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?"
After all, Capitalism is the best, right?
Well, after you run off every worthwile user who donates their time making content, well...
I wonder how much it would cost if Slashdot paid hundreds of worthwhile scientific people to make +4 and +5 comments?
This is an entirely original occurence, a trend like this would be Something Awful.
*cough*
I, for one (and hopefully not the only), would be more than willing to pay a fee for something I find useful... Just because it started out free isn't a guarantee it stays free.
And, juxtaposed with other things in my life.... $13/mo for tivo subscription (and don't flame me about mythtv.... time invested is worth money, too), $600 insurance/year to drive my car, $30/mo for ISP access, $30/mo for satellite TV.... I only marvel so many things have been so free for so long. So, in context with other things I pay for, I'd happily pay $20/yr for something like the right to do this on slashdot. Not saying it should happen, but sometimes things just gotta be paid for!
I may not WANT to pay for yet another "thingy", but it's a system of choice, and if the sum total of things I want and their costs exceeds my budget, I selectively cull thingies until equilibrium is re-established. It's the way the market works.
And, for the record, I sometimes fear the OSS/(and linux) community hurts their cause by their sometimes overly militant won't pay for anything mantra. I once asked a commercial vendor of a really good product if they'd consider vending a linux version.... they responded they were too small of a shop and really couldn't afford to create a version for a community that didn't want to pay for their product. Not speaking for the "community" I did tell that company I thought there may be more of a paying public out there in the linux world (but I really don't know). ~
Only if it gets rid of all the trolls and FPers...
Even if it was like $0.50 US the simple requirement of doing something might prevent people from doing it. Maybe. Probably not.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The SomethingAwful forums charge $10 to join, $10 for access to premium features, and other various small fees for things like custom smilies, titles (for yourself and others), etc. It is ruled with an iron fist, and the banhammer falls with startling regularity.
It's also one of the best, most vibrant communities on the internet. Cash is an effective gatekeeper.
(I think the secret to SA's success is that the fees are one-time, as opposed to subscription-based. It creates a sense of ownership and value. I bought an account, not just a subscription)
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Operating the forums is not free, why should the magazine continue to sponsor the forums for non-subscribers?
People are certainly welcome to start and host their own forums if they don't feel like paying. Then when the bill for the bandwidth comes in, they will be welcome to start charging as well.
SA members prior to the switch continue to have access for free. Had they done the same in this case, I bet the backlash would not have been so.
As someone who operates a large site with fiercly loyal members, I can vouch that even fiercly loyal and frequent members are not always (or even often) willing to contribute financially for that service.
There is nothing wrong with looking to make a profit (or at least break even) on your work and the services you offer. If people really care, they can pay for the service. If they don't, they won't and you'll have to reverse your policy and find another way to survive (or just stop providing the service). The control is in the hands of the members. If they find it isn't worth paying for, they won't participate and the policy will be obliterated. If there are enough that make it profitable, it will remain.
It's called capitalism. Supply and demand. Not everything has to be free. Christ, I wish I could get paid for the thousands of hours I've put into my service. That'd be wonderful. There's nothing wrong with trying.
That said, I just don't see how this is a big deal?
...it keeps the riff-raff out.
My other first post is car post.
Sounds like a job for micropayments. I wouldn't neccesarilly want to pay a yearly subscription fee. But for the odd occasion I feel like I have something to say, I'd put in my 5s n't-seem-to-like-here> to have other people listen.
Especially if such a system weeded out mass spammers and trolls.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
I don't know how many people come to slashdot for reading the comments, but I am one of them... Many readers like reading the comments and not just the main article. In such a case, readers help the magazines popularity! Do they really need to pay for writing comments too?
The restrictions affect two of their about twenty forums - those two being a "general chat" forum and a "buy/sell" forum. All the others, general PC chat, hardware, linux, programming etc. will still be free for all. And being a computer magazine, these are what the forums are about - anything else is a bonus.
It's the same as Aussie broadband site, Whirlpool, only allows access to its "off-topic" forums (TV, sports, news, music, etc) to long standing members. The site is about broadband, and anyone can access those forums, but off-topic forums are a priviledge.
- Chuq
I hardly see how paying for news in irrational, unless you LIKE having a corrupt society where the papers and government are run by those with the most money. If people think it is ridiculous to pay less than five dollars a month for news, then truly there is no hope left for society. Remember, just because you don't have to pay for it doesn't mean it's free.
MacFixit.com went for a subscription model. Content from the past day can be accessed for free but anything else is archived and you have to pay to see.
Even if some aspect of that has changed in the past several years and the site's policies are different it doesn't change the fact that some or most of the content was user submitted.
The reason I mention this is because what else are forums but user-submitted content?
