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.
This was much less intrusive than the awful pop-ups I envisioned when I read about the subsription service. As of the time of this posting the ad is no longer there.
Rob and Gang,
I would not mind paying for a subscription, but I will not pay a subscription just not to see ads. Personally, I can tune them out for $20. You boys and girls need to start your reading here at this article. It represents my views exactly. BTW, do not think about features individually to much, but in the aggregate. Features in the subscription will be the sum greater then the parts. Of course, if one feature costs more then the whole subscription base, then I wouldn't implement it but you get my point.
HT
DotComScoop
Last Friday Slashdot launched its long threatened ad free subscription service.
My first reaction was one of utter amazement; the complexity of the system is absolutely staggering.
'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.'
Companies such as Salon offer ad free viewing as part of their subscription service, but never has anyone introduced an ad free service that creates a direct link between the level of usage and the cost. Slashdot claims that this is the fairest way to do it, which at first glance may appear to be the case. However, as one reader points out:
'The problem that I see 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.'
To my mind he has hit the nail squarely on the head. A community discussion site is by definition primarily only as valuable as the contributions that are made to it. By tying payment to usage Slashdot has created a barrier to participation. Such a policy isn't community centric.
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.
One thing that you can be absolutely certain of is that Slashdot's new model is not designed from a perspective of how best to serve their readership.
On top of that, there is also the factor that ads can be blocked. Such a painful system can only further encourage the user base to do so.
What I don't understand is why they are being so incredibly negative? This subscription service is lose, lose, lose with no win in sight. Even Salon, whose business model I obsessively criticize, did at least offer something of additional value, if not much, on launching their subscription service.
Slashdot is not the first website to introduce a subscription service in an apologetic, negative, half-hearted, and bribing way. However, they are the only company that I can think of who have launched a service that doesn't add anything to the overall experience.
It is odd to me that many online companies seem to think that the only way to introduce subscription is to take something away from the user. As controversial as this may sound - it doesn't have to be that way.
Slashdot informs us that:
'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.'
Why focus on that as the primary mistake that can be made? I'd suggest that alienating your readership is the ultimate sin. Furthermore, whether they like it or not, companies have to invest to gain return. You can't expect people to hand over cash unless you are prepared to create something that is worth paying for.
Slashdot is in a unique position, and one that they should be able to build upon in a positive way. What is shocking to me is that they appear to realize this, yet still insist on acting in this lame manner.
'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.'
Translated: We have introduced this system as it appeared to be the easiest way to milk our cash cow, and will at a later stage introduce a proper subscription model if and when we can be bothered.
I'm sorry, but my respect for these guys plummeted substantially when I read that. They have a golden opportunity to create a viable business but instead insist on acting like a bunch of amateurs.
Let me make my position absolutely clear. There is nothing wrong with introducing a subscription service, but for god sake if you are going to do so, offer something of additional value. Slashdot's service is stick, stick, stick, and perhaps a carrot later, if you're lucky. You just can't behave like that and expect to be successful. This whole thing is just a mess; poorly conceived, unnecessarily complex, badly presented, and will almost certainly do them more damage than good.
My recommendation: Go back to the drawing board immediately.
The whole point of a website is to turn a profit - I am sure you do it for fun sometimes, but on a site as busy as Slashdot, there must be some astronomical costs.
Those adverts didnt seem to obtrusive IMHO. I dont have a problem with it.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
A little bit of karma whoring, but as a SlashNET server administrator I'd like to point out that we have servers in the U.S.A., Europe and Australia. So, use:
:)
- eu.slashnet.org
- us.slashnet.org
- au.slashnet.org
You may also check out our brand new fancy website at www.slashnet.org for more information
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
I caught that 2 second blip where that 200x200 ad was up too. As long as that 200x200 banner stays way the heck below the article posted (as it did when I caught it here) and doesnt do that nasty C-NET (and likewise other news sites) wrap around, i could deal with this. Zophar's Domain did a similar ad placement deal on the side of their site and I have to say, I dont mind all that much.
HONESTLY people. For the websites we go to on a DAILY (or in my case hourly) basis like Slashdot, do you REALLY mind throwing them a bit, even a teansy bit of revenue by allowing them to throw some ads up? I certainly dont. As long as they keep it below the story but before the commentary, and the footprint of the ad doesnt hamper page load times very it isnt much of a bother. Just my 8 braincells
-- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
Ad just don't work. I have *never* bought anything from a banner on any website. More often than not I'm looking for information when I'm on the web, and impulse purchases are the last thing on my mind.
