Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot IRC Forum
The IRC forum with CmdrTaco and Hemos is now complete, and a log has been posted. They answered quite a few questions about Slashdot's subscription system, bigger ads, and other assorted stuff. Don't miss the question about pop-up ads.
Anyone can turn off Slashdot ads for free!
cmdr... seriously... this isn't going to work. mark this redundant right now...
1) paypal
2) tech saavy audience already disables ads
3) why would i pay to view the content i provide??
4) why would i ADVERTISE on a site that allows its biggest fans to block the ads?
this isn't a good idea. period.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
After hearing/SEEING how much slashdot costs, and knowing that I'd like to keep reading slashdot, I decided to change my opinion from waiting until the BFA's become annoying and just to pay the subscription because I want to SUPPORT slashdot.. hell I dont care about the AD's. I dont block 'em but I also can IGNORE the ones I dont want to see.. (THose Thinkgeek ones rock!)
But Slashdot folks do go through a bit trying to make sure that the ads are nonintrusive in that they're not popups and so on.. now THOSE would make you want to run away wouldnt that? and they're not using them STILL even with the subscription thing.. so you have to give them some credit in knowing HOW far to go and NOT going over the line.. so why not support them? 5 bucks isnt that much to pay..
I missed the forum thanks to work; there's one idea that had crossed my mind. I acknowledge that /. needs cash flow to keep moving, but there may be a way out of subscriptions.
Set up polls to gather non-personal data for marketroids, such as what compiler you use and why, what http server you use and why, etc. I'm cerrtain that with some small measure of headscratching, it would be possible to gather information about the geek community to be worth money to a marketing research concern while at the same time keeping it within geek sensibilities, i.e. no 'what is your bank account number' type questions.
Perhaaps some form of questionnaire to be filled out upon registration, retroactively applicable?
Study us; we're geeks. We buy stuff. Expensive stuff. Servers. Networking gear. We're the bleeding edge consumers, what the marketing people call 'early adopters'.
Just don't try to sell us beer.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Was slashdot turning a profit before you implemented this annoying advertising/subscription scheme??
If slashdot is in the red then I really can't hate you guys for not paying out of your pockets to keep the site up and running. But I've heard some anecdotal evidence suggesting that slashdot.org is indeed turning a profit. That would mean VA Linux(or whatever they are called now) is taxing the slashdot users to pay for unprofitable ventures elsewhere.
Face it guys: VA has NO CHANCE IN HELL of surviving as a company. Their flagship product, Sourceforge, is a joke. Last I checked, VA's net loss was more than their TOTAL REVENUE. You can't come back from that in a quarter, or even a year. Slashdot will be sold to some other company or spun off or something.
As long as I can hit the monkey and still get $20...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Slashdot should make comments subscription only.
They could even do away with the need for moderation.
I mean, who wants to pay to crapflood?
--Metrollica
You touches on being able to treat subscribers like Friends/Foes (+1 or -1), but how about the ability to simply ignore a friend/foe or non subscriber???
I want to read at -1, but I also want to not have to look at the crap that Klerck puts out.
Never underestimate the willingness of computer folks to circumvent fees, no matter how small the fee is.
Just in case I missed it:
Do comments display ads by default?
Do I get penalized for viewing them?
And if so, am I paying for that?
Can you explain all this again Taco? Just kidding.
(ducks and runs)
Let me restate:
OSDN is doing very very well."
Er.. It's doing so well /. has been told to help supporting their own weight. And SourceForge goes down all the time, and those hanging around on irc.openprojects.net can't have missed the OPN crew begging for bandwidth several times in the last few days.
So, like, okay, OSDN is doing just peachy ...
What I want to see is a poll on who we think "WILL GNAW OFF (their) OWN GENITALS FIRST", as Hemos so eloquently put it, if we do start seeing pop-up ads here.
Not that I'd care to see them actually do either one...
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Looks like Rob and Jeff Hitler are going after AlterSlash. Why? Think about it? They show you Slashdot without the inane ads and other things which make Slashdot suck. Gee, this is one thing jamie and michael won't be touching.
Here's to Slashdot's demise!
Know what? I put that ad-removing code into my user space... read the IRC log and removed it. Specifically when I read this from Hemos:
"Here's the reality: You block ads. You cost us money. Ultimately, I mean."
This is where you have to stop and think "Hey... if Slashdot DOES go down because of a lack of profits, where will I turn?"
Of course, there are other news places to go to. I visit The Register often. However, Slashdot is, despite any errors in editorials or anything... a truly unique news site. For the years I've been reading, I've been pleased overall. We've all encountered bumps in the road, and that bump in the road for users right now is the ads. Now, of course (which I find it ironic that this comes not long after this, but still) many of you are simply not going to go for the idea of something that was once pratically free and devoid of huge ads to have simply changed on you. You'll cheat the system as much as you can, and for the most part, you'll succeed.
But how much will that accomplish? Realize the plight slashdot apparently is in, and how they need to raise money, somehow. Subscriptions and ads are that way. And while I disagree with a lot of the way they're going to implement them... why not just pick one way, even if you have qualms with it, and just go with it? Put aside your inflammatory, trolling and goatse links for a second and realize that Slashdot is truly a useful resource. If you're going to visit this site, for once prove that it doesn't take sneaky or unethical buisness for something to survive... merely a good product. That is what Slashdot is, and most of you know it: a very good product.
While I personally won't be going for a subscription (16 years old = lack of credit card), I will stomach the ads and probably a lot more if they need it to survive.
<CmdrTaco> We hope that enough users want Slashdot to still be here in a few years.
<hemos> I just don't wnat you to.
Heh.
Hemos doesn't love you, Taco!
Kilroy was here!
Seriously, Slashdot is my homepage and I check it perhaps 10-15 times per day. The stories are sometimes questionable but usually interesting, and the comments are usually blatent stupidity or flamebait, but sometimes though-provoking. I decided I'll just block the BFA's so I don't forget to shoot them $5 on a regular basis, but really the ads don't bother me. This is a part of that whole tip jar using, user community supported, huge media comglomerate free thing that the New Internet was supposed to be all about, whats so terrible about tossing in $5? I guess that seems cheap to me, but then again I tend to use the tip jar for all my favorite sites a couple times a year, never much (because I am a poor college student), but I don't want the sites that I enjoy to disappear. just my quick thoughts-
<Question> SweetAndSourJesus asks : Do you really think this is going to work?
<CmdrTaco> It's really more of a last-ditch effort kinda thing.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Seems like a good point by homerj at 16:41 in the chat. Posters give slashdot permission to publish their comments, but it's not a blanket grant. Slashdot can't put the comments in a book and sell the book, for example.
By the same reasoning, wouldn't there be some limits on what slashdot can do to the site and still carry the implied permission by the author? Changing to a for-pay model means that slashdot is now profiting from the site in a way that was not the case when the author posted. Maybe he would not have been willing to use slashdot to publish if he had known that there was money coming in as a pay service, without getting a cut of that money himself.
Seems to me that slashdot may be stepping over the line in charging for content which was submitted with the understanding that it would be published for no charge. Any lawyers care to comment?