It doesn't matter if the website can't figure out ways of making money off of the forums or whether a search engine makes money when a forum page shows up in a search. The thing is charging for users to submit content that will or could be used by the site's operator is not quite right. The site should seriously take advantage of the traffic and get ad dollars instead of charging to play.
Think about it, what if you had to pay a fee to get a newspaper to print your letter to the editor? And, then the newspaper still charged to get reprints of that letter and the op-ed pages?
Forums are user-generated content. If someone wants to charge people to submit it then expect some fury.
That said, I'm a paid member of at least one forum but that's about helping to cover costs for a small site with no other revenues. A print pub has an advertising dept. Let the ad people figure out how to get sponsers to support the forums.
I recently went through this at my own site, but we faired much better because we handled it with a lot more class than the owners of this Australian site. The result was a member community that has been exceptionally supportive and just a wonderful group of people.
:P
"The SA forums have been doing this for years, and you know what? They're popular as hell"
I'd go so far as to say they're popular because of the small fee, not in spite of it. The big problem with webforums is the amount of people who just like to make trouble. When people have to pay for something, no matter how small the fee, they tend to act a little more responsibly. Most people aren't going to pay $5 just to act like an ass and see how quickly they can get banned. When you have a lot of "troublemakers", it overworks your mods and starts to drive away the good forum members. You can ban somebody but there's *nothing* preventing them from signing back up with another IP address!
The downside is that a fee definitely will reduce the amount of new members you get and some members will definitely feel indignent about having to pay for something they've been using for free. (And I don't blame them!)
At the site I run, we started out free, but I always made it clear the members were beta testers and that the site would be for-pay someday as opposed to suddenly going pay without warning. About three months ago we made the transition to a for-pay site. There was some grumbling (which I totally understand) but overall the atmosphere was highly supportive. To ease the transition, we've done the following:
* Early site members had the chance to earn free memberships if they completed all of the beta testing requirements
* This was unintentional, but the beta testing phase stretched on about six months longer than initially planned, so everybody basically got a free six months anyway
* Perks for paid members such as giveaways
* Parts of the forums are still accessible for free
* Free members can earn paid memberships by doing things like printing up flyers, etc.
* Invite system allows paid members to give invites to their friends, entitling their friends to enjoy paid memberships without paying anything
All in all, I've probably given out 2x as many free memberships as have been paid for. I'm 100% okay with that because it's made the site better and that increases the number of people who want to by memberships in the long run. It's still an experiment in progress but it's been going well...
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
It would stop lame people like ME from making lame comments oowee oowee never ever never ever ever *squaaaa*
You forget that most of the code to Slashdot is free software. If that ever happened on Slashdot, it will take about ten minutes for a new site called Slashpoint or something to pop up.
In the free software community, garbage like this will simply not be tolerated. Behold what happened to XFree86 when they thought they were too smart.
I personally would never pay to make a comment on a board. If you don't like what the magazine is doing it's time to move on.
There is an advantage to restricting posting on certain boards, because you can cut out idiots and trolls if you do this carefully. There is no advantage to restricting commenting based on who has more money. It's called trying to make a quick buck. People forget that commercial magazines are about making money and not about giving people a warm fuzzy feeling.
In the end this will likely damage the quality of the magazine, because sensible people without a large disposable income are not going to waste money making comments somewhere for a price, when you could make them elsewhere for free and enjoy other areas of the hobby.
Still they're free to run their business how they like. Vote with your feet. It's the Aussie way!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I remember briefly being a coder on a MUD. The owner was a very loud mouthed advocate of OSS and GPL, and I figured that, hey, it's just as good a project as any to take part in. And I actually wanted to give something back to the community.
In hindsight, I should have been suspicious of anyone who plays the GPL champion but doesn't actually have CVS access or released any code in years. But, still, I figured it must at least be a community among those donating the content, if not open to the world at large.
It turned out that behind the scene it wasn't even vaguely near being either OSS or a "community", or was just becoming something else. The "waah, others are copying our content" paranoia had struck big time, after someone had discovered a few of their rooms on another MUD. Think a Stalin officer purges class paranoia to find which spy is giving content away to others. You were treated like a thief until proven innocent... and there was no way to be proven innocent.
The real ridiculous part is that room descriptions and such were stuff that you didn't even have to be a coder or a builder/wizard/whatever-you-call-it to see. Any player could just bloody well turn on logging in their MUD client and have the descriptions for whole areas. But try telling that to the owners.
I suddenly needed to go through a ridiculous bureaucracy just to get the files I needed to do my work.
Worse yet, others needed to go through that bureaucracy to see _my_ code. They actually didn't even bother any more. I couldn't shake the feeling that it's like donating code to Microsoft, just for the sake of being locked by someone in a vault and called _their_ property.
I left and never looked back.
