Slashdot Subscribers Now See The Future

We're pleased to announce the newest reason for you to subscribe to Slashdot. Besides the ability to suppress banner ads, limit journal postings to friends, and a few plums, Subscribers now see stories posted on Slashdot from The Mysterious Future! These stories are recognizable by the red title bar, and the lack of a time stamp. Subscribers will be able to beat the rush and read the links before everyone else. You can hit the link below and I'll explain exactly what this means. If this appeals to you, you could read the subscriber FAQ or just go subscribe. First off, this feature doesn't change anything for non-subscribers. All Slashdot stories are put into the story queue before you see them. The time stamps on these stories vary tremendously. Sometimes the story is posted days in advance (like, say, a Book Review or an Ask Slashdot where time isn't critical and we post a set number a week) Other stories are "Breaking News" and are posted just seconds before they go live. But most stories are posted 20-30 minutes before they go live. This time window gives other authors a chance to take a look at them. To fix spelling, to check for dupes (HAH!) or even to reject the story outright!

So while subscribers won't see news posted at the last minute before everyone else, most of our stories will be available to them 10-20 minutes before everyone else. This means they can click through and beat the Slashdot Effect.

Another possible feature addition that we're discussing is to allow subscribers to post during this window. We haven't decided if that's a good idea or not. Since subscribers are still subject to all the same restrictions as anyone else in the forums, they could still be moderated into oblivion if they were jerks about it so it's probably not subject to all that much abuse, but this is still something we're only considering. Feel free to discuss it in this forum, or to contact me with opinions.

A couple of notes here:

• Subscribers have a variable on their subscriptions preference page that tells us how many banner ads they wish to "Spend" per day. This number must be at least 10 for you to be eligible to see the Mysterious Future plum. This means that your $5 subscription will last 100 days- or, $15-20 a year.
• You also need to hit the checkbox to disable ads on the Index. Once you hit your Max Pages for the day, you will see ads again, but you will also be eligible for the plum.
• These notes will be clarified on both the subscriptions page and in the FAQ very soon. Your feedback will help us decide how best to explain this since it's not exactly black & white here. Give us a couple weeks and it should all be blazingly obvious from the documentation how everything works.

In closing, this is a new feature and we appreciate all your feedback, both good and bad. We decided to implement this after tons of feedback from you, and we're really excited about it. This is a really great incentive for users to subscribe, but it also can give subscribers a chance to alert us in advance if stories have mistakes in them. We'll likely be expanding this sort of functionality in the future.

Now please go subscribe and help support Slashdot!

Update To clarify the timing. Right now the mysterious future is set to 20 minutes. That number is not a promise tho, since a story posted 11 minutes before "Air time" would be seen slighter later. A story posted 30 minutes in advance will be visible 20 minutes early.

Comments

Is this going to be like K5?

[mhesseltine]

By that I mean, will readers be able to make suggestions, corrections, etc. to the stories? Or, once submitted, the story is "set in stone" and won't be updated?

Also, will someone begin "karma whoring" and mirroring pages and posting links to the mirrors?

Re:Is this going to be like K5?

[CmdrTaco]

Users can always make suggestions to stories by emailing the author. We do hope that subscribers will be likely to alert us to typos and stuff. No story on Slashdot is really ever set in stone. But I would consider a story from the mysterious future to be totally plastic- I will be editing and updating stories during that window without spelling out changes or putting in little "Update" comments. We've always used the last few minutes before a story goes live to make updates and corrections. This won't change, but users will be able to alert us to issues before it goes public.

paying for what ???

[mirko]

1. So subscribers will pay to let you batch your weekly job ?
   
2. they will only be able to warn you about dupes before the slashdot crowd

ergo: they pay you to help you doing your job ?

(just a question : not a flamebait)

Comments on Subscriptions

[malachid69]

After reading the article, I was prepared to just close the link since I have no interest in paying to visit ANY site. Hell, at least I registered with /., I still won't do that for the NYTimes articles that keep getting posted -- I just ignore every single one.

And pay to PARTIALLY disable banners? Very lame. I never see them anyways, since I have gotten so accustomed to ignoring them... It's amazing at how trained you can get at ignoring pretty much all graphics on all sites.

But, to top it off, I read ALL of the comments to this article so far. Not a single good one -- doesn't that hint at something?

Malachi

Maybe allow subscribers to moderate stories?

[hackstraw]

I've noticed that the shere volume of stories in the past few months has increased, yet the quality of them is kinda variable. ask slashdot hovers around unbearable, but is sometimes good.

Why can't subscribers get a chance to mod stories during this "preview" time, and possibly even keep silly stories and dups from getting posted to the "real" slashdot.

