Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot IRC Forum Today
Hemos and I are going to try to answer questions today at 3:00 PM EST, on
irc.slashnet.org in #forum. Specifically we're going to try to keep the questions on the subject of subscriptions. There are a lot of misunderstandings about
a few things, and we wanna clear them up. We'll post a log in this story after the forum is done. Any questions can be /msged to Questions the bot and forum discussion can be had in #forum.d.
I'd just like to say one thing: "Quantity != Quality". Just because you read/write comments more than anyone else on /. does not necessarily mean that you're contributing more than anyone else.
I believe that one of the /. editors had a little test of the new ads today.
I saw it, too. Hey, I really enjoy reading Slashdot, and if this is what it takes for them to survive, I'm fine with it. It certainly wasn't as obnoxious as it could have been. And think about it - at least they're going to give you the option of subscribing to make the ads go away. How many sites you visit every day don't give you a choice about it at all?
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." -- Tom Lehrer
Granted now I never ever click on a banner ad.. But I dunt click on my television screen either(well while sober) but occasionaly i'll see a banner ad and i will type in the url or go to the website if its sumthin i'm interested in or catches my fancy as i'm sure its the same for lots of people.. I wonder if one of the main reasons people don't actually clock on the banners(i know its my reason) is that i don't want them to keep that kinda information on me :) simple as that. but ads are still effective.
You really need another option for the poll ... I subscribed but I won't re-up because I don't see the value.
... I don't see the value. I have now seen the ads, and well, I likely won't be back, either. If I have to put up with ads, I might as well go for "real" news sources rather than, well, here. I'm not getting a value for "subscribe for no ads".
The page view thing is good for occasional readers, but you really need a time one, too, if you are going to do this. Any plans?
However, I likely won't be re-upping
If I come back, it will be with an ad blocker.
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
4 words easily explain why a flat-rate plan will never work for slashdot:
username: cypherpunks
password: cypherpunks
What's to stop someone from signing up with one account and distributing the authentication information to all their friends? Complicated, expensive technical measures I suppose, but that chews away their profit.
I've been thinking about this over the past few days, and I can't think of any way other than per-page that slashdot subscriptions can work. It may very well be that per-page won't work either, in which case we all get a lesson in capitalism.
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
Forget the 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?
I am frankly disgusted by the lack of professionalism shown by the people running this site - it's okay to be kooky when you're running a site as a spare-time activity, and not too bad when it's free to readers and paid for by advertising. I will not pay to support this site when the actual content (excluding Jon Katz, who simply writes unreadable pap) is all written by users, when the spelling and grammer remain at a childish level, when there is no open-ness in the site. The new ads are annoying enough that I now have the Junkbuster running on my machine at work (and have encouraged my colleagues who read Slashdot to use me as a proxy). I am a natural Slashdot reader, a Unix professional (and yes, I take pride in my work - do the editors here?), affluent and free-spending online, but I only come here because of the content which is supplied by the users.
I will not respond to the stick. I will not subscribe to get rid of ads - I have a technical solution to that problem, so why should I be forced into a financial solution? I'm an engineer - I solve things technically.
I will respond to the carrot. Don't say "subscribe or bad things will happen". Say "subscribe and good things will happen". Some possible examples:
Overall, the two main problems I have are that I refuse, on principle, to respond to the stick, but I'd welcome to carrot, and I'd like to see the staff taking things a little more seriously. Not high-and-mighty serious, but trying to do a professional job serious.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
I have a real problem with anyone using ad blockers, especially at community sites like Slashdot.
Slashdot agrees to give you content, if you view the ads. If you don't want to view the ads, don't look at the content. Using an ad blocker just screws Slashdot out of their cut.
There seems to be this view of "I shouldn't have to pay for anything, whine whine whine" (and before you say it: I have bought copies of Slackware, RedHat, Debian, FreeBSD, BeOS, several pieces of shareware...) Well, sorry everyone - things actually cost money. And even if they didn't, it's Slashdot's right to charge if they want to.
If you don't like it, fine, but don't go and screw them out of their cut. That *is* theft, whether you admit to it or not.
As for the subscriptions, I would subscribe, but not on a pay-per-view basis. Monthly, fine, yearly, fine, but not pay-per-view. I won't subscribe with that.
But I'll happily view the ads they send me, and keep up my end of the bargain. Remember, the world does not owe you everything for free.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
but the idea isn't bad.