Also, there's no way I'll pay any amount to view a website. Call me a tight fisted git if you like, but there it is. There is always another news site to visit if this one becomes unusable. The only thing that really keeps me here is the comments. I find some very useful information in them on occasion.
So anyway, whats the long term solution? I'd be suprised if that many people pay for a subscription. 1000 pages? Geez, I reload at least 30 times a day. Wouldn't take me long to use up that limit.
How about putting a little FAQ up now, to fend of the most blatant misunderstandings and get the discussion off on a good start? That might to some extent avoid addressing irrelevant issues in the discussion and make it more focused since people come there a little prepared and already have the basics pat. I think there will still be enough left to discuss ...
---
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
On another note, kuro5hin.org is moving to text ads (from no ads). It works under the principle that annoying your readership until they're so pissed that they don't come back anymore is not a good idea. Maybe slashdot could learn a lessons from this...
Why don't we opt in for ads? So far, every time I see someone post about blocking the ads, or eliminating pop-ups - some self-rightous Don ?Quixotes come riding out of the dust and flame those that dare complain about ads.
So why not make them opt in? With all these rabid followers they should be enough to pay the bills around here?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Slashdot is a community based site.
Community participation equals a better site.
A better site equals larger reading base.
Take this three statements and apply them.
I won't mind paying 10-20 dollars a year to view slashdot without ads. Period. Anything extra you add to the subscription from there on in is bonus to me.
Now everybody else listen. A site operator that cared more about profits and such would have played his cards differently then Taco and gang have. They would have introduced the most obtrusive and annoying ads possible for a couple weeks claiming "The site needs it to survive." Then a few weeks or so after their introduction, they would have conviently come up with the idea of 'subscriptions'. They would say "Well, you hate the ads, right? Here's how you can get rid of them." In a buisness sense, that would have been the smart move.
But no, as can be seen in Taco's original post, Taco seems to care about fairness first. Letting a viewer base know beforehand, about the obtrusive ads that may plague them? Not a good buisness move. But it is an honest one.
Now what Taco and Co. need to know now is that we don't want pay-per-view Slashdot, we want $20 a year "pay for and forget about" Slashdot. We don't want to be reminded that we just spent $.02 last nite. We just want to know that we are helping.
hungdude345> What were you guys thinking when you $rtbl'ed those 400 people ? And another thi
'hungdude345' has left the chat room.
bigal30> Yea, what's up that ?
'bigal30' has left the chat room.
CmdrTaco>and furthermore, this new revolutionary pay-per-not-view scheme will increase profits 1000%. Any questions ?
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
If there's a shared 'cypherpunks' (or even 'cipherpunks') account you couldn't use it to post messages, or set preferences. It would be no better than Anonymous Coward, worse in fact since there'd always be some loser changing all the preferences to weird settings (block all stories _except_ JonKatz). All it would give you is no ads, and you can get that anyway with Junkbuster or Mozilla.
FWIW: Personally I'd pay for the ability to post to Slashdot by email, treating it as a kind of mailing list. If they threw that in as part of a fixed-rate subscription package I'd sign up at once.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Ask about this before they introduced subscriptions? (Ask Slashot story?) Maybe there would be less constigation about it now. Maybe they might have gotten some useful ideas. There's surely flaws in the current scheme since it requires the people who contribute the most to pay the most. I think they should have unlimited karma accrual (instead of a limit of 50), and that karma should be good for buying pageviews. That would probably be more equitable and probably wiser in the longrun.
I can't do irc, but if someone can be bothered, maybe they could ask about this.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
On reflection, they seem to have the right idea. What Slashdot is doing seems doubly alienating. First, you're selling the audience to advertisers with big annoying ads. Then, you're selling the audience the ability to escape the big annoying ads for a fee. Of course, if this works, you make money off both ends. But if it doesn't work, you anger both the audience and the advertisers, who get a feeling that they are being played-off against one another, and neither deriving any benefit from the transaction.
Look, bluntly, I wouldn't pay Slashdot to have ad-free pages. It's just not worth it. People really can give up Slashdot, if it becomes too annoying. I would pay, gladly, a similar amount to do something like Kuro5hin.org is doing - advertise to fellow community members in an affordable way (I would gloriously, with a big smile, pay that sort of money to run a Slashdot text ad about What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org))
Now, right off, I'm probably among those 3% of high-volume users; I paid the same day it was announced, I only disable ads on the frontpage, and I've used up 149 of my pageviews already. For me, this is looking like around $5 a month if I keep it up.
