The internet is an information resource. I personally think, though this is probably practically unworkable, that when exchanging or providing information, it should be freely available.
But entertainment, advertising, and virtual communities, should not necessarily be free. Though they can be if they want to be, for as long as it’s affordable to those providing it.
“Paying a fee to post here means I’m paying the Reader for them to use my content!”
Well, so what? Are your posts so publishable otherwise that you could sell them elsewhere? Outside of contributions from storytellers like Master Wang-Ka, I can’t think of much I’ve read here that I’d buy in book form. (Yes, I did buy MWK’s book – plus two to give as gifts to friends.)
The Dope is hardly the only site that charges people to publish their work. I’m a member of Webshots, one of the photo-hosting sites. It used to be wholly free. Now it’s got two tiers of membership, one which is free, one which you pay, oh, I think maybe 25 bucks a year for. The free one allows you X number of albums (with numbers over that grandfathered in if you put them online before the start of payments), with X number of photos per album. The paying membership gets an unlimited number of albums, and more photos permitted per album, plus other perks I can’t think of off the top of my head.
Regardless of whether you pay or not to host albums on Webshots, members are providing the content for the site, which offers search and download of pictures to anyone who wants to use the services. So… am I a fool to pay so that others can use my artistic output for free?
Some of you may say yes. I say no. I pay for a given level of service that I find useful, on a site that offers me a tremendous resource for image-finding. If no one wanted to share their photos there, there’d be no pictures for me to search and download, say to illustrate a story I was writing. I get the benefit of an easy-to-use photo-hosting site that makes it a snap for me to link images into stuff like my MPSIMS “How to Acquire Eight Cats” thread. Any images I would want to try to sell wouldn’t get posted there, to protect my copyright.
So, sure, I’ll pay a website for the right to let them use my content – if I feel I’m getting the benefit of the bargain.
Wanna see my albums? Visit Webshots.com and search for nixmom.
You drive a car, right? Is gas free?
The way I see it the value of a message board is in it’s members…if as I suspect a large amount of the current members leave because of the new fee to post then to me anyway the value of THIS particular message board just went down…too much
Sure there are a core group of people here who would pay any reasonable price to keep this board going(maybe a few hundred out of the many thousands who originally signed up) but the vast majority of people who post here at all…post very seldom and yet it’s their posts that keep things interesting too
When I’ve come here with a question about something often times it wasn’t a regular who had the answer…it was someone who hardly ever posted but was delighted to help me because for once they had information they could share with me and all of us…most of those people will leave
I personally haven’t posted unless I had some amusing story to share or some point of view I thought wasn’t expressed here or even some information to help some other person who needed it
I felt in my own small way I was repaying in that way for the enjoyment and help I’ve gotten over the years from others at this board
After this “free” month is up and the people who for whatever reason lose their posting privileges(face it I like many will keep reading the posts…I just won’t be able to post a response)…how many times will a PAYING member ask a question and get no answer from someone who REALLY knows the answer? I’ll bet however someone reading the post will have the answer but not being a paying member will be unable to help…this is going to happen a LOT
I have no doubt in the beginning when what I’m saying becomes apparent some of the regulars will go the extra mile to find out the answer for the questioner but this won’t last
There will be threads in which some current news story is discussed and someone who happens to see it and will have information not generally available to the public…this person might love to share what they know but will be unwilling to pay to contribute to this thread
Like I said in the beginning…while each of these people who barely post may INDIVIDUALLY contribute just a small amount to the success of this board…the vast numbers of these people added together make up(in my opinion) a value that hasn’t been considered when deciding on charging to use this board
The amount the people running this board charge doesn’t matter($4.95 is cheap considering the help I personally have gotten in the past) but once you charge and once all those people leave…some of whom will have the answers to questions I haven’t even thought up yet or who may have a point of view I’d like to hear…the value of this board will go down…I’m sorry…I have the greatest respect for those people here who post on a regular basis but you guys are only a part of what made this board so good
I’d pay the fee if I thought I was wrong but IMO what makes this board worth the fee in the first place will disappear once the fee is charged
Sorry for the minor hijack but…can you provide more information about this? Please?
Well, thats exactly what the reader is doing. posting for a month and reading for an unlimited time is free, posting without nag screens and searching is premium.
I’ve seen what happens to boards that give out too much free stuff, there just isn’t enough people who move to pay to make a profit. Only extraordinarily large forums seem to be able to do it through economies of scale.
It is so much faster to go thru and read the board now that I can skip all the posts by non-members, as their opinions don’t really mean that much anyway. It’s not like they paid their $5 and are entitiled to an opinion!
