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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?"
We use forums in our little ISP business as an invaluable form of customer feedback and communication. In fact, to such a degree that we spend NO money whatsoever on any other type of advertising or marketing. To impose a fee for people to post feedback, comments and suggestions is to me like asking for money from people to watch advertising on tv. Just crazy.
Please start charging to post as soon as you can. Then just maybe people will actually read other people's posts before posting the exact same thing over and over.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
The Straight Dope Message Board has gone to a subscriber-only setup. I no longer post there. This is a particularly interesting move given that Cyril still states in the Ask a Question submittal form that one should start by posting to the MB. I'm definitely not commenting on the columns anymore even if there are errors. (Which I sometimes wonder was why they implemented subscriptions...)
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
They should use a Slashdot-like-moderation-system, the rules would be as follows:
* If someone gets modded +5 Insightful or Interesting within a day, it's on us, because we're nice like that.
* If you get modded overrated you owe us a buck.
* If you get modded redundant, that's two dollars
Now here's the catch, so pay attention:
The first time you get modded troll you pay five dollars, the second time you pay five dollars AND you start with a -1 rating from then on, the THIRD time you pay five dollars, and CowboyNeal (or whoever the Australian equivalent is) comes over to your place and beats you with a baseball bat for 5 minutes.
As for getting modded +5 funny, well you don't really want to know what happens when you get modded +5 (it's bad, but not as bad as what the grammar nazis will do to you), so please moderate this post accordingly.
Right now, one of the "big ideas" in the scientific journal biz is "pay to publish" - since restricting electronic distribution is an obviously stupid thing, the industry is scrambling to think of something.
A lot of people there seem to think it makes sense for the author of the paper being published to pay for the publication costs himself - the argument is that the fees can just be folded into the researcher's grant proposal and so won't have much of a negative effect.
I personally think that idea is very stupid, and I hope that as the Aussies have rebeled so does the scientific community. The people who benefit from the work should be the ones to pay for it in some fashion or another.
For example the aussies ought to look at a peer-reviewed system where comment posters get discounted to free access while lurkers have to pay "full" price (note the peer-review to insure bogus posts don't flood the system just for free access, peer-reviewing would also qualify for discountage).
For the journals, I think the "lurkers" ought to pay too - the university libraries and corporations that currently pay for subscriptions should continue to pay, in advance. As long as enough groups pay in advance to fund the journal's operations, the results would be free to all. If not enough groups are willing to buy subscriptions, then the journal should either close down and give all the money back, or operate on a smaller budget with a smaller number of articles published.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I was going to comment to say basically this. Yeah, SA attracts some 'unique' characters. You could say it's tasteless and unsavory, but it doesn't have trolls (that last), jokes/catch phrases don't get beaten into the ground (since using one that's been deemed 'old' will get you probation or a banning), and people generally don't talk in AOLspeak.
There's a sense of cameraderie there and the forums are much more close-knit than say slashdot, where I seldom remember another poster by name. Because you stand to lose something real (your right to post or 10 dollars), you're more likely to behave, contribute, and get something out of the forum.
All in all, I'd say that this is a good move. SA did this several years ago. When they moved to the payment system from being a free forum, users who didn't post comments lost their accounts and contributors kept them. This makes sense more in light of the 'one-time cost' model than a subscription one (a subscription for life saves you much more than $10 in the long run and is much more a liability to the owner). I know people who lost their accounts then. Years later, they don't care. Most of them payed the $10 and kept on lurking. If anyone was bitter, it didn't kill the forum.
Now if we could only figure out how to keep these annoying as fuck highschoolers out...then we'd really have it figured out.
You don't pay, but actually spend your time in meaningful, troll free discussion areas, like Tech Talk, etc., which will remain free to access.
I don't know about the Atomic boards specifically, but in general, charging money for forum access keeps out the riff raff (read: trolls, spammers, etc.), and this is a good thing.
Slashdot's discussions do okay because of the moderation system, despite its flaws. But ever read an unmoderated discussion on say...Ain't It Cool News? Read their Talk Backs for 10 seconds and you'll wish you still had a CRT monitor so that you could punch through it and end your painful existence.
By charging for access, you keep out the riff raff.
