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Annual Fee For Your Comment?
CaptainThunderbolt writes "Imagine this: you read an interesting story on Slashdot and you have a comment to make, so you login only to be greeted with a message saying you will need to pay a fee in order to make your comment. Seems ridiculous, doesn't it? Why on earth would you pay just to make a comment? Well, that is exactly how thousands of Aussies feel right now. AtomicMPC is an Australian PC Magazine with a fiercely loyal readership and an equally loyal online community. Yesterday it was announced that access to the most popular sections of the forum will soon attract a $20/year fee unless you are a magazine subscriber or a high-ranking forum member. The reaction to this announcement triggered the most vicious backlash I have ever witnessed as the website feedback forum went beserk. Users baulked at the idea of having to pay to access a community which the feel they are responsible for creating and I must say I understand how they feel. Is this a trend I should worry about? Will I one day have to pay a membership fee to access other popular forums?"
I think that people don't like paying for something they used to get for free, but there's precedent for it. The OP needs to stop pretending that there isn't.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Atomic magazine has been going down hill in my eyes for a while now, this is just going to dig its grave even more.
Commercial online communities have a long history of this. People didn't really resent on Compuserve, The Source, Prodigy, GEnie and AOL that they paid to participate in the communities they were building. They just asked if they got value to match their money. Of course there were also lots of free BBSs at the time and paying BBSs, and there were arpanet mailing lists even earlier, and USENET groups which were "free" but you had to be part of a select club to get at them at the start.
Of course, if offered something good for free, people like it and will switch to it. But paying communities thrive today in both MMORPGS and things like Second Life (which does let you own the stuff you build in order to attract people who do have this concern.)
But this is nothing new, it's a competitive battle that will continue for a long time to come, with free and paid and people choosing.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
that's the most insightful comment of the month even though we're only two days in.
What the article submitter forgot to mention is that If you buy the magazine you get access free for 1 month.
So you have 5 groups
1) Subscribers - They have paid money and get access for the length of their subscription
2) Mag Buyers - They get access every month they buy the mag. All they have to do is enter that months code. They have paid money for the mag and get a free months access with it. This is reusable for every month.
3) You are a God or Mod or SuperHero or Hero - You are at the top anyway so you get access free
4) You dont buy the mag - so there is a $20 year charge for something that is based around a magazine and is a commercial entity. Heck slashdots subsribtion cost money. You need to stay afloat
5) You dont buy the mag and dont want to pay so you just lurk
Airliners.net does this also. I'm an aviation enthusiast and I like to contribute to sites like it and to railphotos.net (I'm also a train enthusiast) and people get ads to look at my pictures. Yet airliners.net wants to charge me to post to their forums (I got as far as "reserving" a username before it refused to let me get the account without paying).
If they use my material, which I grant them permission to use (and they credit me, they don't transfer copyright to themselves) and they get ad revenue from putting ads on the pages showing my photos, why should I have to pay? I've already essentially paid by helping them get more ad views/clicks.
I let the "reservation" time out because I didn't agree with their policy.
i am a soviet space shuttle
What the OP failed to mention is that paying the AU$20 annual subscription also allows access to the current month's magazine content online, as an alternative to a paper subscription.
But that would actually make it seem like a reasonable deal, wouldn't it?
It should be noted that:
* Those who buy the magazine - do not have to pay (they get a code on the magazine)
* If they subscribe - they have their subscribe id (and free use).
* Else they pay $20 - which is those who just go there for the site.
Also, do note that only -certain- forums- need to be paid to view/post.
All technology related forums are free for all.
no, i dont have a slashdot login...
/., whether it be for good or bad reasons (hey, i thought they were amusing!)...
no, i dont particularly want to be identified by those members of the forum being discussed that actually know me (though i'm sure a few will guess... meh)
i happen to be one of the "high-ranking" forum members mentioned, and though i get a free ride, i'm rather annoyed at the fact that a lot of my 'lower ranked' friends will now be charged to keep in touch with their mates, as there are a number of members of the community who either dont buy the mag, or live elsewhere in the world where the mag isnt sold...
at the same time i can see where Haymarket are coming from...
i did have something useful and constructive to post here, but all i'm really feeling is ambivalence, and cant make up my mind whether to support this idea fully, or be outraged...
oh, and i just thought you'd like to know that there's a small group of atomicans that are quite chuffed that the community made the front page of
Yesterday it was announced that access to the most popular sections of the forum will soon attract a $20/year fee unless you are a magazine subscriber or a high-ranking forum member.