I'd pay Andover to remove ALL ads, and also remove the anonymous cowards from my world. In other words, I'd pay to not have to read post by trolls, etc. I'm not certain if this was covered in the IRC, but I would have raised the issue if I wasn't at work, and able to participate.
just my two cents.... sorry if it is redundant... and I'm sure an anon coward will have to say something, just the people to prove my point about quality non-troll subscriptions.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
I wonder whether CmdrTaco and Hemos really enjoyed the chat. Slashnet was overcrowded by trolls, there were lots of double questions about the ads and subscriptions and I think the Slashdot staff *does* have a mixed feeling on 'going non-free', but they can't go back. According to the logs, already 1,5% of the Slashdot visitors is a paying subscriber. :( I wish him luck nevertheless.
I don't want to sound ungrateful for Slashdot, but some crew change might be welcome too. Slashdot has become a habit - the editors no longer feel obliged to fix half-wrong stories, they don't realize that they piss off a customer with every rejected submission and I think CmdrTaco has rejected *lots* of good ideas tonight. He seems to stick on only no-ads and gold stars, and little extra power for subscribers. Come on Taco, you aren't a suit - some things might not be too easy in Slash (submission of polls, access to the submission queue, a trusted net of paying moderators) but they will prove more robust and much cooler than this ripped-out-of-any-book business model. That's my point: Slashdot gets boring. I hate to see this leading weblog go the same road as so many others.. this is not another troll, Slashdot will be as interesting as it ever was, but the specialty is gone. Hey, we're a community! I liked the chat, but Taco hardly *listened*
Read the IRC Forum. Basically, they indicate that they gave all of this very little thought. They still have no idea of the complications of advertising.
It's a kind of intellectual arrogance. Because they know computer things, nothing else can be difficult.
Bush's education improvements were
I just want to say two things:
First, the notion that "posting is payment enough!" is a troll. Posting doesn't pay the bandwidth bills. I think it's sad that Slashdot has become a victim of its own popularity, but I understand their need to search out new sources of revenue. I'm not even against it.
On the other hand: Sorry Hemos, Taco, but it doesn't sound like you put *any* thought into this subscription plan at all. (Proof: grep the IRC log for "i dunno", see how many times Taco says it.) Shouldn't you guys have thought this out before you implemented the thing? Isn't that the first rule of programming?
And, not to be too pointed, but what about asking us what we want? For a site which prides itself on providing community, I'm profoundly disappointed in the way Slashdot rolled this out.
You had a real chance to change the world here. What is Slashdot supposedly about? Open Source. Imagine if you'd practiced what we all preach: You could've let the Slashdot community propose and moderate the features they most wanted in a subscription service. Like Google, you could have shown all the failing dotcoms that, if you give the customer exactly what they want, you'll be successful where everyone else fails.
You had a chance to lead the way, and you blew it. The current plan seems like -- forgive me - a Microsoft patch. Poorly thought out, badly implemented, causing more problems than it fixes.
You could still do this right, you know. And I'll probably pay a few bucks because I know how much I've enjoyed reading Slashdot. But I can't help feeling like this is the beginning of the end. Here's hoping you pull this together, and thanks for the memories if it turns out you can't.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
If people weren't sucking up the bandwidth just to get first p0st.
First I was afraid
...
I was very sad
Kept thinking I could never read
a slashdot full of ads
But I had oh so many posts
Smacked down for saying jamie's wrong
I grew strong
I learned how to carry on..
So now there's ads
More of the same
I just logged on to find them here
Between the news and all the flames
I should have changed my fucking hosts
I should have switched my uid
If I had known for just one second
they'd be back to bother me
So off I go - I'm out the door
Just turn around now
'Cause I'm not reading anymore
Weren't you the one who hit me with $rtbl
You think I'm quelled
You think I'd just go to hell --
Oh no, not I
I won't subscribe
As long as I know how to post
I know I'll be alive
I've got all my life to live
I've got all my posts to give
I won't subscribe
I won't subscribe
It took all the strength I had
Not to read this thread
Kept trying hard to ban
slashdot addiction from my head
And I spent oh so many nights
Just posting crap at minus one
Used to be fun
But now I want to cut and run
And you see me at
Another site
I'm not that stupid little user
Reading every night
And so you felt like dropping in
And just expect me to be free
Now I'm saving all my comments
For someone who's loving me
So off I go - I'm out the door
Just turn around now
'Cause I'm not reading anymore
Weren't you the one who hit me with $rtbl
You think I'm quelled
You think I'd just go to hell --
Oh no, not I
I won't subscribe
As long as I know how to post
I know I'll be alive
I've got all my life to live
I've got all my posts to give
I won't subscribe
I won't subscribe
Hey hey...
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Those were interesting suggestions, taco really shouldn't have ignored the question. I don't necessarily like the idea of a "subscribers only" comment tree, but taco's reaction does not reflect well on the willingness of the
I know that Slashdot is now part of a company, so there are probably gobs of legal issues (albeit, very stupid ones) that go against my idea, but, why not put out the finances of Slashdot for everyone to see? This way the users can see what's really going on, and maybe even develop a solution that does not necessarily charging the small lot of people who actually make Slashdot the place to be?
Just my idea . . . after all, this is a community that advocates "open" things.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
they said 1.5 % of viewers signed up within the first week, so you gotta figure that that's between 10-15k people by now, at 5$ a pop. so figure they have gotten between 50-75k. i don't see what the whole big deal is... whoo remove the ads. even the new big ones aren't that bad. have they considered more FEATURES...?
I guess I'm not that "involved" but I had no clue whatsoever about this subscription status, heh.
:)
After reading this, I went and immediately to throw in my tip
Maybe this 'subscription' should be more publicised? I think that would increase the amount of 'signups' 10-fold
hrm..
------------
Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
Time to get coding :)
I love Slashdot, but CT & Hemos, you look like idiots bumbling your way through explaining why we should pay to keep you employed. No sale.
to keep them forking out $5 have a monthly lottery with prizes worth at least $100 each. the annual prizes could be really big ones like a powerful server, a vacation , things like that. the monthly ones could be LED flashlights or slashmugs thinkgeek stuff, a crate of beer or whatever VA marketing suits can think of.
of course, there's a slashtv appearance possible too for the lucky winner.
I have to do a radio interview at 10 tonight, and eat dinner.
;)
I'd like to watch Junkyard wars w/ kathleen
but I'll keep going for a bit.
Dear lord, I want this man's life. My fiancee won't even watch a movie with me if it has a computer in it. *sigh* Some bastards have all the luck.
Now, to be on topic: I think this could've been handled a bit better. I think people would've been more open to the whole thing, had the term "tip jar" been used from the beginning, instead of "subscription"...
But, what's past is past...
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
A guy walks into the public library one day... Okay, it isn't the public library anymore, they've been privatized for about a decade, but people still call it that. Anyway, the guy walks into the library, and the head librarian walks up to him.
"Welcome to the Infotronobeam(r) Public Library! Our increasing costs means we have to look for new sources of income. Unfortunately the ad posters on the ends of the stacks aren't generating enough, and we have to seek financing from those who use our library."
"Aw, damn," the man says. "You mean you're going to start charging me to borrow books? If you do, I'm just going to leave and go to some other library!"
"No, no," the librarian says, smiling. "You still get as many books as you want for free."
"Um, okay... So what exactly do I have to pay for?"
