)
Should be modded much higher!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
kinda off topic - but if you have problems with paypal here's their phone number just in case anyone is curious (888)221-1161
I should have said earlier how much I value Slashdot. That's why these issues are important to me. I want to see Slashdot grow.
Probably partly because they are intelligent themselves, and because they have been willing to do the work, the Slashdot editors have created an intelligent and valuable forum, which I have often found very useful.
You said, "On Slashdot, grammar is nice, but not required. It is the openness of the communication that makes the site interesting."
I agree that posters should not be expected to hold themselves to high editing standards. But Slashdot editors should use high standards in stories because poor grammar, incorrect spelling, and insufficient explanation degrade the quality of the resulting discussion.
Bush's education improvements were
If you only have 1000 page views per $5 are you going to use a view format that forces you to click on links to see nested or long comments or are you just going to setup the comments to display in one huge page? Are you going to have a brief front page with just the stuff that interests you or are you going to double the number of stories and uncheck all of your excluded topics, just so you don't have to click on "older stuff" to see all the stories?
Slashdot has to charge based on how much traffic you cause and it needs to have a nice way of helping you optimise your viewing.
With flat rate, you pay even if you do not use/read slashdot so mostpeople will end up paying more than what they use (except the crazy hit-reload-first-posters).
/. for 5 or 10 dolls a year.
Flat rate would mean 60 dolls a year though with this system, you can read
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I agree with you, contributors should be rewarded. For example, every comment that is highly moderated (4 or 5) would be rewarded by a chunk of free access.
This would be an incentive for posting interesting comments.
The moderation system should be improved though so that every comment gets a fair chance.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
That's why I asked you to consider asking your ISP to pay your content fees ;-). If subscription models don't work (and they won't in the long run if individuals have to pay sites directly - noone wants to pay 50 monthly bills and manage all the subscriptions), sites will ask ISPs to pay for the content.
Large sites can easily force ISPs to pay by otherwise denying access to their customers (by blocking the ISPs IP range). Someone with enough weight has to be the first to do it, though (perhaps a conglomerate of high quality web sites or someone like CNN). So, it's not altogether unlikely that at some point your ISP will offer a "basic" access package that only gives you the connection and traffic, as well as a "premium" package that allows you to access those sites that charge your ISP for the content.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Glad to see the VA Software sheep are calling this offtopic. I really don't see what's offtopic. They screw the users and take away their IP. You want me to pay for your site....I want complete user moderation.
1 simple reading: scan the frontpage for articles of interest and click on those of interest
2 thorough metamoderating: sometimes scan context in metamoderation if the comment can not be evaluated on itself
3 thorough moderating: switch to flat/newest first/threshold 0 to give new comments a chance, reload page (automatically) when moderating
4 writing comments: prewiew your comment at least once, maybe reference older slashdot articles or context of the current article, maybe also write multiple comments per article, especially when discussing.
5 submitting articles: although you only need one or two pages to submit, you will probably be very interested in the subject and comment a lot.
The order is not choosen arbitraryly by me. It is (at least i believe so) ordered according to the number of page accesses needed for these actions per item of interest (article). It is notable that those who contribute the most to
To my understanding the comments are what makes slashdot interesting, to grab the latest news it is sufficient to go to the frontpage and thus view only one page or stand through just one annoying ad, or just go to other sites. Your system makes those activities most expensive (either in adverts the user is exposed to, or in pages he has to pay) that contribute the most to
- do less thorough or no metamoderating
- do less thorough or no moderating
- write less comments and not preview/edit them properly
This will make slashdot a poorer place, moderation will be worse, there will be less comments and less opinions. This will probably happen to some extent anyway, because of people leaving who neither want to pay, nor view adverts. But to charge those most who contribute for their contributions (in moderation and commenting) makes it even worse. I don't think it's far fetched, that manny moderators and commenters will revert to above methods to avoid costs/adverts, and that this will make slashdot less interesting (and thus also drive people away who were interested in the comments, and a well functioning comment system).
So if you must have adverts/subscriptions maybe you shoud try to avoid that effect (maybe by making those pages, that are needed for metamoderation, and especially commenting/previewing free (of fees and of overlarge adverts), maybe also introduce a special free moderation page (one page of newest/threshold zero/flat for an article)). I don't know how much a percentage those accesses make, and how much difference it would make to exclude them from ads/costs. But i think a well functioning comment/moderation system is vital to
--
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
No, I was talking about you and the parent. I'm equal opportunity in my grumpiness, son.
