I’m sorry, but that’s just flat out false. The Reader has shown that they’re not adverse to using Paypal. A “Click to Donate” button via Paypal could be added to various places – or a simple pop-up window called from a link in a sticky thread at the top of every forum – extraordinarily easily. It’s a cut-and-paste operation. The creation of the sticky threads in each forum would take longer.
And for the umpteenth time, no one has said that they do not have $5. They have said that their personal priorities for where money is spent, even such money as might be considered “entertainment” money, may not be able to be stretched far enough to include the Dope. That’s not for anyone else to decide or pontificate about from on high. Your values for where and how to spend your money are yours and no one else’s and you have no right to attempt to impose them on other Dopers whose personal situations are unknown to you.
I’ve spoken in the past about another forum community – and that’s all that it was, forums, nothing else – that went pay-to-post. Before it went there, there were Paypal and Amazon Honor System buttons, and Amazon affiliation so that they couuld get revenues when users (and others) bought from Amazon with their name.
They sold custom user titles, which generated a massive quick inflow of cash. Yes, it took admin time, but at $5 or $10 a pop from a thousand users it was worth it.
Then they did branded merchandise – easy peasy with CafePress, and users donated the artwork and made suggestions about what kinds of things they wanted (like mugs emblazoned with one of the forum in-jokes, the equivalents of our “Hi Opal!” or 1920’s style whatevers.). When the users themselves designed the merchandise or had their input about it honored, they bought thousands of dollars worth of the stufff.
Then there were text ads and user classified ads, then expanded to offer personal ads. They added user auctions where the board got 0.5% of the revenues as a kickback. Lastly, they bought a related domain name and resold hosting for users to have their own blogs/websites.
Along the way, other features were added. A 24-hour chat room was started. Clubs were started, one that did special things for user birthdays and anniversaries, others for different weight-loss plans (separate clubs for South Beach, Atkins, Weight Watchers, etc.), another was geared to parents, another for GLBT users, and so on. They started a new member program so that every new member got a “mentor” who would give them a personally guided tour of the boards and some insights on the “personalities” of each forum. The forum owners gave their okay to using Meetup.com to do officially branded monthly meetings of forum users in a variety of different locations, all managed using meetup.com’s infrastructure.
In other words, they built a huge community with the forums as the centerpiece but with so many other aspects that meant something in the user’s lives, even if they never met another forum usr in person, even if everything they did was limited to sitting behind at their keyboards. They built up a reason for people to join, so that it wasn’t just a matter of people paying to give someone content. (Their users also retain copyright to whatever they say on their forums, which allows them to reproduce good posts in their own blogs, etc.) And when they went pay-to-post, the users also knew that it was because every other option for providing the infrastructure and bandwidth necessary to keep the community – the community that they had come to love and feel strongly connected to – alive, and so they ponied up happily and there was only about 5% attrition.
Criticisms of the lack of responsiveness to Doper suggestions for alternate revenue streams are on point. We are the community that’s supposed to be so important that we’re willing to pay cash money to be a part of it. So why was our input ignored on the topic? We are the reason that the boards exist, not vice versa, so why are we expected now to be unilaterally thrilled with being left with no other option than to pay for the pleasure of giving our words away with no recourse to an entity which could happily decide to try to turn a profit by republishing them elsewhere.
It’s really disturbing to see so many Dopers attempting to stifle any dissent or any criticism in the worst, most heavy-handed sorts of ways. Everyone is entitled to their opinion about this move, and it’s really disgusting to see so many posts which boil down to nothing more than “your opinion is wrong, so shut up.” That’s not what the Dope is about, that’s not the standard that we hold for one another or ourselve when discussing any other topic, it’s not acceptable anywhere else so it’s not acceptable here. (Yes, quixotic and Libertarian, I’m looking very pointedly at you. This discourse is beneath you both, and you know it. I’m ashamed.)
– has to come up with some fake numbers and decide the best (read: most cost efficient) course of action. They must come up a couple different courses of action, and then sell the one their fake numbers says works best. Maybe in the case of the SDMB, there’s going with PayPal, going with a competitor (surely such exists), going with PayPal but dicking over the foreigners because they’re too much hassle, or setting up a system independent of the Internet.