Though I suppose the damage had been done. Around that point is where "OSS" and "GPL" stopped being magic words for me. Was a bit of a rude awakening at the reality that some people will pay all the lip service in the world, but only because they like having a free ("as in beer") OS on their server. Ask for access to _their_ code, though, or in this case to code that they just took from others anyway, and it's suddenly "Noo, you can't take my preciouss."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think the issue more is that these people feel like they built this community into something that *can* make money, and now they're basically being told "hey thanks for all your hard work in creating something we can make money off of, now please pay to keep up that hard work."
I see both sides of the story. I get that it takes large amounts of capital to run sites like this (I used to work for userfriendly. don't hurt me), and I totally understand that they need to recoop some money somewhere. But I also see the community's side of the story, feeling betrayed that they built a community and now they have to pay to stay in it.
It'll be interesting to see how this develops... I want to study online communities when I go to graduate school, I think this may give me another angle to look at.
I'll give you a dollar not to post.
Username taken, please choose another one.
The subscription (IMHO) is a different to things like the SA forums, this monthly access isn't there to cover the costs of hosting. Atomic PC is run by a large company (AJB Publishing, which is a part of Haymarket Media) and the way I see it the printed magazine is their core business.
Is this the only magazine that will be charging for access to their supporting forums? Is this to try and convince users to buy the magazine or is it to try and reward buyers with extra benefits? I'm just not too sure why they are charging money. I can understand hobbyist type sites needing to cover costs, they normally don't have other products to offset the hosting costs. I run a small Australian PC website with a few others (here) and can appreciate the fact that the owners don't want to be left out of pocket for hosting costs.
We have always remained free to use and read, offsetting the costs either with sponsorship or a single banner ad on each page. I'm hoping that I can always keep it that way, as I know a subscription based model would never work for us.
www.techwatch.com.au
SomethingAwful was a good example to quote here in the context of forums. Interestingly, there are other examples along the same lines but in a slightly different area, that of 3D virtual worlds, which in many ways are like forums but in more modern clothing.
For example, in Second Life (a 3D world in which you live, build, and interact with others, but not a MMOG) you contribute to discussion events in much the same way as you would contribute to a forum thread. In addition, you contribute content in the form of objects like clothes and other things that you create (objects can contain scripts, so they can be quite sophisticated), and of course you build unique mansions and places for people to visit and play in, and everything that you create is yours unless you sell it. You are adding the world content, as you do on forums.
Yet, Second Life charges you a one-off lifetime fee of $10 for membership to this world (and regular rent too if you want to own land), so in effect you're paying them for adding your own content, even if it's just your own presence to fill the world, which is quite analoguous to paying for your right to comment on forums.
In principle, it's quite reasonable to pay the host for providing the environment in which you exist. Whether it is reasonable or not in practice depends on the details of each case, especially the amount which you are being asked to pay. After all, it is the actual participants who actually give life to the world or to the forum, not the hosts, so a significant fee can never be justified.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Okay, so he makes some money.
The truth of the matter is that the $10 one time fee serves to keeps the riff-raff out. People don't first post, flame wars are few and far between, and there's a general attitude of respect for other forum goers.
If you fail to meet the minimum requirements, you get banned and have to pay $10 to register again. It's a rather effective form of regulation.
The truth is there are always people who will shit on something just to get attention. Something Awful makes it cost money to do that, and if you keep doing it, it can cost a lot. Most of the internet chuckleheads will go where the registration is free to get attention, and frankly Something Awful doesn't miss them a bit.
pickled pork livers
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
The value of Slashdot and other tech discussion forums is in the contributions from the members. It may take awhile to sift through the threads, but in a topic that really interests you you may find a reply that offers some new insight, a link to another project or idea, etc that really gives you something you can use. Frequently even going to the users linked homepages provides some value, as a lot of them wouldn't show up very high in a google search for instance, but still might have some great content.
Hmm, here's a for instance. I started a bookmark folder called "wireless". It is entirely filled with links I culled directly from Slashdot replies on that subject. Sort of like a mini personalised de.licio.us thing.
metafilter charges $5 to join and people and links get booted occasionally. Again, it works. Contrast this to the decline of Kuro5hin.
Are you serious or was that supposed to be funny? No more 'trolls', 'people with agendas', 'poorly thought out comments' or 'mindless Microsoft shills'? If it'll cost money it follows that it'll be done well? Then explain network TV to me. No worthless crap there, because it costs money for it to get there? Nothing but quality material at your local newsstand? No shills or agendas on the radio?
Charge 25 cents per post and the only thing you'll lose are the voices of the people unwilling or unable to spend 25 cents per post. You'll still have shills. You'll still have people with agendas. You'll still have post from people who post without thinking.
Making the world a better place, one psychotic episode at a time.