"Nothing," she says, still smiling. "That is, unless you want me to stop doing... this! WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP!" She draws in a deep breath. "WOOP WOOP WOOP-"
"Stop! Stop!" the man cries. "Okay, what do I have to do to make you not do... that?"
"Oh, it's simple! You just pay five Northamericos, and you can check out a hundred books without any audio accompaniment. You can even choose if you only want certain kinds of books... For example, I could be silent in the Non-Fiction section, but shout WOOP when you go into the Childrens Literature section. It's like a tip jar!"
"Okay... Wait. How is that like a tip jar?"
"You're giving me a tip for my great service!"
"The great service of not screaming incessantly?"
"That's right! So, do you want to put some money in the tip jar?" the librarian asks, holding out the glass jar, shaking it as if in invitation. The few lonely Pentium pieces in the jar rattle. It seems not many have jumped at the opportunity.
"No, I think I'll pass... I just want to check out books."
The librarian gets a stern look on her face as she draws in her breath. "WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP..."
At that point the man remembers he has some earplugs in his pocket. He puts them in his ears, and the woman's screaming dulls down to be almost unnoticeable. Smiling, he goes about looking for a book, with the librarian following, becoming increasingly frustrated. He notices suddenly that everyone else seems to be wearing earplugs as well... He laughs, thinking that the "tip jar" is going to remain pretty empty...
{hemos} Amoritized costs for 30 servers
:)
additional hardware costs
then travel expenses and all that.
{CmdrTaco} Hemos knows what "Amoritized Costs" are
{hemos} Heh.15:46
Amortized Costs:
When a business buys a computer it pays the cost up front
What is the generally accepted amortization period for computer hardware?. Do you go by Moores Law (18 Months for processor speed to double) or Gates Law (12 Months for software speed to halve)?
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I wonder what "watch Junkyard wars" is a code word for...
Slashdot.org is essentially a website that links to news stories that in a short period has grown into a large fan base. Everyone in IT knows that it is very diffuclt to put a meal on the table by running a website alone. What cmdrtaco and the rest of the slashdot moderators, admins, and etc should do is run slashdot.org on their spare time after hours and get regular 9 to 5 jobs. They could make more money by getting regular jobs and working on slashdot on their spare time.
They could have moderator time slots where moderators work a rotating schedule to scan the stories for ones that should be posted. The slashcode is essentially complete except for ongoing changes to support the new ad based system. So if they got regular jobs they would make more money, still have ad revenue from the banner ad at the top, and they would put slashcode into maintainence mode. It would cut down on the number of headaches, which is always good.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
And what about a flat payment rate?
I wish you guys had addressed these important issues in your IRC forum. Also, I can't be bothered to read FAQ's, the original article, the entire web log, or anything else pertaining to the questions I'm asking. Please send me a uu-encoded, ROT13'd, PGP'd, and backwards response to all my questions or I'll keep asking them over and over and over...
People demonstrate that they just don't get it.
/. even though there is nothing here worth paying for.
Shades of 1999. Let's make money on the Internet by selling nothing.
1. Computer hardware is expensive and difficult to maintain
2. Bandwith is expensive
3. Therefore, people should pay for
Walmart makes a gazillion dollars a year because it sells things that people actually want and need.
/. is free because that's exactly what it's worth.
If you're using a filtering proxy like Junkbuster so that you don't have to see the annoying Java/Flash/blink 10,000 times per second/etc. advertisements on other sites, but there are a few sites (such as slashdot) on which you are willing to view advertising because:
1. You want to support them
2. They've agreed to not have horribly annoying ads
Then it's easy. Just go to the proxy configuration page (Advanced -> Proxies) in a recent version of mozilla. Put ".slashdot.org" in the "No Proxy for" field. Done.
I've had to use this at the office since I can't seem to make junkbuster want to work correctly with our message form or fax gateway.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Here's why:
1. Slashdot is nothing but reposting of stories that originate elsewhere.
2. So why pay Slashdot. Go read the stories at their original source.
3. If thoses sources start charging, read the newspapers and magazines that carry all those same stories (and that I'm already paying for anyway).
This might come off as a troll, but...
/.: You have to pay the coloc fees, staff, you have the cost of the servers, and probably a few other things. I can't speak absolutely for Slashdot because I quite frankly don't have the facts, but by far, bandwidth is our biggest expense. Maybe I'm wrong, but $5/1,000 page views seems a little steep to me (unless you're feeling philanthropic.) I think I'll keep viewing banners.
While I'd like to see Slashdot stick around, I'm not sure that it's useful enough to warrant paying for it, especially at $5/1,000 page views. Unfortunately, the articles on the front page are occasionally outright wrong or very misleading; add to that the fact that many people don't even bother to read the stories, post completely inaccurate comments (read the story about rebuilding data from modem/ethernet blinkenlights if you don't believe me), and then manage to get moderated up (presumably by moderators who also didn't read the story)--the signal to noise ratio seems to be getting poorer all the time.
Now don't get me wrong--my uid is 5189 (just in case you can't read the comment header)--I've been here for some time and I don't think that Slashdot isn't a useful resource. It's just not that useful to me.
Perhaps if it was cheaper (I admit, I'm stingy with my money. At least it keeps me out of debt), I'd pay for it... Check out these numbers:
I work at a small ISP. We have a mere overpriced T1 to the Internet, and although we don't pay by the amount of data transferred, it comes out to a little over $3/gb. Now, presuming that VA/Slashdot pay the same rates (they almost undoubtedly pay less), let's see what 1,000 pages would cost...
At the time I grabbed copies of the html, the front page was 37,190 bytes and the comments page 201,778 bytes. Presuming I read the front page and the comments for 3 stories (which I did, in fact, do at the time), my average data transfer is about 160,631 bytes (in reality, this will vary depending on the user).
So, 1,000 page views at 160,631 bytes each comes out to a grand total of
160,631,000 bytes = 153.190mb = 0.149599gb.
0.149599gb at $3/gb = $0.44880 in bandwidth costs.
Now I certainly realize that there are many other costs associated with running
p.s. If anyone who actually knows has figures for the extra expenses that go into Slashdot, I'd be interested in knowing...
What pop up adds? I don't see any.
:wq
Many posts have been made about how VA needs to recover the costs of running this site. Well guess what, Slashdot is ultimately owned by a public company. The upper management of VA has a DUTY to the shareholders of VA to make as much money off of Slashdot as possible. This isn't about breaking even, its about profit maximization.
VA can take a long term view of this (making less money money now, so that they can make more money later). But ultimately, VA must justify its actions as being in the best interests of the shareholders. If, in the long run, more money can be made by taking steps that reduce the population of Slashdot by 50%, then they have a responsibility to do so.
We shouldn't think that these actions are being taken just to ensure that Slashdot breaks even (nor should we believe that earning a PROFIT is somehow morally or otherwise wrong. They will only earn money if what they provide us with exceeds the cost to us [in money or annoyance]).
I mean, who wants to pay to crapflood?
Crazies, people with tinfoil hats, astroturfers, arrogant rich bastards, clueless rich twits, and, of course, people with stolen credit cards.
Overall, I suspect that the total volume of posting would drop dramatically, but I'm not sure that the percentage of igorant, offtopic and clueless posts would drop all that much.
This is really good to hear. I was pretty worried about losing access to features once I gave them money.