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[kriegsman]

Here's a great marketing opportunity for someone entrepeneurially-minded:

1. Subscribe to the Mysterious Future via ./
2. Contact Web site owners and warn them politely of impending future slashdotting
3. Offer to sell them (short-term?) service on a Content Delivery Network
4. ... Profit!

Commercial sites would love this. Academic/government ones probably wouldn't care as much. You could sell them a contract with an existing CDN (Akamai, Mirror-Image, etc.) or build out your own special purpose service, just to handle slashdot-like effects.

-Mark, founder of Clearway Technologies (now owned by Mirror-Image Internet)

Are subscriptions helping the bottom line?

[bear_phillips]

How well are subscriptions doing for slashdot? Does anyone know if this feature was added because subscriptions are doing well or because subscriptions are doing bad and they need more incentives to subscribe?

At $5, slashdot is getting $0.005 per ad-free page view. What does slashdot get paid per page view with an ad?

Re:/. effect?

[cgenman]

This might be a good thing (tm) for system administrators. Getting a sudden, solid surge of slashdot referrals might trigger a webserver to htmlify dynamic content and / or switch to a text-only site in anticipation of the real flood, which might shut down any such system.

Of course, if you can't hang with the ping flood, you're screwed. But for those who aren't Dossed but merely hosed, this could be a great thing.

Re:Ummm...

[Whatsthiswhatsthis]

I am red/green colorblind. This doesn't mean that I cannot distinguish red from green. I can tell that everything on Slashdot's main page is in a green motif. It's harder to distinguish when the colors are close together or very light/dark.

This colorblindness test illustrates the problems I have recognizing the difference between these colors. In plate 2 I read the number "3" and in plate 3 I see "70." Try it for yourself.

If people who are red/green colorblind could really not distinguish any difference between the two, traffic lights at night would be really confusing.

Re:well golly

[sabaco]

Thats a pretty good idea. I would still think the /. effect would be better suppressed if slashdot would mirror stories, especially if its running off of somebody's mother's DSL connection.

What?! Now you want people to be responsible when they could use their own irresponsibility to generate money for them?? What is the would coming to... That's just downright unamerican.

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[silvaran]

Wouldn't that be blackmail?

"Hey, I'm calling about your impending doom... I have a way out. Deny my offer, and suffer..."

Re:/. effect?

[Ed Avis]

So while subscribers won't see news posted at the last minute before everyone else, most of our stories will be available to them 10-20 minutes before everyone else. This means they can click through and beat the Slashdot Effect.

...if they reload Slashdot every quarter of an hour or so. Who does that all day long?

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[Rick the Red]

if slashdot themselves offered this service, wouldn't it be coercion?

Yes, but the Supreme Court just ruled that coercion is legal.

Subscription glitch?

[nuwayser]

I was happy to subscribe the first time this idea came around. Got my 1000 page views no sweat and enjoyed it.

Then, after the initial 1000 ran out, I looked at ads again for a while. About three months ago I got sick of it and tried subscribing again. No soap.

Paypal showed my payment as unclaimed for days, and I was still looking at ads. No replies received from the relevant OSDN address after sending two emails... not even a vacation message. I eventually cancelled the payment and am back to looking at ads.

Attn: Taco and team: I want to support you, I really do. But blowing off paying subscribers is BAD. How do you expect to retain your paying customers when someone is asleep at the switch? Why should I subscribe now?

Re:Disable ads on the Index?

[bmetzler]

As for liking the ads, well I guess we'll address that in the future- its not a bad idea. ALthough, depending on your reading habits, you could enable ads on the Homepage, but see them on articles & comments, which would probably allow you to still see a few ads every day.

I'd rather see all the ads, and just pay $20 a year. Perhaps you could offer 2 subscription methods. I just feel that if I turn of ads, I'll miss something someone wants to sell me that I like.

-Brent

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

I don't honestly remember. I believe what we did was graphed the number of dollars a person had paid us, against their M2 fairness score. The end result was a quite linear chart- the more you paid, the more "Fair" you were. Not totally surprising I guess.

It clearly is not a coincidence, but doing anything with that information would have to be thought through very carefully- just because a user is statistically more likely to moderate fair, that doesn't mean that they aren't going to. Every now and then you see someone who uses all 5 mod points to mod up 1st posts. They get killed in M2, but it does happen. We have to keep that sort of thing in mind when we make any changes in moderation.

Re:Disable ads on the Index?

[CmdrTaco]

I could definitely see that sort of an option. It didn't make sense when we originally designed the system, but we always considered it. So maybe yeah, someday. More likely if someone submitted a patch.

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[CmdrTaco]

Fortunately, I can disagree with you about the definition of "Professional". Do you believe South Park should have higher animation quality? Slashdot was designed to be an informal place. Should I change that just because there is a subscription system? I think not. Slashdot is what it is, and I think that the informal tone is part of its appeal. Part of that means you actively see mistakes happen. You may not like it, but I think that its just part of Slashdot. I work very hard to keep Slashdot consistent with my original purpose for the site.