.75.
example 1: I post once on a new acct, get a five (net points of four), and bingo, my score is four.
example 2: I post 40 times, have the +1 bonus, so after 10 "5" postings, and the rest unmoderated (net: 30), my score is
Which is more valuable? A weighted average with total points makes a little more sense, but only knows what that might be.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I've noticed a BIG trend in the post-boom IT industry where those free service providers who rose to the top of their field think that if they start charging, they'll STAY as good as they were. They don't seem to realize that in every single case, they reason they were so popular is that they were free. Take Yahoo! Personals for example. I'll admit it... I had a lot of fun there a few years ago. I met a lot of extremely strange and interesting people through their free service. I've had a very serious girlfriend for the past 3 years now, but I recently poked my head back in there for kicks, to maybe expand my social circle again, and meet some people my g/f and I could hang out with. I posted an ad, and was perplexed at the fact that I got no responses. In the "good old days," I'd get at least 1 a day. Granted, I was single then, and I imagine most people went to Yahoo! Personals to get laid, but still! Then I got hit by a survey (they wanted to know how people liked the new structure) and I discovered that you have to PAY to respond to the ads. Consequence? What used to be a fantastic place to meet psychos and weirdos (and I happen to like weirdos) became a no-man's-land of horny AOL-wannabes where no one connects (and Yahoo! can't be making much money off of it!).
So how does this apply to slashdot? Well, it's great now, because of the, what, 250,000 readers, I'd say a least 1% are contributors, either in stories or in comments. Of those perhaps 25,000, a goodly portion are intelligent, or at least fun to argue with. Also, those perhaps 25,000 community members come up with some very interesting stories to submit, giving us good topics to flame each other about. If Slashdot makes it inconvenient and/or expensive to participate, well, guess what -- participation goes down. Sure, they think slashdot provides such a great service and such great information and they think they can turn a profit off of that, but the proverbial "they" may forget how much of that "provided" value is actually provided by the community which uses slashdot. If the community shrank by 90% (which it probably would if, for example, they REQUIRED subscription), I seriously doubt that slashdot would still hold my interest. Yes, I realize that's not what they're suggesting, but if participation drops by say 33% because they spew ads at non-subscribers, it will have the same effect, to a somewhat lesser degree.
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." --Voltaire
Have you seen their new text ads? They don't get in the way, don't jump out of the screen screaming at you and most importantly of all have actually been interesting (The ones I've seen so far). I've been clicking them for the curiosity value.
They have a page where anyone can buy their own ($12 for 4000 impressions). http://www.kuro5hin.org/submitad
Now *that's* how it should be done. I hope it works for them.
I think the word "subscription" is the wrong word to use for Slashdot's new pay-per-view system.
A "subscription" implies that you're receiving something you otherwise wouldn't have received. For example, if I have a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens, I'm getting the magazine at all. If I don't subscribe, I don't get a "free" copy of it in the mail, but with ads.
The same happens with a newspaper. I don't have the time to read the newspaper every morning, so I don't have a subscription to it. I wish that the Dayton Daily News would given me a "free" copy full of ads in case I wanted to read it, but that's not the case.
Calling the new Slashdot system a "subscription" implies that you have to pay for it if you want to read it, which isn't the case. If you don't mind the ads, and even think that some of the ads on Slashdot are worthwhile (like I do), then you're free to not pay. That's not the case with every other subscription-based service out there.
I think Slashdot should rephrase the system as the Slashdot "Tip Jar". If you want to pay $5 into the Tip Jar, Slashdot will "thank you" by giving you 1,000 pages without ads. If you don't want to leave $5 in the Tip Jar, that's fine too.
Calling the current subscription system a "Tip Jar" makes it sound more like what it is - a way to pay for the content on Slashdot if you desire. It's not a requirement to receive content at all.
Just my two cents.
I cant get to IRC from here so I'll ask here,
I know you guys are looking for other ways of paying the subscription fee besides paypal,
but are there any plans to sell them on thinkgeek ? Technicly that would be pretty easy to do, or am i missing samething here (buisnes/legal) ?
42
More specifically I like the ad system right now because I know exactly where the ads are going to be so I know exactly which section of the page to skip (or code out via a proxy server).