JMendl asks: Do people on the street ever recognize you? And if they do, what do they usually say?
[snip...]
"First Post"
Taco said "I think people overrate them. Several people said that we should follow what google does. But they don't understand that we're very different then google. What keywords do we sell, and to who? It just doesn't make as much sense."
Every story could have words replaced by links e.g. IBM has just sued Sun because of GPL infringement becomes IBM has just sued SUN because of GPL infringement
next
People who refuse to pay are not mainly in the group of people who begrudge the cost; probably most readers would gladly part with the money and are largely fairly well-to-do. Its the administrative overhead and risk that stops us.
The 'overhead' refers to filling out forms, tracking the information, and the charges on my credit card. I hate paperwork. This alone is enough to make me leery of participating.
The risk factor is the true stopper though.
I won't give any personal information to anybody because I have been abused in too many ways; not just internet sites but the world at large. I have been sold on lists to telemarketers. I have been charged on my credit cards by fly-by-nights. I have been outright robbed using paypal. I have been spammed. I have had my personal computer cracked by warez hackers and chinese dissidents. I have been, and am being, stalked by a [literally] psychotic guy from New Jersey. I have had my bank account compromised; my credit card hijacked.
In short, my life has been made a living hell by the simple fact that I have given information out to people who all said they wouldn't let it out.
Thus I believe this is the 'ultimate' reason for the dot com failure; nobody ever solved the problem of easy, fast and trustworthy electronic transactions.
Until that problem is solved, slashdot won't get my money.
Exactly. It's amazing. They are doing very well in an extraordinarily lucrative field, but they don't get the benefits because they don't know how to do business.
Bush's education improvements were
Taco:
The department line on the Slsahdot Subscription story was
...
'Throwing a few bucks in the guitar case'
I forget that people don't bother *reading* slashdot before they complain
This was in reference to the subscription system actually being more of a tip jar rather than a true subscription.
Hey, why don't you call it that rather than belittling your users? I don't seem to recall having to "subscribe" to Penny Arcade to get the wallpaper, just give them a clearly labelled donation. The department name is not exactly the best place to tell people an important message you don't want them to miss. If it were, perhaps the next steaming pile of Katzshit could be "from the don't-know-my-ass-from-my-elbow-without-an-instru
Oh, and it's nice to see that you can't spell for shit in real time, either. Why don't you sell off those VA options? Ought to be enough left for a remedial english course at the local community college.
--saint
Wow, FAQs, multiple stories, 3 hours of IRC chat, and people still have 50 million questions, and at least half the comments so far are nothing more than whining and/or trolling.
/., I still shake my head in wonder. Geeks who've made money online, and are still making money. Sometimes I wonder if it's just sour grapes from a lot of formerly-employed dot-commers... but let's face it: if Rob was such the uncaring asshole people make him out to be, he would have just sold Slashdot for a big chunk of change. Taco made something cool, made himself at least something of a career out of it, and is STILL DOING IT. Find me more than a handful of people who can claim that over the past 5 years. AND still will take 3 hours to sit on IRC of all the godforsaken holes in the universe to answer the same 5 questions repeatedly.
Lighten up, people! It's a WEBSITE. A good one, one that I happen to find entertaining and informative, but it's still a website. 300,000+ users a day ain't chump change in the bandwidth game. Keeping a system alive to support that with very little downtime is itself quite an accomplishment (think of how many 'big name' sites have themselves been Slashdotted).
I have yet to actually see any of these 'new' ads, and something tells me I'll be ignoring them just as I would any other ad within a week. Don't like them? Cough up some dough. Don't like that? LEAVE. Why exactly do people keep posting 'I will not pay for a message board'? Fine, then go. Just please stop whining about it.
Every time I visit
Oh well, that was rambling enough. Long story short, if you don't like it, make your own. Whining won't make it any better.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Text ads in metafilter are very effective because
1. Not annoying
2. cheap (relatively)
3. interesting
People (ie. users) pay to put text ads on slashdot. You don't have to charge much, given the popularity of slashdot everyone would want to have their ad on it, for they company, they blog, their site or what ever. Text ads generate money through quantity in numbers of advertisers not in money per ad.
You could have people pay for text ads on front page (cost more) or by category. Have it as a slashbox, people who choose to subscribe can close it, while the rest of "us" (Thats include me) can have the ads while skimming through slashdot.
Just make a good payment queue so you can have a diy system.
I read this part without reading the question... Someday I will give it up ;)
If my wrists hurt every day I'd quit.
right now they only hurt once in awhile.
As it stands, I'll do this until they make me stop. But I'm 25. I doubt I'd feel that way when I'm 50 :)
Dude, aren't you getting married?
I was so happy when I heard about the friend/foe system! Finally I could make my -1 browsing experience good! I could read all the stuff that Taco doesn't think I should read just because it's on a subject more interesting than what the article is about, and I could not see Klerk's pathetic attempts to widen the page! It would be slash-bliss!
But NOOOOO. It is useless if you aren't browsing at least at 0. But Klerck gets his ass modded down to -1 right quick, which means the Friend/Foe function is really only useful for making people who don't crapflood but who you don't like go away.
And that's just sad.
The enemies of Democracy are
Remember the Karma Whores? People would compete to see who could come up with the most Karma points for the sheer joy of saying "my score is bigger than yours".
I say let's ressurrect this annoying facet of human nature and turn it to Slashdot's advantage. Why not include a symbol along with each subscriber's comments that represents his/her "devotion" to Slashdot, as measured in US Dollars. (Kind of like the "community supporter" program on EZBoard, and similar "marks of recognition" found on other discussion boards.)
The catch-- these are not earned, they're bought! People could mindlessly compete to see who could get the most impressive widget associated with their name. Hemos could spend hours thinking up new and more interesting associations.
They would give no special privileges, just bragging rights (and revenue for OSDN).
For example:
$10 gets you "open source leech"
$100 gets you "linux bigot"
$1000 gets you "kernel hacker"
$10000 gets you "alpha geek"
$100000 gets you "better than Hemos"
$1000000 gets you "new owner of Slashdot"
Some observations/questions which I found interesting (TI = Time Index):
TI 15:12 - Someone asks about the costs of running Slashdot. Lots of "it's hard to tell", "hard to calculate", etc from the Slashdot crew. CmdrTaco says they have 12 servers + test boxes and stuff.
TI 15:43 - Again someone asks how much is costs to keep
TI 16:14 - Someone asks if the money from subscriptions will go to help improve infrastructure, bandwidth, costs, etc. Hemos says the money will go into the OSDN bank account. He then says "But the money for Slashdot is tracked". Taco says "The thing is we don't need *more* we just need to keep what we have".
TI 16:15 - A question is asked about how long
TI 17:16 - Someone asks how much bandwidth
Is it just me, or does it seem profoundly odd to anyone that the people who run Slashdot have no idea how much money it costs? Maybe this is the reason they're in financial trouble? They say that
Slashdot of course has absolutely no obligation to reveal their costs to their users, whether they're subscription based or not. But answering as they did above really makes them look unprofessional IMO. If they don't want to answer, or are prohibited from answering, they should simply state that.