You can also access these areas if you buy the Magazine at the newsagents, although then you do have to update the access code monthly.
Note the two parts of the forums that have been blocked are only general chat and trademart, all the tech related articles are still available free to everyone, so the comments that people have made to help the community at large are still freely available, it is only the general rubish that has been restricted. And trademart, but again that could be considered a premium service! Who complains about having to pay to use the trading post or similar??
The comment has been made that the loyal supporters of the mag are upset about this. Why? If they support it, then they are buying it and therefore will have access to all areas! Is it really such a problem for people to support what it is they use??
I'll say it again, the only part you miss out on if you don't buy the mag or pay is the general chat (The Green Room) and the Trademart. General chat is really just a forum based chat room. If thats all you use and now can't because you don't support the Atomic Magazine, what have you really lost? A chat room.
As a subscriber this doesn't impact me. I can't understand the reasoning of people who don't buy the magazine and refuse to pay a fee. If you don't support the place, why are you here to begin with?
What you describe is a more troublesome problem than that of community fora being payware. it happened to a dutch /. clone, tweakers.net. Basically they translated /.s and made themselves quite a name in the process, then when they had a significant following of sycophants, they made it payware. I don't this as big of an issue as what you describe. Any sycophants who are happy to pay are free to do so. The problem of gpl violation and un-orthodox practices is more worrysome. The most visible one at this point is to my knowledge YellowDog's reluctance to release the code of their linux-on-ipod installer code. You can buy it but there is no cvs or sourcecode repository that I know of.
*please correct me if I am wrong!!*
anyway, it sucks but if every website was a ship, the captain's word is law and primate under god....
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Lowtax is not exactly struggling to pay bandwidth bills.
You can find numbers from 2002, when he was registered as Something Awful LLC in Washington state, with monthly revenue of around $60,000, of which only about half went to pay for server colocation and bandwidth. I'll let you do the math on what that leaves in profit.
In fact, he makes enough profit that the front page writers are also paid for their content, in addition to it being his full-time sole source of income.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wonder how much it would cost if Slashdot paid hundreds of worthwhile scientific people to make +4 and +5 comments?
Beyond the fact that, yes, that's precisely how markets work...
Rob and Jeff have explained repeatedly that the vast majority of Slashdot readers don't go past the front page, and that those are the cheapest, most profitable readers to serve as the front page is cacheable. In fact, the site's prominence is supported by the comments and losing them would probably wind up costing money in the long term, but in the short term, they make their money from submitted stories, not from the world's interest in your or my brilliant comments.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I had a group on meetup.com and last month they anounced monthly charges for the group organizer. I promptly droped my membership and said goodbuy to the group (it was not working out anyway).
But seriously a monthly fee for recieving what many other (most other) sites provide for free, is a great way to shutdown an active site. I think that making plees to the users to make a donation or offer new services at a premium price, is way better than charging for what was once free. Just bad business.
The SA forums have required payment for years now, and Metafilter now requires a fee for new signups (this is better then their old policy of not allowing new signups at all!) I'm not an SA forum goon, but I hear it's great over there, and Mefi rocks. Charging people keeps the rifraf of multi-accounted trolls away. IMO, why the hell not?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well, not sure how to convince you ( and others ) otherwise. Any copyrights are assigned to the Nonprofit organization and I can tell you that as one of the officers of that organization I will never vote for going comercial. We've already turned down several offers. The flip side of this is that we want unique content that is not used elsewhere. Now I can see how people can consider this to be somewhat against the OSS idea which is why we have the seperate stuff for art and other content. I know that people have already forked our engine for their own projects ( using their own content ) and I will fully support them in that.