As for a magazien or DVD, I'd love to see it happen. I just don't have the time and expertise and budget for it. If everyone clicks on banners and subscribes, then I bet such a thing would be quite possible.

Circumvention?

[cybermace5]

So, can subscribers grab the story URL, hop into the latest public thread, and anonymously post the URL for everyone's viewing?

Re:Mozilla block ads

[t]

Your analysis of the moderation system is interesting, but I think the premise that there is full knowledge of the current score is flawed. I think for there to be any significance to the actual levels -1 to 5, the moderators would need to moderate based on those levels. For example, instead of adding a point, a moderator should have a sliding bar and say, I think this post is a 3. Then the resultant score of the post would be an average of all moderations. This way if 10 moderators mod a post simultaneously, it doesn't soar instantly to +5.

Come to think of it, this shoulds suspiciously like a judging event or a grading session with multiple judges. They all grade independently, then you average the scores.

Moderators

[jbohumil]

It might be nice if moderators also got the advance reading. That might increase the chances that the moderators have had a chance to read the topic before they moderate. Plus, moderators would get a peek at what the advance viewing system would be like, and it might encourage them to subscribe.

Re:Comment Ranks

[CmdrTaco]

I think that the solution to this problem is more complex then just widening the scoring range. Read my journal for occasional thoughts on this issue.

Other more interesting ideas...

[StevenMaurer]

I doubt that as presently constituted, this is going to be counted a success. Certainly Slashdot will get some low percentage just from the good will they've built up, but this will likely wither over time as subscribers realize there isn't that much benefit.

Nearly every change made to Slashdot over the last several years has made it harder to offer any real diferentiation in a premium service. People buy totalfark subscriptions to get more time to "win photoshop contests" - while slashdot has hidden it's equivalent karma system (and most regulars have topped out anyway). The delay from story acceptance to publication isn't all that long - it can't be: Slashdot is primarily a news site. The sophisticated readership could avoid ads if they really wanted to (I suspect most don't because it's part of the social contract). Finally, there are too many people who have run afoul of Malda's notoriously thin skin to have built up a "save salon" type of outpouring. (Setting special flags on people's accounts just because they dared mod up a critique? How juvenile -- but I digress).

Still, there are a number of ideas that haven't been tried that might be of interest, if done right:

Have a special premium queue for stories, plus the promise that one story will be picked a day. Suitable markings to differentiate stories drawn
from "preferred" queues ala google.

Allow premium users additional access to html. IMG tags anyone? Maybe combine this with small level of image storage.

The ability to "challenge" a mod down. Automatic if the mod is "overrated" which doesn't get metamodded; better yet, get rid of "overrated" it's an invitation to abuse.

The option of mirroring any content mentioned in slashdot (except ads) for any site owner who is a premium member. Most site owners love the attention slashdot brings them, it's just the slashdot effect that's so hard to deal with.

The ability to be modded to a value of "6". (The post still has to earn that value from the mods on it's own merits though.)

The ability to read from low karma to high. For fans of "alternative humor".

The ability to start at a +1 karma level (editable, of course, for those so unamerican as to believe money != speech). This would be especially attractive to people with "high uid" accounts.

A higher bandwidth channel to premium customers.

A java plug-in that downloads slashdot incrementally in the background, making those annoying page-load/drill-down delays go away.

Allowing edits of your own posted comment, so long as it hasn't been modded or responded to. If it has, you can still edit it, but a link is added to the original version.

I think this is a good start on you offering enough differentiation to make a "premium" view worth money without cutting into your site's popularity.

The bill for my business advice will arrive in the morning.

Re:valuable rankings (was Re:Allowing posting...)

[CmdrTaco]

Actually I like that idea.

Right now the Hot 10 Comments box is simply the N comments the DB pulls out first, when ordered by score.

We could change it so that the 10 Hot Comments is actually the shortest time frame between the 1st and last moderation for all Score:5 comments. A comment with 15 moderations would have a long time frame between #1 and #5... but a comment that went zip straight up to 5 would have a relatively small gap. If a comment goes up really fast but is moderated down, then that time lap would increase... eventually falling off the list.

We would also need some sort of absolute limit on this... like only count comments posted in the last 24 hours. Alternately, I could see this as being a useful factor when we rework scoring. Certainly 2 mods in 3 minutes are worth "More" then 2 mods in 3 hours. Since we start "The Clock" at the first mod, Score:0/1/2 starting comments are relatively equal anyway... although Score:2 have the edge since they only need to get 3 mods... but a really good Score:0 comment could conceivably get up there fast if it was good.

If someone submitted patches, I'd probably take 'em.