Personally, I won't pay for a subscription. I'll likely install JunkBuster or something similar. As someone posted on another thread, it's *my* right to choose what's displayed on *my* computer, and if I don't want to see ads, I won't. Just like it's the choice of Slashdot to remove itself as a freely accessible site and become completely closed and subscription only based if they want. If that happens, then I have a choice to pay, or not pay and get my news on the multitude of other tech news sites. It's all about choices, as it should be.
So exactly how much DOES it cost to run Slashdot per year?
Frog
This should reduce /.'s overhead some: Fire Jon Katz. It would make the users happy and save Slashdot some cash.
Opinions are not Informative, though they may be Insightful or Interesting.
A Score:5 comment, perhaps a few thousand.
The value of comments is questionable.
Considering the percentage of readers who care.
Amazing... Slashdot is composed of two things, the front page, with all the spelling errors and factual mistakes, and the comments pages, with all the user submitted corrections. Now, if you take away the comments pages, you are left with the front page alone, and to me, slashdot becomes almost worthless. With the current levels of fact checking, I could never believe anything posted.
The value of comments is questionable. If the value of comments is less than the cost of transmitting pages to people, then slashdot will ultimately fail, because it will throw money away with every page served. This is true whether the cost is paid by advertising or by paypal. However, the value of the frontpage alone, is a lot less than it is allied with the comments. The value of the frontpage is almost certainly less than the cost of transmitting it.
Taco comments clearly indicate that he does not see this value. That he sees comments.pl, not as an integral and important part of slashdot, but as a burden on bandwidth and processing power. Wake up, Taco: you are not the only person with valuable content contributions to make to slashdot.
As to hemos, he comes across as a guy seriously unable to do his job. If you've ever worked with one, you know what he mean. He does not seem to be contributing at all to helping slashdot stay afloat. He doesn't have any idea of what to do, or what direction to take. Taco seems to be carrying him.
Good luck keeping slashdot going guys, but I doubt you are the people to keep it afloat. It will probably die when the .com cash runs out, maybe before if VA kills it first.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
In my opinion, it's more than just this. What if the subscriptions idea fails? What new scheme will be thought up next? Will it be subscriptions + the new scheme? What if that new scheme fails? Will it be subscriptions + old new scheme + new new scheme?
Philosophically, Slashdot is banking on the idea that people will want to support it through thick or thin. That alone might be a dependable motivator. However, in an implementation sense, the current subscription fee is based around blocking the big ads. But the small ads still get through on some pages. How does one sell this to a potential Slashdot reader? Give us money and we'll only force you to see some ads and not others.
That doesn't really sell well. Maybe with a snappy jingle, I don't know.
However, at the heart of this is the fact that you're asking people to pay for doing what actually makes the sight interesting, follow-up discussion on tech ideas. Unfortunately, an internet junky can get their fix of this stuff through USENET if they really want it.
A previous post mentioned the fact that a large portion of geeks with computers have disposable income. Why not tap into that? I'd certainly start buying stuff online if a cause I believed in was getting a cut of it. I'd also post about my system specs and software purchases if I knew it would be kept confidential. With each passing quarter that data could be a pretty regular and valuable source of information.
Furthermore, you've got a decent weblog, arguably a marketable commodity, and yet O'Reilly is the one selling the books about how to use it, not to mention getting the profit.
And even more furthermore, I know Slashdot editors hate the idea of paid advertorials, but in the end, what's wrong with them? It's just another form of advertising anyway, and will be seen as such, and it might even stimulate some interesting discussion, not to mention encourage the advertorial sources to actually make sure they have some substance to their pitch or else get flamed into oblivion.
CmdrTaco says:
"It's really scary tho- more then half of Slashdot's readers NEVER read a comment. another 25% read comments on maybe one story a day. "
This does not gibe. Less than half of slashdot's readers click (Read More...)? article.pl displays the comments too, are you counting that?
I know I mostly read comments (usually more interesting than the stories), but I never browse to comment.pl.
I'm surprised no one else has called him on this, or else I missed that comment because, seriously, who reads the damn things.
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
Alterslash is actualy a pretty cool site, now that I've seen it. I don't really see how you guys can go after them for the comments when you said yourself you don't have any rights to them, perhaps you should leave it up to the individual posters to take it up with that site if they have a problem with being reposted.
/.
Of course, the site does give everything the "82%" take from
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Maybe the answer is this: They've done computers all their lives, and then Slashdot. They have had no time to learn any other area of life, such as business or advertising or marketing or
Bush's education improvements were
Good forum, it made me nostalgic thinking about how the 'net has grown up.
Rather than having the suits go after alterslash, wouldn't a much better outcome be to incorporate the value that is added into the site? I think its damn cool and useful, like kernel traffic and its obviously a fan site. He's not making any money.
If the suits are so uptight then just rip off what's he's doing into slashdot or have him and a few people be editors for stuff.
The logic you used is scarily like what GM and Walmart say when going after fan sites that have their trademark's in the domain name.
Hemos said that VA fits the bill for Slashdot because it costs 1.5 million a month.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Geez people... +1 informative? -1 Troll? Try +1 Funny... sheesh...
I don't mean to insult, but this will probably come across that way. I'm a loyal surfer and certainly appreciate Slashdot as an information source. However ...
...
:)
:)
You say that 10-12 people work on Slashdot as their job, plus support from NetOps (which I'm guessing is third party? Exodus?)
Honestly - I don't get it. What do all these people do? It seems to me that Slashdot isn't run as a business, but instead is still run by a couple of geeky types that had a Fun Idea (TM) that they rode the Dot-Com boom on and don't want to give it up.
The content is submitted by the readers, the moderation is done by the readers...
The application is worked on by the community
Stories are posted by 4 "story type people", but the posts are so frequently duplicates, have misspellings, poor grammar, broken URLs, etc - I can't really believe that anyone puts any serious time into it!
$100-$200k per year of bandwidth at 10mbps? You're getting ** raped **.
12 machines and some test boxes? C'mon. Most readers have that much in their home. Is the setup that poor that it requires that much hands on maintenance?
I'm also guessing that the geeks that founded it aren't able to admin machines, configure routers, etc... since we've all read the stories about all the people that get jerked out of bed when the site goes down.
It seems to me that Slash could run with about 3 employees, provided they had breadth of skill.
Yes, I've done all this before - including the part where you re-evaluate and realize you can do it a LOT cheaper.
Yes, I could be VERY mistaken in my observations and I welcome corrections.
I also have no beef with subscriptions. I'll even consider paying. This is just a tangent.
I'd hate to see Slashdot go away, and it seems a great way to do that would be for VA/Andover to take some serious looks at cost cutting... a lot larger companies have run with less.
ROTFLOL!!!
that turquoise theme of this site has got to go :)
maybe it wont match the banner colors and the popups?
my blog
Strikes me as a good way for the slash editors to keep in touch with the slash community, and vice versa. I know I'd really appreciate it.
Obviously, it would take up some of the editors' valuable time, but surely something's feasible, like a 2-hour session every week, or a 3-hour session monthly?
Ma bell used to have a similar setup for US phones. Lifting the reciever disrupted the voltage, so they knew the call went through and started billing. The green box (if I recall my colors correctly) maintained the signal while you picked up the phone, so they never started billing. Although they did sometimes get suspicious if you spen half an hour waiting for someone to answer the phone :)
<hemos> Yep. No Flash.