I am certainly not adverse to Slashdot's decision to charge us for access, especially considering it's completely optional. OSDN must be reimbursed for Slashdot's overhead somehow. However, they should begin treating us as customers instead of "the flock."
If we pay for the access, you'd better not restrict M2 simply because we moderated your bait as "interesting." No more $rtbling or "behind the scenes" censorship. We are now customers and expect to be treated as such.
Thank you.
Do you like German cars?
Thank you, Slashdot! I've been looking for just this type of thing from my favorite sites for a long time. I do have a question, though --
for those of us in business, it would be nice to see just how successful Slashdot is with its subscription model; sort of a "test case" on a web-based business. I've yet to see a major site do this and share their results. I beleive they would be very interesting, in the least.
There are many other things you could do. Slashdot for the most part has completely stagnated and any technical work you have been doing has not been visible, it just makes things work the way they should.
...) brainpower of your combined readership. Maybe trolls will come in useful too in this endeavor!
..) and let us put our heads together for you. If you really are worried about going out of business then put the pedal to the metal and get some use out of the brainpower here. But don't just make a 2-day thread. Make it an initial test of the Slashdot Problemsolver or whatever this would be called. Email me if you want, I've worked on the idea a while myself.
Here are some concrete ideas for generating revenue. They require you to make some visible effort and leverage the (unbeatable, global, altruistic,
- Put all the information about the calculations you are making out in the public and give us all something to chew on. You aren't sitting out on the moon somewhere you know.
- Page the site starting tomorrow and see how it goes. This thread surfed at 5 still gives me 66 comments, or *60* screens for one little ad at the top. I spend a lot of time on Slashdot and your advertisers should be made to pay you for it without making the site unuseable.
I definitely try to escape sites with big ads, or ignore the big ad and find a printer friendly version.
- Maintain incentive for serious posters and make trolls pay. Ad size should be inverse to karma. Karma whoring a problem? Fix your voting system, -4 karma whoring.
- Slashdot readers are often reading to learn. Text and voting gets into their heads better than images. I'd recommend letting people pick theme boxes which include one or more ads guaranteed to be a small image with some descriptive text and a vote meter users vote on. Themed means I already want to know about the product. Votes over a given threshold make the border change color or move it to the top. The ads could remain on page within a 1-2 inch wide margin.
- Ask Slashdot (it's *not* too late) about ideas for increasing community involvement. We *do* provide critical feedback to manufacturers featured on Slashdot.
- I am well acquainted with a system called CARMA that is used by many PR agencies to prepare valuable reports on news about a specific issue or product. Humans grade articles from around the world (in this case just Slashdot, or you can further analyze your own demographics) according to many items on a scoresheet, and the company can find out what the main issues are, how favorable news is, which writers or news outlets are most favorable, etc. You could work out your own system, or if you like I would be interested in helping. Anyway, you charge AMD, the RIAA, Disney, or Microsoft for professional (hire one) analysis. You might want to have a separate firm do this so you are not caught between hoping Microsoft remains the bad boy (good for linux!) and teaching them how to tweak techies and open sourcerers. Micro$oft has the dollar sign in their name for a reason you know!
- If you really want to have a pay medium, consider getting more help understanding how to provide additional professional value to your readers. They can pay, they just don't want to pay for what they are giving you it seems. You will need to pay writers and editors, and innovate. Though you may have done so, the readers haven't seen it yet.
- Consider adding meta-functionality to Slashdot. I've suggested it in the past, but you might want to consider an integrated function akin to a BBS or Wiki which would assist in boiling down the brainpower of your readers. Perhaps it is a moderator who is tallying things, or maybe it is a way for people to stay in touch with threads over more than a few days. Currently Slashdot is in one ear and out the other, with little sense of its own history. This is childish management considering the immense value of the resource at hand. I suggest you add to the Ask Slashdot help at people mentioning things that are of value to someone regarding the site. Some can be made for pay for some people.