/. - I find myself surfing less and less to slashdot. No longer do I reload the page just to see if anything new is up; instead, I rely more and more on the rdf feed I have on Evolution. I've also started clicking straight to the stories, rather than go via the frontpage, thereby missing any other stuff happening in my rdf boxes on slashdot.
/. on the list.
/. back, so I'm going to burn through those pageviews I have, and then not pay for another set. If I can get the option to pay per month or something similar - and especially if they eventually implement some interesting perk for paying - then I'm in again. Until then, I just find this scheme cramps my surfing habits too much. Ridiculous, I know.
And that's the problem. As I know I'm using up my ad-free page views - even though I paid only to support
I have a sort of set click routine when I'm bored, where I go through a set number of sites (/., LinuxToday, New York Times, Dn, and so on), lookig for anything interesting to read (this is sort of the same behavior as zapping through the channels on a tv). I've stopped including
Now, I know it's only $5, and I didn't even really pay to remove the ads, but just for supporting a favourite site. It doesn't matter. Psychologically this has set up a resistance to wantonly going to slashdot unless I have a good reason to be there.
The problem is that I'm paying for a set number of pageviews. I estimate (as above) that for my normal surfing habits, it'd cost me about $5 a month to keep this up. I would, however, _much_ rather pay for a set time than for a number of impressions.
I want my
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
One change which could be made (and would it be noticed? It could be in place now, for all I know) would be to have paying subscribers get a "live" feed (aka as soon as it's posted, subscribers can read and reply). Logged-in users get a 5 minute delay. AC's get a 15 minute delay. This eliminates some of the first post conditions (maybe a prohibition of anonymous posting in the first 5 minutes or until, say 10 logged comments have been posted is a good idea...), and means that if the trolls want to post early, they'll probably have to pay.
I agree with Wire Tap. (See the parent post.)
Slashdot Editors: You are obviously smart people, but that doesn't automatically mean you know everything. Advertising is a VERY complicated business of creating a connnection between a company and prospective customers. You are showing, very clearly, that you know NOTHING about good advertising. That is entirely okay; no one can know everything about everything.
But, this can have VERY unpleasant consequences for Slashdot authors and the entire Slashdot community. Get help! If you want free help, contact me.
First, I saw the woman whose agency has the IBM advertising account interviewed on the Charlie Rose show. She knows and cares NOTHING about technical products. She is making fools of IBM executives with those stupid ads of dorky-looking guys in space suits.
Slashdot editors, you can let yourselves off the hook. If IBM executives are clueless about technical advertising, you don't need to worry that you don't understand it either. (However, remember that IBM top management is composed of people with no technical background, unlike Slashdot editors. At least you have half the knowledge that is required. Remember that IBM ran OS/2 into the ground with stupid marketing, calling it "Warp", a term for something that is useless because it is bent.)
It may be that executives of your parent company, having failed at their own endeavors, have a subtle desire to destroy Slashdot. Obviously they are clueless about making Slashdot pay a reasonable return. (For example, they try to sell us high-caffeine candy. Caffeine is a chemical made by tropical plants to discourage insects. It interferes with the normal functioning of their nervous systems, as it does human nervous systems. Yes, there are people who buy such things, but those people are misguided. Using strong chemicals to force your body to submit is not a good strategy. Trying to sell things that are bad for the customer is not a good strategy either.
There is a HUGE need for advertising of technical products. There is money in this field! For example, check out the hardware firewalls available, and get advertising from the ones that are good. Plenty of us work in situations where such products are needed. Good advertising, if properly done, is a big help to the reader, not an annoyance.
Maybe now is the time to negotiate the sale of Slashdot to some other company that has a better understanding of the issues. Slashdot is an extremely valuable resource! Yes it has shortcomings (such as editors who don't spell check), but it is extemely valuable!
Board of Directors: I hereby apply to be CEO of Slashdot's parent company. OSDN says it is:
"#2 for delivering people who look for General / Politcal News* "
I kid you not! That's what it says! See the Advertising page.
My first qualification is that I know how to spell the word political.
Slashdot editors: I recommend "Confessions of an Adverising Man" by David Ogilvy. It's an old book, but good. It's a difficult field. Learn it.
Bush's education improvements were
Really? Wow, whenever I want to buy something from thinkgeek, the first thing I do is reload /. a bunch of times until a thinkgeek ad comes up. Then I click on it and place my order. I do this specifically because I like /. and I want to see them generate some revenue.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
For foo's sake, hire a real editor, not a Perl hacker who ended up running a web site with 250000 readers, and have everything which goes on the front page run by them first. We all know how readable most Perl is - we need someone who's good at writing English!
