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Failures

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Mar 6th 2002 8:53am





Slashdot Ad Free: Worst Subscription Service Ever

from the try,-try-again dept

John Taylor writes "I wish that I didn't agree with this guy, but Slashdot has fucked up badly this time. What he doesn't mention is why they are doing it - cue the OSDN Deathstar. I would pay Slashdot if they offered something cool, but they haven't. This is so pathetic, it is unreal." This is, of course, referring to Slashdot's decision to charge people to get rid of the big annoying ads they're planning on introducing. The article linked here points out that they've come up with the worst possible system for doing that. Most of Slashdot's value (they say) comes from the community - and the new pricing scheme discourages that part - because the more you use Slashdot, and the more you participate... the more you pay. They're actively discouraging their heaviest users. It also points out that it's all negative reinforcement. They don't give anything extra of value to users who pay - they just make users who don't pay have a worse experience.

4 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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Reader Comments (rss)

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  1.  

    actually, that could be useful...

    identicon
    Brandon, Mar 6th, 2002 @ 6:48pm

    It might actually discourage the twits from using that site.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Slashdot needs to lower expenses.

    identicon
    alternatives(), Mar 6th, 2002 @ 8:27pm

    The biggest expense is bandwidth.

    Driving away users will lower bandwidth. Given the BIG ad is in the upper most section, it is easly ignored.

    But when has /dork cared about the users?

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Ads? What Ads?

    identicon
    Drew, Mar 7th, 2002 @ 1:19pm

    I've been happily browsing websites for a good long time without many different forms of ads, all except those particular annoying ones from x10.com, and I've been able to avoid nearly all of them by using WebWasher & a really deliberate lmhosts table that references a lot of the ad-company servers as 127.0.0.1, saving not only me actually having to look at those ads but also wear and tear on my local DNS server.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    Problems with Slashdot

    identicon
    Phillip, Mar 7th, 2002 @ 5:49pm

    People resent having to pay for a magazine where the readers generate all the content. The editorial 'value' comes from randomly choosing submited stuff, adding a poorly spelt one-line comment, and then posting it without doing any fact-checking at all. To add insult to injury, the people who generate the most content are the people who visit the most often... who are going to be the ones most heavily penalised! If they can't break even with 1/3 million targetted readers against distribution alone (they claim it to be $1.5/annum) using advertising then maybe they should think about more intelligent ways of distributing their content (mirrors?).
    Phillip.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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