You sure about that?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
if you don't like it then don't fucking use it. god damn all these posts about taco not knowing what he's doing or not paying attention to the community. shut up already. its his fucking site. let him do as he pleases and if you don't like it theres always kuro5hin.
ugh
grr argh
-
If you sell 18% of the ad banners that are currently displayed and 23% of readers may purchase a subscription then you're eliminating 23% from the 72% of ad views that are Unpaid. Thus they aren't loosing any ad revenue and are Still collecting the subscription fee. Unfortunately it means fewer freebie ads for animefu and the like for those of us who don't subscribe.
18% * 100 = 18
(72% - 23%)* 100 = 49
18 / (18 + 49) ~= 27%
So if everyone who said they had subscribed and everyone who said they would subscribe (if the banners got annoying enough) then the paid banner rate could hit 27%
This is a win-win situation for a site that isn't selling enough banner ads.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Perhaps it would help if you sat down and looked at how much money you're losing per month. Then add your income to that figure. You now have how much you have to get extra per month to break even.
Then figure out if 82% of readers (200,000 accounts?) paying $5 for 3 months of ad-free browsing will get you enough money. That's $20 per year per user, or about $400,000 per year if only 10% of those 200,000 accounts subscribe (I wouldn't hold my breath for a subscription rate of over 25%).
I sure hope that's all you guys need to break even. If not, it's time to go back to the drawing board.
Moderators: I'd rather you replied than moderate this message up or down.
I wish I had some mod points to throw at you, but this'll do.
I could have saved 5 Bucks!
This page was generated by hand using sweat shop labor, thank you for Subscribing Subscriber (564781).
Taco resonding to how much /. costs:
I really don't know.
This has one of two possible meanings, and they are equally bad.
Say it aint so, Taco.
I'm glad that an archive of this exists on slashnet.org -- I started logging the IRC session when I saw:
:)
<Questions> elsie asks: are these gonna be popout ads?
<hemos> I WILL GNAW OFF MY OWN GENITALS FIRST
Though I'm not looking forward to popup ads appearing here, I must say that I will enjoy calling Hemos on this one a couple of years down the line.
-Waldo
Now that you have a subscription revenue coming in, do you think you could set up a cache for the smaller sites that obviously cant afford to take a pounding from >100,000 users in a 24 hour period?
Seriously, do you guys even think about the consequences of sending huge amounts of traffic to a non-profit organisation that probably barely survives.
Not that its illegal or anything, but to me it's rude and inconsiderate
You little punk!
You block ads.
You cost us money.
Ultimately, I mean
The irony here is almost unbearable. The same crowd that swears that pirating software somehow doesn't cost record companies any lost sales ("I wouldn't have bought it anyway") is now being asked to believe that somehow blocking ads instead of paying for the non-ad version directly costs /. money.
As many others have said already, this plan is not even half-baked, let alone fully thought out. And none of the other suggestions I've seen so far will work, frankly, since they all rely on either 1) the willingness of the /. crowd to pay money voluntarily (and this is largely the crowd that killed off the Linux book market by not buying books, remember), or 2) advertisers to pay for banner and other ads, which everyone in the business knows just don't work.
I like /., really, and I would hate to see it go away, but unless someone has a major epiphany about 'net site business models, and soon, /. and a lot of other sites will either disappear completely or devolve into someone's underfunded and largely neglected hobby. That would be sad, bP>Bt's life in a capitalistic environment.
I see. Much like the $$democratic$$ process you rant horridly against, you allow those who pay you have a more solid voice.
I see.
Count me out, Taco. You are now just another part of the $$process$$, no?
Actually, count me in. Here's the $$$. Now, I'd really like to moderate. .
From what I understand, Slashdot cannot police their users' copyright. They've been granted a non-exclusive license to display the users' comment; as such, if anyone else is posting it, they have no grounds for a suit, as they haven't been wronged (if they had an exclusive license, it'd be another story). Since they have no copyright on the comments, and no exclusive license to reproduce them, they frankly have no standing to bring a suit -- this is the very same reason that GNU insists that all contributed code has its copyright assigned to the FSF, because they don't have legal standing to bring suit in the event of GPL violations unless they're the copyright holders.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Pardon my inability to articulate, the endorphines still occupy my bloodstream. :)
Given the parent posting's author's Slashdot history, I find it very unlikely that he is a troll. I respectfully ask anybody browsing with moderation points to assign his post +1, underrated.
CmdrTaco and Hemos had addressed my question previously (whoever maintained the queue asked it twice) with a somewhat negative view of my suggestions. They believed that there would be prodigious overhead in tracking bandwidth used by person. I don't believe so; you can estimate the amount of bandwidth used by multiplying the number of pageviews by the approximate bandwidth used by each one. I stress that this method could prove inaccurate due to the fact that Slashdot's images are variable in size. (There are ways around this, but they require considerable amounts of overhead themselves.)
I agree with your opinion of a "subscribers only" tree; I would suggest a scheme where everybody would be allowed to view it, but only subscribers given write access.
Thank you (and Taco/Hemos) for your response(s).
Do you like German cars?
IANAL but have an interest in it and Hemos and CmdrTaco don't seem to understand the issues ( or are trying to hide their true intentions ).
Firstly, copyright (unlike trademarks and to a degree patents) doesn't have to be protected to remain in force. Yuo can allow people to abuse yuor copyright to their hearts content and then at a later date sue them for current infringement (not sure about previous infringement, time passing may equal consent to use it).
Secondly, slashdot has no case against alterslash on the grounds of them reusing comments. Slashdot isn't the copyright holder of the comments (according to Taco or Hemos in the log) and so cannot sue alterslash for copyright violation there. Users can sue alterslash but Slashdot can't (for the comments) They probably can't sue for submitted stories either leaving them with only the small additions to the stories on the front page (and the obligitory corrections). So their main premise for the cease and desist is (to put it bluntly) crap and on par with any large company. They aren't using the slashdot logo anywhere so there's no trademare issue there (they'll have a rough time of it with the background image).
Morally what they are doing is dodgy. Legally they may have a few problems but not the ones Taco and Hemos seemed most annoyed about.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
A simple solution would be to put a checkmark next to the +1 and, AC checkboxes that we could click, say, "no reposting", a marker (hidden even) could be placed in the comment header or body signaling that it can't be automatically reposted.
another solution would be for alterslash to collect the usernames of people who would allow their comments to be reposted, this wouldn't work very well (most people wouldn't know about it), but would require no work on your part.
Of course, you're totally within your rights to ask them to shut down based on their copying of your copyrighted data, but the whole "the posters will be pissed off" argument just seems like an excuse to avoid being like the RIAA. But remember, they are going around saying "We need to do this for the artist!" while really they only have their profit motive in mind.
Also, about copyright, you don't have to protect it in every case. That's just trademarks. The film It's A Wonderful Life used to play all the time on different stations at Christmas, then some company discovered that they had the copyright, and now it only plays on NBC. Copyrights, (and patents) can be applied whenever or however you want. Only trademarks need to be protected from entering the common vernacular. Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really know all the ins and outs of copyright law (and neither are you).
If users have a problem with alterslash printing their comments, just tell 'em to talk to them. It's not your responsibility.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
... that Slashdot is still considering accepting donations even though they're now technically a commercial entity.
Of course, I can see that some people may want to 'donate' without subscribing, but that's still akin to RedHat requesting donations.