The ViewAskew.com boards (View Askew is Kevin Smith's production company), among others, has been doing something similar for a while now. To register on the View Askew boards you need to pay 2 bucks. It's a low fee, and it all goes to a rape/incest survivor charity, because, after all, Smith isn't trying to make a profit from this registration...the money is really just a gate keeping mechanism. $2 is low enough to not be prohibitive for legitimate users, but high enough to keep out the idiots.
I get SO much pre-info from those pages that it is SO worth it for me. I wonder if perhaps the nominal fee keeps the trolls at bay (sorta, we get a few "Gamecube is TEH GHEI!!! XBOX RULES!!11!!" losers), and there are few people w/multiple ids ($40/year is pushing it). But I guess if it used to be free and now isn't, i can understand their frustration...
While I would never, ever pay for a SA forum membership, I enjoy paying for the far more prestigious "TotalFark" membership :)
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
There were even comments by admins that if people left because it cost to post, it would decrease the server load and that would be okay.
I let my membership expire this week, and haven't really cared.
I hope so, but I don't know so. Maybe you know something I don't. Sometimes services are provided in the hope and belief that, though they start out losing money, they are good enough and valuable enough, and yes, maybe even get enough God Love, they will prevail. In that light some eventually reassess, and go away because they just can't afford to provide the service anymore, and others decide to charge so they can continue to offer the service... hoping the "served" agree the service is valuable enough to pay for to continue to receive. I just don't know where various forums stack up in this continuum.
I HOPE slashdot is profitable and continues to offer "this" for free, but I still consider it a valuable enough service in my world I'd pay some fee to sustain that service.
I've been an Atomic forum goer for nearly 3 years. I have a post count of around 6300. I have also been a subscriber at times. I think I'll end up paying despite the fact that I think it's wrong to charge us. This is down to the Atomic Community itself. I attend several Atomic events a year and consider these people my friends. Like the first thread said...we are fiercely loyal and out of the seven hundred people who have posted in Atomic since yesterday, only 30 or so are leaving. I bet some may even be back. Still, it's a pity because I respect some of those leaving and their reasons for doing so. Now where did I leave a spare $20?
So can we alter adblocker so it pretends to click on all the links?
A blog about stuff.
After all, Capitalism is the best, right?
Good point, yes it is. Free Market systems will choose the best course. Naturally, a website cannot simply sit around making no money and expect to continue providing content.
The real problem is the people who have come to expect a "free as in I'm too cheap to pay" community on the web. Of course, I guess we could just ask the government to entitle us with "free as in payed by taxpayers who are too stupid to notice the rising taxes" web services.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
Depends on the forum, though. I would agree that there is a large degree of abuse at Slashdot, which is targeted at a wide range of audiences, but other less general forums (fora?) such as, for instance, Dropline's have remained pretty civilised and consequently useful.
The forums for Kevin Smith's website, View Askew, does this (though the fee is a mnimal $2 for eternal membership.
In his case, I understand it, because he practically made a whole movie devoted to people bashing his movies (Jay and Silent Bob). The internet has given everyone a voice, and everyone has chosen to use that voice to bitch about movies. Better, the internet is a place where people can go to download porn and talk about movies. I think he's just defending himself from the AC.
Put identity in the browser.
1.) They are asking already loyal members to suddenly pay for something they've always gotten for free before.
So what? Those "loyal members" don't own the equipment and don't pay for the bandwidth. Loyalty doesn't mean jackshit if you're the guy that has to pay the bills.
2.) Those of us who have been around the Internet for a while remember when the whole purpose of the thing was the free exchange of information.
Big - fucking - deal. I remember those days, too; they weren't nearly as entertaining as they are now. In any event, refer to my previous point. Those "sections of the internet" are owned by someone *who isn't you*.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
It's a shame, but unless something starts off as free from the outset there's often little or no desire to actually work with it in the way necessary to foster a developer community. Fortunately in this case the company in question does have a few standalone open source projects which are useful for a variety of jobs, as these were created that way from the outset.
Once upon a time, Atomic Magazine was good. I mean Really Good. I bought every copy religiously from the newsagent, and later I subscribed. It was cutting edge and always had cool grunty technical stuff in it that other PC mags seemed to take months more to discover (you would have thought that they would have had one of their staff reading Atomic so that they could at least run copycat news in the next edition).
Atomic proudly (and justifiably) boasted in one of its early issues that they were the one PC magazine on the newstands without a cover CD, as in their experience this only was a gimmick to compensate for mediocre articles, and they didn't need to play that game. Hear hear.