- Look at Perlmonks.org again. I at least put much more work into it than Slashdot. But there is a chat, a sense of community, altruism, and a vibe of rulership by intelligence. There is an offering plate. It is aimed more at tech people and you have to type in HTML. You can edit your posts and people do, especially to Update your postlater with new info. There are some great search facilities. There are heroes, gods, self-proclaimed writers of tutorials and other sections, different levels of editing crews, etc. You know all about it, just look again and analyze it. Maybe post a question in SOPW (Seekers of Perl Wisdom) from Taco or Hemos with a question about recommendations for Slashdot.org. You can't be embarassed, the culture doesn't allow it. Really. People get kicked out for personal attacks and bad trolls are deleted. You probably know we ask people "Is this a homework question". So look at Perlmonks, not for a revenue model but to see why Slashdot looks like it's in the 80's still. There is room for imagination.
- Offer money for creative patches to Slashdot which will do something neat with user/points/article/access stats. Nothing too deleterious to privacy. Slashdot takes itself way too seriously considering hardly anyone there is writing the articles. Most readers, sorry to say, are probably ignoring in disgust many of the "editors'" comments that are spliced to the submission.
- Analyze what the most popular threads have been, and if possible what threads have generated thank you emails to Slashdot about how this really helped. I'd guess info for public organizations setting up linux-based networks to save money is a big one. You could write up a real report based on actually following up on all the information provided in the posts (which in case you forgot are already editted for you for free) and get some professionals to vet it. Get some real world stats and maybe some advice from readers in return for sexy hardware or something cool they'd like. Maybe you make them special associate gurus or somehow help them in a geeky or other way. Then sell the report. The posts belong to posters (I guess?) but you can summarize the information and publish it as a Slashdot Report. Ask O'Reilly, or maybe some private consultants in different countries, for help. One example I can provide is Internet Magazine in Japan. It provides articles of course, but also the most detailed comparisons of providers, and also a separate booklet inside on a certain Internet technical subject.
- Consider New York Times. I am amazed at how many posts are made to Slashdot regarding their site and I wonder how many people sign up. They have Times Fax, which is now a gorgeous PDF (10 pages). Consider an online magazine mailed or web-accessible to paying customers, in HTML or PDF format. Did you know by the way that an immense number of magazines in Japan are selling mainly translated versions of data from the U.S.? Sell it to them or their readers pretranslated over the web! Have you guys got any professionals in the publishing business or what?
- Reconsider the launch of VA Software and what you can use it for. Recently VA Japan held an Open Source Database Conference and it was really beat I thought. There were so many more things that could have been done. Instead of a fairly insipid seminar for quiet suits you could have rented out a huge conference center. The only fun thing was drinking with Mysql's Atmark and the Mysql mailing list members. But businesswise, what a total waste!
- and while we're on international, slashdot japan which I had dismissed as miniscule and irrelevant a while ago, now seems to have interesting articles and weblogs not available on slashdot usa. How about translating some of it back to English? Many Japanese people have trouble reading tons of English you know.. Slashdot could be more relevant. Let's see, top four stories right now are the crash of KDDI's mobile phone network (not receiving more subscriptions), possible sale of Niftyserve from Fujitsu to Sony, a lawsuit being brought by the Japanese RIAA and main music copyright holder JASRAC against File Rogue, and stolen goods on Yahoo Auctions Japan (which had actually gotten a boost when eBay pulled *out* of Japan last week). Number 6 (Broadband Watch) is how DSL just beat out CATV for broadband connections. As of last september, they had half a million each and now they are growing exponentially.
Gee, how can you guys drool over 3G and Clies when you don't show the least interest in how the next generation digital economy really works? While the U.S. gets itself bound in sticky tape other countries have reached higher density.
- Tell us about the deal with apple (or did you do it for free?
- That's it for now. I think you have criminally wasted the resource in front of you and that's why you are where you have gotten. You are providing one of the the best marketing resources in the world for the IT industry for no money whatsoever. Duh! Let's fix the problem and make you guys a bundle of cash!
OSDN has started selling ads that can be restricted to certain countries, based on originating IP...
www.anandtech.como cp.com
w ww.arstechnica.com
www.tomshardware.com
www.hard
www.cnn.com
www.msnbc.com
www.nyt.com
and a lot more!
All these sites are still free; and most slashdot comment is duplicated there anyway (minus the comments, which might be a good thing)....and no, i'm not affiliated with any of them.
-ted
This has got more comments than Taco's proposal!
:(
;)
Yeah, and this one comfortably looks like it could hit #1
Love couldn't beat out terrorism, but bitching and moaning about having to pay for something - *that* beats terrorism.
It's sad
Stuart.