Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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