The more the content gets lost in the noise, the more the visitors lose intrest. If this keeps up, it may be time to move on. People are here for the rich content. Over dilute it and the attraction rapidly fades. That's why I do not visit MP3.com. There is no real content. Everyting seems to be a teaser advertisement. TV has become a wasteland of product placement and mega blocks of ads and paid infomercials, I no longer watch it. I'd hate to see Slashdot face the same fate of smaller viewership, thus they must sell more ad space to make up for the lost revenue of fewer impressions, spiral of death. Without viewers the ad space is worthless.
The truth shall set you free!
No, they look like they belong on MSNBC because the text wraps around them. They don't just sit out there naked between the story and the comments.
Hey kiddies, how about a bedtime story?
... Slashdot was a pioneer in the digital "community" game. Information was shared, knowledge was spread, questions were answered, friendships were made, and everything was bright and sunny.
... it just got rid of the ads. And, to drive the point home, the ads started to switch from unobtrusive banners to pop-ups and embedded graphics. "Pay us," cried the Slashdot gnomes, "or we will bother you with intrusive dreck!"
... instead of pity and derision.
Once upon a time there was a website called Slashdot. In fact, it was MORE than a website
Now, everyone knew that bandwidth wasn't free. So Slashdot, like many sites, had banner ads at the top of the screen. Now most users didn't mind the ads at all. They were informative, often interesting, and promoted products that the geeks and wireheads couldn't find anywhere else. Even if they didn't actually click through on an ad, most of the readers saw the banners more as content than advertising.
But, children, there was a fundamental flaw. Unlike virtually every other form of media, web advertising at the time only paid if your readers acted on the ad! So - when Slashdot's corporate masters decided that there weren't enough people acting on the ads, Slashdot moved to a subscription service.
Now, your subscription didn't get you more value, or new content, or even a chance to sit on an editorial board and maybe get rid of that untalented and unreadable hack Katz
Can you guess what happened, kiddies? That's right! All the users, who USED to see the old ads, started blocking the new ads because they annoyed them. And nobody paid for the subscriptions, because you didn't really get anything for your money, and the more you contributed to the community, the faster your subscrition got used up!
Eventually, with the all the new ads blocked, and subscriptions going wanting, Slashdot dried up and blew away.
The moral of the story? If there is a problem with the way the web revenue game works, then FIX the game, don't try and make your users play it. The idea of getting paid ONLY if an ad is acted upon is inane. TV doesn't work that way, radio doesn't work that way, print media doesn't work that way. Be the ones that break the barrier and bring web advertising in line with the rest of the media world. Or go down in flames trying. At least then you would be remembered with respect
-- There are two kinds of motorcycles. 1: German. 2: Crap.
"This site is not a real community...as a single-minded (close to) autocracy, where the topics of discussion are chosen by a small, closed group, and staying on-topic and within the acceptable norms are enforced by moderators."
Sounds like a community to me. Wherever have you heard of a community that does not try to impose its ideals on its members? Some group of people will always be favored in a community because that is how the community comes to be in the first place. If I don't like what is going on, I move on to somewhere of my liking. If on the other hand I do and I exert pressure on others to think like I do to make myself more comfortable (hence the feeling of being part of the community). Over time (in a sort of evolutionary way) the community agrees more and more on the issues and that's how it solidifies (and stagnates). The only way you can prevent this from happening is via an autocracy, though an open-minded one.
It is not. It is pay-per-view. It is disingenuous to say you are offering a subscription when that is not an option. I would happily subscribe at a reasonable fee (say $20-$30 per year), but I am strongly against pay-per-view.
It sounds like you didn't read what he said at all. Or at least you didn't read it with an open mind. Because you certainly didn't grasp what he was saying. I deduce this because you said:
/. subscription service was a missed opportunity to add something truly worth paying for.
/. staff... It was about how you can make a subscription service successful. You do it by making things people want, not by making things they want to get rid of. Because they may not owe us, but we sure as hell don't owe them.
/. would be mentioned on every tech site in existance? Not a chance. Because without the comments -- the community -- /. would just be a standard news portal like Ars, the Reg, or any others, except very, very shitty.
/.), but they add good commentary to their news-linkage. What would /. have, if it wasn't for us? I'll give you a hint: We already know, and it was called "Chips and Dips". Do you see VA paying for that?
/. will be dead in a week. Sure, sure, Taco has to maintain the code and stuff, all of which I don't have to do... That's why he gets paid for his contributions to /., and I don't. That doesn't make me a leech. It makes me a volunteer.
/. how I always have.