And then Atomic gradually fell into the trap of starting to believe its own hype. Became complacent. Instead of superior-quality articles on cutting edge technology and pulling hardware apart & hacking about in interesting ways, we started getting full-page articles of arrogant pseudo-intellectual drivel which seemed to be more concerned with narcissism than nuts & bolts. Lengthy paragraphs about the trivial personal doings of elitist writers educated beyond the capacity of their own intelligence is not what you buy a hardware mag for. And then I noticed competitor mags starting to write about new techy gear before Atomic did!
And guess what? They started sticking a cover CD on the front. Says it all really (and funnily enough, in Atomic's own words).
One of my friends, a hardcore hardware nut, stopped reading Atomic over a year ago, but I was locked in by having paid a year's subscription. The quality has noticeably subsided from those early days to a level even below their competitors. Gratuitously scatological cartoons (& occasional URLs) on the last page that are routinely UNfunny. Pointless self-absorbed personal ramblings dressed up as editorials. Ho-hum PC game reviews. O yes, they do have a few techy articles & hardware reviews still, but the chaff seems more abundant than the wheat these days, and there's better brainfood elsewhere.
One person I'd like to exclude from this flame is crazy ol' Dan Rutter, of . This guy has stuck around since the beginning, has an amusing writing style, and knows his stuff (writes the answers for their tricky problems page, as I recall).
Others on the Atomic staff however need to get back to basics & stop all this "We are Atomicans and we are L33T!!" crap, a philospohy apparently cherised by the former editor, who I think works on their website now. I got so annoyed with their monthly wank that I stopped buying their rag, and so did my mates. Charging drop-in visitors to their website & making 30-day-code users jump through login hoops? Bah. We don't care any more as there are far better things to read (like Slashdot), but it may drive away yet a few more Atomic readers...
So good luck with milking the cash cow, Atomic Dudes. But then again, maybe if you have fewer drinkers, perhaps you need to charge more for the milk.
You pay a monthly fee for telephone service, even though YOU provide the content of the conversations. Get over it. There is more involved than simply "content". This is like suggesting that nobody should ever charge money for a book, because it's just words on a piece of paper... when there's really a lot that goes on behind the scenes in editing, producting, manufacturing, promoting and distributing that book.
Sure, maybe YOU provide the CONTENT as a user to a site, but someone has to pay for all of time and expense that goes into maintaining the service and community that you're able to share your content *in*.
If I'm paying a couple hundred bucks a month for bandwidth and hosting, not to mention a few thousand bucks for the hardware and countless (hundreds or thousands, easily) of hours of my time to build and maintain a site where a community "provides content", why shouldn't I feel free to charge? It sounds like what people want is a place that is FREE TO THEM, whether or not it's free to the person providing the venue to begin with. That, in my opinion, is the epitomy of greed.
What I don't get is why, when the moderation system and filters available allow for you to screen for almost anything, people seem to read a -1 then rant about First Posts and trolls, but hey, that's just me.
I'm a /. fanboy, I like /. warts and all. I see it as a the net's agora. Like any open gathering place you should take what you value with a grain of salt, until you've been able to substantiate it. Reading /. at +4 gives results equal to the best techno sites, but it's up to the reader to validate the information.
I liked /. best before it was sold, but think, that to date, it was at it's best about 3 years ago when the post grad ratio was at it's highest and the best and the brightest seemed to post. But again that's just me; I don't subscribe, not because I don't want to support /., but because I get alot of value out of the ads and think they're germane.
cheers
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Long story short, the *CODE* for the RPG was all GPL, but all the game content, was curiously licensced under the planeshift license, which was bascially, "we o3n jou!" I started asking people, hey, why shoudl I as a musician assign my copyrights to you again? Why do you need that in an open source game? The were bullheaded and said basically "thats how it is."
Like a year later it leaked that the top brass had secret plans to sell the game all along, and were basically harnessing open source enthusiasts and naieve artists/musicians/writers to develop a proprietary game for them. I confronted one of them about it and all they had to say in their defense was "we never said we WEREN'T going to sell it."
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I think that once money changes hands that formal terms of service...with concomitant legalities, will follow.
If someone implements a subscription system on their forum they had better be ready for professional and mature management.