I dunno. I thought that part of the charm of the place was the inanity. Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, Jeff "Hemos" Bates, John "CowboyNeal" Pater, Nate "Mixmaster" Oostendo[rp] (yes, some people CAN spell your name) etc. are just "regular guys". Sure, they've got quite an audience, but that doesn't mean the place has to be ultra-serious. Sort of like some anime I've seen. It's just *goofy* and preposterous; and that's what's so great about it!
But, that's not to say that it's always just a bunch of dorks trying to be the first to post to a new story. There are acutal story readers and people who think seriously about whatever are the stories of the day. Just look at the Hall of Fame (and raise your threshhold!).
Sometimes, it's fun just to do something relaxing. Reading Slashdot is so. People who are smart and (mostly) think similarly read and post here. It's fun and relaxing (for me, at least) to read that in which they are interested and what they have to say about it. It seems to me that (unless they got a REALLY good one) a serious editor would remove the fun and put correct spelling and grammar in its place.
So, I think the ads do suck. However, that still will not urge me to subscribe[1]. I can easily scroll by them. The one thing I would reiterate (someone else said it earlier) is that they are poorly placed; like you just plopped them in there. However, they don't really break up the page too much, which is nice.
Hopefully the editors will be able to answer the questions of most people pretty satisfactorily this afternoon.
[1] Completely off-topic: Things are going to get pretty nutty if I have to pay to connect, pay to get any information, pay, pay, pay. It's like the only people making any money are the ones handling the equipment (important as it may be) that transmits intagible bits. Sort of like everyone having to pay the power company or phone company. Funny that some of the most expensive things to regular people are intangible...
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
I know there are many ways one can block the ads, personally I'll never do that, slashdot has been nice, and to me that's just not right.
I don't think I'll pay the subscription as it is, I'll live with it instead. Since most of the time I spent on slashdot is reading the forum, I don't see too much obstructions from the ads.
However, if the subscription service gives me a cache of slashdotted sites, suddenly it looks much useful to me.
geek page at KY speaks
Lynx doesn't like your ads. It spews out about 3 lines of text, presumably the picture's URL, but nothing relevant at all. It doesn't make sense. Where'd the text-labels go? Oh, and when you implement them again, please make sure they're easily differentiated from the articles.
Could we please do this at some later time, such as 8:00 EST so the majority of the United States could get out of work? I, for one, do not do anthing on IRC while working, and I hope that most of the readers out there do work when they're supposed to, too.
By the way, I don't troll slashdot under company time; this is my lunch break.
Don't worry, I believe you, and so does Google
Now that I have your attention, I can tell you that I don't mean technically, but ethically.
:).
Just look at the system! They're making us pay for ads, they have a completely unfair moderation/editing system in which the users have no power, and are steered by the Slashdot editors, who not only have "superpowers" over the users, but have used these powers numerous times, in insignificant situations. Just look at "the post." We all know CmdrTaco and his band of editors are convinced the post is off topic, but they went too far when the bitchslapped the entire thread and deprived any moderator who modded it up of their moderating privileges.
The GPL has taught us all that more good is done if power is in the hands of the users, not in the hands of a select few. Systems like that of kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] have taught us that sytems like this can work. Kuro5hin's system gives users the power to create stories, vote whether or not the story should be on the front page, and gives the user unlimited moderation rights.
Now, to the on topic part of the post....
Slashdot has recently introduced it's subscription system, in which it threatens us that if we do not sign up, we will see large ads. They are trying to force us to sign up! That's bullshit! Once again, kuro5hin shows a much more honorable system. Instead of adding ads, or even making the ads larger, kuro5hin gives unregistered users text ads, while registered users get no ads. I'm not saying this will rake in more money, but it was what convinced me to become a member.
I, for one, am not sticking around Slashdot when they get the large ads; it's an insult.
So basically, SLAHSDOT! WHY CANT YOU BE MORE LIKE KURO5HIN????
And no, for you crackhead moderators, this is not a troll...just my opinion. This post is ontopic, and I'm all man in case you have heard otherwise
Vive la revolution!
At Slackersguild, we tried offering e-mail addresses.
The current server is old and dying under the load of hits we're getting per week. About $1000 for a new server is desperately needed. Unfortunately, exactly 1 person seemed interested in the e-mail address idea. We've also tried t-shirts, which was a failure.
Sadly, we're considering the same subscription-based model Slashdot is using now. We have no other choice--if we don't, the site will die. All of us do this for free in our spare time, and we don't want it to go, so we'll try anything--even selling our souls to the Internet capitalist machine--just to keep the site up.