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?"
Now might a good time to disable the "Subscriber Bonus" by default...that way, they won't know who you are.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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). ~
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.
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.
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
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."
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?
I would prefer to see an IQ test to make a comment.
...it keeps the riff-raff out.
My other first post is car post.
Boo yeah!
(and it didn't cost me anything....)
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.
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
that's the most insightful comment of the month even though we're only two days in.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
* Shrug *
Hindsight's 20/20, of course, but it seems obvious to me that you introduce fees in a formerly free setting by charging for new, premium services. To use Slashdot metaphors:
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
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?
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.
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 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...
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
Wow, your reply is even out of line for a slashdotter! So, you're just graduating from college, and got three job offers. This apparently means:
Hmmmm, come to think of it that's about all that means.
Sorry to hear you only got three offers, that pales in comparison to the number of offers I had (not bragging, just stating), and pales pretty much in comparison to others in my graduating class. But, because of your three offers you seem to think you know what makes a resume, I call bullhockey... (I don't even have to look at this guy's resume to know you're off base and out of line....)
And, you might consider for a moment the fact you got and the reason you got three (wow!) job offers has a lot more to do with the fact the market is more willing to recruit and hire newbies (don't care how good you are, don't care how good you think you are, you're a newbie) because among other things, they cost less, they don't expect you (or even want) to hang around for too long, and they don't have to give you benefits. You're myriad offers probably have less to do with your self-anointed position in the technical world and more to do with market conditions.
I don't mean to lauch on you, but come on, it's a shitty world out there without we the tech community being shitty to each other.
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.
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
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 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
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?
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.
Cool. Set up the recurring payments to me via PayPal and I'll email you instructions on how to filter out low-rated comments.
So can we alter adblocker so it pretends to click on all the links?
A blog about stuff.
I'll give you a dollar not to post.
Username taken, please choose another one.
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
You don't pay, but you do notice that the site runs Asp and Sequel Sewer, and oh, that your keyboard has a single-quote (') key! You troll all you like, for free, and even in those areas of the website that are offline for the garden-variety, paying, customers!
hmm, that sounds just just like this /. story just the other day
5 3&from=rss
Meetup.com Ends Free Meetups
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/13/03592
Of course, it seems that not only lemmings stampede towards their own demise. Apparently suits do so to.
You do remember, dontcha?
Words to men, as air to birds.
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?
Do you often write letters to newspapers to which you don't subscribe? Maybe you should just consider that you are paying to read other people's comments. And newspapers do sell your letters - along with everything else in that issue. If the site can't find a way to make enough money to pay for itself with ads I guess it should just shut down. I don't know about you, but I really don't want newspaper level ad density on online forums. Popups are the online equivilent of newspaper inserts, do you think that would be a good way for the "ad people" to "figure out how to get sponsers to support the forums"? Most places people meet have some sort of entry cost involved - be it cover charge, admission fee, taxes, or just the cost of a beer to sit at the bar. Try going down to your local office supply store and telling them you deserve free paper and pens because you're going to put up some valuable 'content'. Try plastering some of that content up on the wall at your local mall. I'm sure you can imagine the form 'moderation' would take. You know, if you place so much value on your comments, maybe others would also. Then you can become a columnist and get paid for your views. You could try it yourself but I doubt your revenues would cover the bandwidth. Don't forget though that every bite of your reader's comments is going to cost a little for storage. Do you really believe that 80% of the content in most forums has value to anyone besides its author? On
billy - the checks in the mail
Usenet doesn't cost anything last time I checked. The sense of community in many groups is just as good as a closed forum. Sure, you get more than your fair share of trolls and off-topic posts but that's why most newsreaders were blessed with a killfile.
Spam levels on Usenet also seems to have peaked now, while the problem seems to be getting worse in subscription forums.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
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
[snap]
Comment withheld due to lack of payment - slashdot team
Yeah, free Ipod! He is innocent!
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
'Will I one day have to pay a membership fee to access other popular forums?' you ask, and the answer is:
'No, but you may have to switch to another forum'.
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.
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.
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.
metafilter charges $5 to join and people and links get booted occasionally. Again, it works. Contrast this to the decline of Kuro5hin.
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.
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
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.