They risk losing customers otherwise and possibly even risk legal headaches from people who are not content to simply cancel their subscription and move on.
There will be less room for the inconsistent and sophomoric forum management often seen on the web.
When people pay, they expect more.
The original poster mentioned that the forum members in the article were angry because they felt that they contributed to building the community for which they are now being told to pay for.
Healthy on line communities often happen by accident.
It takes a different set of skills to throw a successful party then it does to set up an internet forum.
There is no shortage of empty web boards, abandoned email lists, unused Usenet groups and forgotten IRC channels.
A person looking to implement a subscription based forum should be sure of his/her social skills and ability to intentionally create ( or at least maintain ) a successful social environment.
S/he may have to start one (over) from scratch if people chose to leave ( or not come ),
If a forum owner has these skills then s/he has something to offer in exchange for charging a fee where other forums owners with the same I.T. skills do not.
Any technically skilled person can set up a web board, an email list or an IRC channel. However very few people who can do these things also know how to create a successful social environment.
If someone wants to charge a fee for a forum s/he should be aware that if s/he only has I.T. skills then she will have a huge number of competitors...and a huge number of free competitors to deal with.
Like a $20 cover charge at a bar...it keeps the riff-raff out.
No, it doesn't. You assume that the "riff raff" is either poor or too tight to spend a little money for the privelege of harrassing their target forum. You also assume the same for bars and nightclubs.
In both cases that assumption is incorrect.
There are plenty of well-to-do jerks and "riff-raff", and plenty of excellent people of modest or little means, so while you may be creating a little club based on the exclusivity of daddy's wealth, you are not inherently enhancing dialogue, intellect, or ethics by using a financial filter. In fact, arguably, you're doing the opposite.
One thing is certain, you're losing a lot more interesting, worthwhile people than you are jerks when you start levying a cover charge for a discussion forum. This sort of thing reinforces the need to resurrect USENET (with decent SPAM filtering).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I'm not sure where to even to begin here. First the name is PlaneShift not planescape. Second the content is licensed under a different license because it offers both the team and the person some protection. If somebody later on decides 'I don't want that model in game anymore' then we are screwed. Many artists want their stuff not opensource so they can control how it is used. I suppose you think that if I write a book with OpenOffice I should have to give that away for free as well? As for the last stuff I hope by 'brass' you mean the sink or something. What you claim has *never* been the policy and nobody from the team has ever said anything like that.
Are the companies greedy, or just trying to turn a buck?
They are publicly-traded, for-profit corporations. Their sole reason for existing is to make as much profit for their shareholders as possible, regardless of any other short or long-term consequences to either shareholders or the public at large. Anything else would be a breach of fiduciary responsibility. Concepts like "greed," "fair rate of return," and "enough profit" are meaningless to a corporation.
However, in order the subsidize their phones, they have to lock consumers into a contract. Terminating your contract early without cause is a breach of contract. Otherwise, providers would either have to charge an insane amount of money for the phones, or simply lose gobs of money on them.
They wouldn't have to charge insane amounts of money for their phones, just enough to cover their costs. Giving you a "free" locked down phone and making you pay for it over a two or three-year contract is just a clever way of making it more expensive to switch providers than it would be if you bought a generic phone at full market value that you could use with any provider of your choice.
That's where capitalism comes into play -- you have a choice, and if you don't like your choices and don't want to play, you don't have to.
Economists base their theories around the assumption that human beings are inherently rational and will always act in their own best interests. Marketers base their practices around the realization that human beings are frequently irrational and can be counted on to trade a long-term benefit (such as the flexibility to change network providers at will) for instant gratification (like a phone you can get for "free" today in exchange for signing a three year contract).
The idea that you can just choose to "not play" is unrealilstic. Choosing between service providers that screw you over and doing without the service altogether is pretty harsh. If everyone told wireless providers to piss off all at once, the wireless providers would change their practices. But that won't happen: the cost of doing without is often greater than the cost of accepting service under oppressive terms, making a boycott by enough people too difficult to maintain for a sufficient period of time. In some cases, the only way to force companies to be more responsive to consumer demand is through *shudder* regulation.
I respect your opinion but Im sticking with my story :) And yes I realize I bunged the name and I do mean planeshift. When I offered to give them an irrevokable license to use my music -- but allow me to keep the copyright, they still found that unacceptable. I really think they're up to some funny business.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley