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?"

Comments

Hey, Subscribers!

[Short Circuit]

Now might a good time to disable the "Subscriber Bonus" by default...that way, they won't know who you are.

Let Capitalism run its course.

[Creepy Crawler]

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?

Re:Let Capitalism run its course.

[techno-vampire]

Libratarians like to say that the Marketplace will take care of it. This is a good place to let it do exactly that. Don't pay, don't comment, don't contribute. Go someplace else and watch the site wither on the vine.

Re:Let Capitalism run its course.

[Zontar The Mindless]

...after you run off every worthwile user who donates their time making content...

This is similar to what happened at Builder Buzz back in the day. CNET decided to take the "our site, our content" bit to extremes. The biggest contributors to the discussions didn't like the idea of CNET charging people for 2-3 years' worth of content that they'd donated for free, with the understanding that others would be able to make use of it for free, and left. This in spite of the fact that many of these folks (including me) were offered free subscriptions.

sign me, "Former Builder Buzz Community Leader"

(BTW, if you've ever wondered what happened to the original Builder Buzz crowd, a number of us hang out here now. Feel free to drop by sometime and say Hey.)

Re:Let Capitalism run its course.

[FLEB]

After all, Capitalism is the best, right?

Yep. People will buy elsewhere when a seller does something dumb like this.

Re:Let Capitalism run its course.

[anagama]

"Libratarians ..."
I'm a Scorporiotarian --- what should I do??

Re:Let Capitalism run its course.

[SharkJumper]

Expect the unexpected this week as an old friendship is renewed. Be open to the possibility that it will lead to something more. Business opportunities are all around you if you're willing to take a risk on a fresh idea. Your work relationships could become strained soon. Now might be a good time to take that vacation that you've been ...

...For the love of God, look out behind you!...

Oh, crap.

Re:Let Capitalism run its course.

[NetSettler]

Don't pay, don't comment, don't contribute. Go someplace else and watch the site wither on the vine.

The market only responds to the high-order bit, where the decision about which bit is highest-order is also decided by the market.

Suppose you have a great Chinese restaurant near your house. The food is world-class. The owner is nice. But the service is consistently slower than you wish. You can't simply stop going there and expect a new one, just like it, to pop up to compete. The market doesn't work that way. It can't discriminate why you are failing to send it money. Especially if you're eating Indian food at the restaurant next door in the interim, in which case it will conclude you have stopped liking Chinese, and you're more likely to get two Indian food restaurants than an Indian and a punctual Chinese one.

It's common in US Presidential elections for newly elected Presidents to claim, as our latest president did, that The People actively wanted the whole platform, when in fact mostly all a vote ever shows is that "for some reason(s), you thought this president was better (or less bad) than the other." It certainly does mean "for all reasons" nor does it help you discover for which reason(s).

Salon Magazine tried the same thing as is being complained about here quite a while back. They wanted to charge people for posting on TableTalk , their online forum, but continue to allow people to read for free. I was incensed. Charge the content producers and let the users get things for free? As a sensible poster, I stopped posting and went away. Salon continued, though, in spite of that.

What's hilarious to me about complaining about such matters here is that Slashdot is a haven of free software buffs--that is, people who champion the idea that people should pay to produce stuff (you do have to eat while you code) but you shouldn't have to pay to use stuff (you don't pay for the result of all that free software that it cost someone to produce).

Perhaps the human mind is some sort of capitalist market, deciding what rationales are most and least important based on internal market forces that we can only barely understand because we see only that same, elusive, high order bit of outcome. Maybe understanding the process from the outcome is more than we should expect...

Oh dear

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an entirely original occurence, a trend like this would be Something Awful.

*cough*

fees happen

[yagu]

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). ~

Welll Slashdot Does it again

[horsebutt]

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

Re:Umm, Something Awful?

[John_Booty]

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.

"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 :P
* 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...

It's not even just a matter of money

[Moraelin]

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."

err, no

[Trepidity]

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.