Do you like German cars?
Actually he said it occupied a middle ground between a tip jar and a subscription system, he didn't say which side of the middle ground it was on. (It's not more a tip jar then anything else)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I've noticed Rob say a number of times that the biggest thing deterring Slashdot from doing flat-rate subscriptions is the few who load a TON of pages a day, and they can't support that.
Here's the thing: those people will be there whether you have flat rate or not. The only way to keep these people away would be to have Slashdot be closed to the public. Otherwise, a person who would load a ton of times each day will just plain not pay per view.
If these people who load tons are going to be here no matter what... wouldn't you like to get $5 per month from some of them, instead of nothing from any of them?
I don't care if it turns out to be a better deal to do pay-per-view. Maybe I'll get 3 months of viewing out of it. But I'll hate page-pinching every time I read, and the page-pinching will be unavoidable and in the back of my mind all the time. Give me the chance to just have peace of mind.
That's all!
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
So would you believe ABC if they went on air asking you not to use TiVO or ReplayTV to zap the commercials on their broadcast because if you zap the commercials you cost them money?
The reality is, if the figures taco and hemos threw out were correct, there is only a 12% chance someone who blocks ads is costing /. money on a given page view. The remainder of the time, the person who blocks ads saves /. money because the add being viewed is not a paid ad.
Not to mention that ad rates are largely driven by number of readers of the site, not necessarily by numbers of readers of the site that view ads.
...or their ilk.
I don't trust Pay-Pal. Anyone who wants to act like a bank, but won't actually become a bank, and be subject to regulations and FDIC insurance -- well, then I'm not at all interested in touching it.
Now, if I could just give you a credit card number, that'd be swell.
I'll subscribe when Pay-Pal ain't the only way....
1. Slashdot is nothing but reposting of stories that originate elsewhere.
No, I don't think so. If that was all Slashdot was, it wouldn't be nearly as popular. The thing that makes Slashdot Slashdot is the comments. The ability to have a discussion about the posted stories. And for some, the sick entertainment value of trolling. If Slashdot didn't have a good commenting system, Slashdot wouldn't exist.
If you just want to read stories, go to the source. If you want to try to discuss the stories with like-minded people, go to Slashdot.
Your post made no sense at all.
Think about what you want to say and write it out clearly so that people can understand.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Look at the nubers CT is giving out. only 18% of the people who look at slashdot even look at the comments at all
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
/. moderators already work for free. They are drawn from the userbase.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wouldn't surprise me in the least if the
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
1. Cookies are disabled on my system except for the rare occasion when there is a compelling reason to enable them for a few minutes on a single site.
2. I refuse to remember yet another password
3. #1 and #2 mean no Slashdot account.
4. I would tolerate and maybe even click through an ad for the good of the system IF they weren't animated. Animated graphics absolutely REQUIRE disabling.
5. Even with everything above, I would pay $10/month on the condition that Slashdot improve the proofreading to the point that it doesn't look like it was slapped together by a bunch of drunken mental patients. I wouldn't need a login because I can filter my own ads, thank you, and the "extras" like access to the rejection bin look as tempting as last Tuesday's pot roast.
Unfortunately, I have seen nothing in the articles or IRC log that indicates that Slashdot will operate with even a modicum of professionalism in exchange for payment.
So here is my offer:
If Slashdot can get through ONE WEEK, starting today, without substituting "then" for "than", mispelling "definitely", or miscapitalizing "operating system" on the front page (user comments don't count), I'll send them a check for $120. That's a one year subscription at $10/month by my plan. Note, that's not even for a competent Slashdot, just one that avoids three glaring errors.
I WILL back this offer up, but somehow, I think my money is safe.
I will not pay for a subscription. I will not use an ad. filtering proxy unless the ad. situation goes over my acceptable limit. If this happens I will send $20 to CmdrTaco himself.
/.'s staff can do better than that.
The same cost as a one year subscription.
Seriously.
This subscription scheme is a badly formulated one that reads like this:
We need money. Lets bring in more ads. Hmm, people probably won't like that... so let's make 'em pay to remove the ads from their pages.
That's dumb.
Check out this copyright myths page for the straight dope.
IANAL, so i don't know if you have to act against alterslash, but apparently you'll have to deal with 'em (hopefully this doesn't get messy). Nevertheless, i think, the idea of a digest with a few highranked comments (if it can be automated), as well as their comment statistics are an interesting feature, that is probably easier to implement in slashcode than by pulling comment-snippets from a site anyway. Alterslash may be violating copyrights, but still /. could benefit from their ideas.
--
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Seeing Hemo's comment that he'd need a huge spreadsheet for all this my question is why isn't there one already there? Geez, I even have a huge spreadsheet for my own home budget. How the hell do you plan for the next quarter or year? How do you know when you can afford to buy server upgrades, give raises, or just buy all your guys pizza?
It really isn't any wonder why the dotcom bubble burst when you see such poor business/accounting practices as displayed here.
BTW, I love slashdot, but hate the idea of some stupid subscription. I refuse to pay for a subscription to sites like this on the grounds that all the news is freely available elsewhere on the net and that I'd essentially be paying for other users comments that they in turn were not paid for. So, if your thinking of restricting access to information only to subscribers count me out.
I have one more slight beef. Now that we see that the motives behind this are to get into the black and thus driven by *cough* corporate profit needs. Doesn't this all just pollute the notion that this is a community? I mean before the subscription idea came out we had ads. Everyone understood that ads were necessary to sustain the community. It was the communities desire to remain a community that allowed us to see the ads as a necessary evil. But the idea of a subscription just turns us all into customers of a business now. It's become no different than the people standing in line with me at the department store up the street. I'll have no more bond with them than I do with another /.'er. That to me is very sad.
I understand the need for more ads. I guess I just believe that the /. community could have come up with better ideas to sustain the needs of the community than the subscriptions or the larger ads. I mean isn't that the whole point of "ask slashdot" is to say "hey here's my problem anyone got ideas?". From the amount and nature of responses I've seen in ask slashdot there are alot of pretty creative people in the community.
Do away with annoying animated ads (read "all animated ads") and people won't avoid them like the plague with tools such as junkbusters.
I recently purchased Opera for Linux. I'm not running junkbusters there. But, since I can turn animation and pop-ups off, I don't mind the ads and have no plans to block ads.
It is the intrusive and obnoxious advertising that is shooting the ad business in the foot.
Darren
Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.
OSDN: Here's one -- nine pence.
Slashdot: I'm not dead!
AC: Here -- he says he's not dead!
OSDN: Yes, he is.
Slashdot: I'm not!
AC: He isn't.
OSDN: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
Slashdot: I'm getting better!
OSDN: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Slashdot: I don't want to go in the cart!
OSDN: Oh, don't be such a baby.
AC: I can't take him...
OSDN: Oh, do us a favor...
AC: I can't.
OSDN: Well, when is your next round?
AC: Thursday.
Slashdot: I think I'll go for a walk.
OSDN: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there
something you can do?
Slashdot: I feel happy... I feel happy.
[ AC clubs slashdot to death]
OSDN: Ah, thanks very much.