These people don't owe us anything;
No shit. He wasn't saying they -owe- us, he was saying charging a subscription fee which doesn't offer you anything is a stupid business model. The
The post wasn't about how the subscription service or the ads are heinous acts of evil by an ungrateful
we aren't a "community," we a bunch of freaking bandwidth leeches who sit here and suck down knowledge and commentary all day.
Speak for yourself, Geek In Training. You may be a leech, but I'm not. I'm one of the apparently less than 3000 (acording to Taco) people who contribute to this site. Depending on who you ask what I post may be worth reading or not, but I'm not a crapflooder and I'm not a troll, and I'm not even a karma whore. I and the rest of those 3000 (minus the crapflooders etc) are the ones who make slashdot what it is.
Do you think that if it wasn't for what we're writting here,
No, I mean really. Would you tolerate a news portal with as many factual errors, spelling and grammar errors, broken links, and repeats if that was all it was? The Reg has a lot of typos (by the standards of journalism, not
So we damn well better be a "community", because if we aren't this site isn't shit. If this "community" gets up and leaves,
Now, I'm perfectly happy being a volunteer. It's not like I just figured out that I am one; if I had a problem with it, I would have left a long time ago. But then you- You say you're willing to let yourself be annoyed into paying money for your volunteer work. You're not going to pay because you're getting something you want, but because you're being poked with a pointy stick until you give them $5 so they'll stop for a while. And the clear message you're giving is "if I don't cough up the dough, then you should just increase the size and pointiness of the stick." Well, you, being just a leech, might think that's okay. Maybe you feel guilty for leeching. Maybe you're just the kind of spineless mark salesmen love who'll buy the overpriced TV just to get the salesman off your back. But I, being a volunteer, have a different view: Fuck that.
/. is a great site. But it's great because of the community, as disparate and cantankerous as we are. Taco and co. -- they provide the means, the capability. We use those means to provide the content. That's what makes this site what it is. And you want to talk about owe?
Forget about oweing. I don't owe Taco shit. Frankly, he doesn't owe me anything either. So given this neutral agreement, why the fuck would I pay this man just to stop annoying me? That's right, I wouldn't. I'll block the annoyance with mozilla, maintain the neutral relationship, and keep using
The enemies of Democracy are
This is an obvious act of desperation. Everyone knows that internet ads no longer pay any money. This is not 1998 anymore. Mostly, the only people who ever clicked on them were the newbies to the internet... and it didn't take long for them to learn their lesson. The rest of the people have either learned to ignore them or they use a proxy server like Junkbuster or Filterproxy .
This is so predictable. They say that history repeats itself, but this is too much for even me to deal with. Most websites that do this are dead within a year. Everybody knows that internet advertisers no longer pay any money. How much money do they expect to make from 0.2 cents a click when Slashdot caters mostly to internet veterans who have either learned to ignore adds or use a proxy server religiously?
Slashdot has become "a victim of its own success." Can you imagine how much money it must cost to pay for their bandwidth alone? If you've done a lot of browsing over the last 5 years and seen this happen to many of your favorite websites you know that intrusive adds are the first step. Next comes restricted usage for non-subscribers. Next comes access denied to non-subscribers. Next comes the obituary and farewells.
Bye bye Slashdot. We knew ye well. :-\
Ads don't bother me too much. They bother some people alot. Some of the most vocal users here are almost militant in there views on spam and ads. And now /. is doing the very thing that most people come here to deride. /. is becoming the very thing that it's own userbase depises.
/. isn't the place to build brand recognition within the IT/OSS community across all continents, I don't know what is.
/.'s front page? Being in a non-US country I get the pleasure of paying duty and tariffs despite our wonderful NAFTA agreement. I dont want to pay $50-60 CDN for a bloody t-shirt from thinkgeek. But if I ever want to splurge, I know where to go. Brand recognition.
/. is nice to kill time with, interesting and funny at times. But linking to other site's stories submitted by your own users, then editorially embellishing the headline to get the anti-microsofties frothing at the mouth is not worth a subscription.
If I pay, I never want to see a goatse link again. I dont want to be modded down, in fact a subscription should negate karma altogether. Mod me up, let the thread see the results, but I never wanna have to deal with karma again. Stupid system, I feel like Pavlov's dog.
I want real stories, real editors, real grammar, and real spell-checking. Stories should be spell-checked, and so too should comments. There is nothing worse than having to read thrug sumonz awfull post to figguere out wy thye were modded intrsting.
Threatening to berate me with ads wont make me pay. If TV, print, and radio can get by without click-through, so can the web. A multi-million (maybe billion nowadays?) dollar industry is built up around creating brand recognition. If
You can be sure that when I can scrape enough together every month to afford the $US to buy a rack at rackpace, I will. And guess where the name recognition for rackspace came from? Guess what site I "clicked-through" to investigate rackspace. SLASHDOT.
I put up with (read: ignore) commercials in all media, not just the web. I don't see the advert industry taking a nodedive anytime soon. Radio station *give* money away fer craps sake! I don't drop the mag/newspaper/run out the door everytime an ad for Smirnoff invades one of my five senses, so why should I buy a t-shirt that says "WTF" everytime I decide to see what's on
Do whatever you feel guys, I dont need an ad blocker, my mind does that just fine. I promise not to block the ads, but I won't promise to buy crap I can't afford or don't need. Load it up with banners and javascript to make me click (ala porno) before reading a story. Your users will hate it. And they will go elsewhere. Napster is proof of that.
BTW, did you guys even *try* a tip-jar? ( I realise that maybe this isn't your decision, maybe it's coming from on high, and they want revenue, not tips.) But still...
This comment on the parent thread says it all:
... Having to chose either Space Mountain or The Materhorn (but not enough tickets for both). Even if you had ample tickets -- you were still subject to a "nervous tick" that made you think the the tickets were going to run out.
It is widely accepted that people prefer not to be 'nickel and dimed.' Internet Service Providers charge flat fees, 99% of online subscription services are flat fee based, as are the majority of cable subscription services. Why? Because forcing people to monitor their consumption detracts from the overall user experience.
I remember going to Disneyland when you had to buy individual ride tickets instead of "all day passes"....It really made for a "nervous energy" that really took away from the experience
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Oh, wait, you were serious. Sorry youre so gullible.
Liberty in your lifetime
First of all, it would have been nice if you did this at a time when most of your viewers are at work. Nobody like to work on weekends, but this is important enough to set up on weekends. BTW most suscribers will be people who are working.
;)
You need Value add for subscriptions work.
1)suscribers get access to a mirror of the links in the story.
2)The ability to not see posts be non-suscribers, regardless of there rating.
3)Email me when a certian story is posted. I.E. if a NASA story is posted, shoot me an email.
4)put suscribers on there own machine when they connect.
5)Invite suscribers to the wedding
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hmmm, looks a lot like a verbatim copy of someone's post here on Slashdot:
http://www.dotcomscoop.com/article.php?sid=263
Now I'm pissed. Why *shouldn't* the people who load this site down the most pay their share? Why *SHOULD* the average viewer pay the SAME AMOUNT as someone who loads 50 times as many pages, who loads the servers 50 times as much and costs 50 times as much bandwidth???
No-one would EVER suggest that gasoline stations have a "yearly fee" for everyone and anyone. Delivering the product does have a direct per-unit cost.
Furthermore, I see tons of people who figure that they're "earning something" by posting. What is this, a job for you? You mean you're not posting because you enjoy posting? Because you enjoy talking with your fellow readers? Because you enjoy the pride of having a post positively moderated? The SERVICE allowing you to discuss, post, moderate, filter the comments, and be the center of attention once in a while when you say something others think is worthwhile - this isn't it worth anything to you?
(As it turns out and as Rob's statistics show, MOST of your posts aren't read by the majority of the quarter million users! Maybe your posts in general aren't worth diddly. Maybe it's simply not economical, bandwidth vs content, to )
If you think the price is too high for what you get out of it, then start a competing service where the price is lower (and see how long you last). Put your actions where your mouth is.
If you think that you're "contribution" is worth so much, start a competing service where things are run the way you think they should be.
If you've got some feedback, an opinion, fine, I'm not dissing you. If you think x-cents per 100 KB/page-of-text is too high, fine. You're allowed an opinion, and a choice as a consumer.
But if you're whining and screaming your lungs out like child because you figure you've been so badly done by.... tough.
BTW: If you hadn't noticed, the space where they're putting the ads, that was all empty white space to begin with!!! NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED!
And I have to wonder, if Slashdot *had* used any of your hair-brained schemes, how many of you would *still* be screaming your lungs out about the "horrible failings and unfairness" of whatever they chose. (Some people are just like that.)