AC: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
The last thing you should do is make people pay for not seeing the ads. If anything you should be denying ads and promotional offers to non-subscribers. This way you could even offer content that actually costs something. For a change. You know. Do your own research and stuff.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
Let me get this straight. You want to take an audience that goes to some lengths to not pay for things they like (books, music, movies, software) and you want them to pay for something they love AND gripe about in the same breath? Good luck. Stephen King let 'The Plant' die, so too might Slashdot. Bummer.
For my part I can safely say that ignoring banners on web pages costs me less than $5 a month.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Even if we posters gave Slashdot an explicit license to use our comments (which we don't), Slashdot could not sue Alterslash. Only the actual copyright holder has the right to claim infringement. In any case if the copyright owner objects to the action, the licensee doesn't have a leg to stand on.
It is technically possible to abandon copyright, but it is quite difficult, and proving abandonment requires, among other things clear indication that the owner intended to abandon the copyright. (for example, by destroying the last known copy of a work)
Hopefully Rob is just ignorant of the differences between copyright, trademark, patent, etc. He does have a financial incentive to go after alterslash. AFAIK there is no penalty for sending out a 'cease and desist' threat so he may actually do that. But if his legal counsel is any good he won't take it to court. Slashdot does not own the comments or the submitted portions of the stories. They will have to sue based on Katz stories. What a joke that would be.
I've just been reading the IRC log, and I noticed a type of phrase which I have been taught to avoid uttering myself... "I think what users will want more personalized stuff. E.g. gold star based on what people ahve said me"
Some people out there might think.. what is wrong with that? Well, the answer is that this isn't reader research, or really asking the slashdot population in general what they really think. It's the same as someone without and UI design training saying.. "I know what users want, I don't need to get a UI expert in"...
I really think that slashdot ought to put together a proper web survey, not just a silly little poll and some stories where people post comments, a properly survey. Present the options, ask for peoples opinions, find out their views on ad's.. store and analyse the results. Then let make those results public so you have some facts to back up your arguments.
I like slashdot, and given the right subscription package I probably would subscribe, but please survey the readers, find out what would work the best, and present some real figures and reasons rather than the handwaving we've all had so far
If I'm going to pay to become part of a user forum, I want some say / influence over the way I pay / what I can pay for. A properly constructed survey will give you the information you need to make a decent informed choice about subscriptions, I think assuming you know what the readership want / like is a dangerous assumption to make, and if you get it wrong a large number of users will either not subscribe, or just walk away.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
It ain't like 99.
But how I wish it were. The times where you still could make money from everything on the web, it was so easy. Ah well those were the times.
The reason Slashdot now wants to charge is because of bandwidth costs.
:)
An earlier suggestion of using mod_gzip to compress pages before transmission is a great idea to reduce server bandwidth by nearly an order of magnitude. This should be implemented as a matter of urgency imho.
Failing that, has anyone thought of a way to do a peer-to-peer distributed slashdot that is truly run by it's users? That would free us once and for all from the tyrany of adverts
That's your lot.
Just want to try and keep things in perspective... or at least keep some view of Taco and Hemo's perspective.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Excellent. Took me a while to read it to the tune of "I Will Survive". For a while, I thought you were the kind of person who just fit your message within the horizontal boundaries of the little window.
Too bad you couldn't come up with a rhyme for goatse.cx, huh?
Taco and Hemos and whoever else are not running a company. They run a website and are employees of a company.
Someone in VA Linux has responsibility for Slashdot, knows exactly how much it costs etc. Rob obviously doesn't - but that's not what they pay him to do!
DocSnyder asks: Would it be an idea to offer a subscribers-only webcache for /.ed sites, with links in stories and comments pointing to the cache instead of the hosed target?
CmdrTaco Please read the FAQ.
hemos Copyright issues.
Quick question, have you actually checked up on the copyright issues of this? Or is google, Alexia and the other companies out there violating copyright left, right and centre?
On another note 12 people to run one site??? Christ, what the hell do you do all day? Fire Jon Katz (he writes the most unmittigated twaddle I've ever seen) and immediately reduce your team by half that amount. I totally fail to see, how, with only a dozen or so submissions a day how you really need all those people.
For fucks sake, my company delivers gigabytes of content to a large number of customers with a team of 8 techies, 4 editors and various freelancers. Seems like to me the work per person here is substantially higher that slashdot.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I've been thinking a lot about this. I think they have an enormously broad knowledge of the computer industry. I think they are overwhelmed with the enormous effort necessary in producing Slashdot. Maybe they simply have no time for anything else.
Bush's education improvements were
I "tipped" the maximum amount I would pay to receive Slashdot for a year (if it was a strictly subscription service). I'll see how long I can go ad-free with that amount, it ought to be a very, very, very long time.
Why don't you do the same?
I'm a 2000 man.
* You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
* We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.
* Don't worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it's not the only thing on your mind.
* Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?
* Your product broke. Why? We'd like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We'd like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she's not in?
* We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.
Now that was a quality trolling FP. Kudos !
I used to have magazine subscriptions to several tech journals that were far more expensive than the $5 for views slashdot is proposing.
Let's not totally bash the advertisers either. Magazine subscriptions have a subscription fee and advertisements, which aren't always an evil thing. Advertisements do have their place - they inform you about new products and services that you otherwise might not be exposed to. As long as they aren't intrusive (ala popup adds or being forced to redirections to totally unrelated material), I don't mind. I plan on paying the subscription fee, but I'd also like for Slashdot to allow me the option to turn on advertisements that I DO want to see. I don't want to miss out on those ThinkGeek goodies!
I think of news journal sites like Slashdot the magazines of the modern era. They are dynamic content (updated daily instead of monthly), they save on paper waste, they are archived indefinitely (can refer to favorite articles very easily though search engines), and they are interactive (post your own comments about the topic). Sounds like a better bargain and service to me then my current print magazine subscriptions.
It's a win-win situation. Slashdot receives revenue to keep operating (and does not depend on advertiser revenue alone, where the vendors are given leverage to dictate size, placement, etc), and we get to continue to enjoy the content. Given the average salary of a tech worker, I think we can afford a mere $5 subscription to a service that we like. Heck, we don't have to pay the $5 at all if the advertisers foot the bill (but then they get leverage on size, placement, etc).
One of the questions was about whether there was an archives of the first slashdot page.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://slashdot.org appears to go back as far as 21 Dec 1997, but when I try to view the older pages, I get a blank document. Maybe a temporary glitch? You can see pages from earch 1998, in any case.
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Was that, instead of taking questions one at a time, in the order they came in, our two hosts only answered questions they wanted to answer. At one point, they were ASKING for more questions and rejecting the ones that were coming in. I stayed for the whole thing, waiting for one of my questions to come up. A lot of other people did too.
Respect for CmdrTaco & Hemos has reached on all-time low in my book. I mean, why didn't they just write their own bloody questions like politicians do?
I was looking forward to a real IRC dialog. I was very disappointed.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Computing is a lucrative field. If their technical advertising were more advanced it would be no problem to make money putting informative ads on Slashdot.
Bush's education improvements were
Maybe the reason they're still even bothing to do it is because there still is still some fun in it, and it's a good job? Can hardly blame them for thiniking that way if that's the case
It is my thesis that they aren't making a good profit because technical advertising is so poorly done. The one site, of the ones I know, that fixes some of the abuses of technical advertising is Google, which is making a profit.
Bush's education improvements were