It’s a softcover/spiralbound 8 1/2 by 11 volume of his stories posted over the years on the Internet, both the Dope and elsewhere. Includes some pictures, and set up pretty much in chronological order. 265 pages, and lots of good reading.
You can email Master Wang-Ka at doctorbedlam@hotmail.com for ordering details.
It’s not equivalent at all after 30 days.
Simple. Set your servers so that all unauthorised hotlinks to images get redirected to goatse. Thieving webmasters will get the hint real fast when they see all their visitors getting mooned in the worst way possible. Is that evil, or what? 
If you’re not feeling quite that vile, try an Access Denied message.
(If you do go the goatse route, make sure your host’s TOS won’t object AND your copy of goatse is on your own server.)
Surprising how many people miss this part.
This could be a good GD thread if it weren’t for the still raw and tender feelings over the subscription issue. Indeed yosemitebabe’s experience with her leecher shows one of the problems with the concept that “Information should be free”. A confusion between “free” = equally accessible, not censored, open; and “free” = at no cost, gratis, with no term or condition attached. I really cannot understand how can someone say that it is a “principle” to not pay for information available online.
Take this point up another level – if the SDMB moved en masse to a different, free message board, then that new MB would get overloaded and have to start charging.
Tommyturtle, within the first 48 hours, 1,500 folks had already subscribed. “A few hundred” was acheived in the first few hours.
Also, while your points about the contributions of drive-by members are well-taken, I think you overstate your case somewhat. IMHO, the core 1,500-2,000 members do 90+% of the board’s heavy lifting.
Counterintuitively, there are quite a few new subscribers who aren’t in that core group going ahead and signing on … folks with few posts, but who feel the information exchange at the SDMB is worth $4.95. At the same time, and unfortunately, the SDMB will be losing a not-insignificant number of core members. But on the balance, it seems to me that we’ll be maintaining a large enough membeship to ensure well-rounded dialogue on a large gamut of topics.
The day I have to pay for participation in a discussion group/message board is the day I quit that group/board.
Any group/board has the right to start charging at any time.
It is too bad, so sad for me, but that is their right.
I will participate in all things free on the internet that I want.
If information exchange in an internet forum is constricted by a fee, then it is no longer free (in the non-monetary sense). I believe that to be wrong.
So the “principle” that it violates, for me, is the freedom and all that that entails (which, according to bordelond, is the information exchange between 2000 people and the exclusion of a few billion).
Re: Freedom. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Several billions of people were excluded even on a free SDMB. Heck, a few billion don’t even have Internet access to begin with. So invoking the figure of a “few billion” seems somewhat ingenuous. On a world-wide scale, the Internet is not quite a tool of the Everyman.
IMHO, 2,000 to 3,000 subscribers is enough to ensure the “richness” of discussion on these forums. Not that a few more folks couldn’t concveivably hop in and contribute meaningfully from time to time – not at all. It’s just that there comes a time when the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in.
Others’ MMV, of course.
beajerry, as many of us have bemoaned, the discussion keeps getting clouded by the continuous whine about having to pay for this board, when right off the bat the OP has said that it’s OK with him if people feel it’s not WORTH it to use a paid web-board.
The deeper issue that does bear further discussion is with the (so-far unsupported) claim that in the on-line world, monetarily-free is an absolute imperative “of principle” when dealing with information access. Which so far has been backed little beyond “just because, it’s wrong” and “if it’s got a price to it, there’s no freedom” (gee, welcome to the World).
The thing with that is that there’s got to be more to the “principle” than that. Otherwise, does having to pay for the morning newspaper violate “freedom”? Does having to pay to buy a book or a CD? Paying tuitionl? Having part of your tax dollars go to support public radio, public TV, public museums and libraries? (because yes, you DO pay for the libraries) Is information “not free” if you have to return a book to the library within X days or pay a fine – or in the case of reference works, not even be able to take it home, and have it available only during business hours? If the lecture series happens only for one month a year and only on Thursday evenings? If you have this truly important idea you want to spread, but first have to convince a radio host to book you on his show, or a publisher to print your book (which he’ll want worked over by a professional editor first)?
Why should the internet be immunized from the realities of the laws of economics, privileged over any other medium for communication and dissemination of information? If in 1989 someone would have paid for access to information X, Y or Z, available in print, tape or CD, what is fundamentally wrong with paying for X, Y, or Z 15 years later when it’s on the Web? (which as bordelond reminds us, is itself still the tool of an elite. To “the billions”, this sort of online content is meaningless)
Supporting arguments, please, that online info should be (economically) free! Not just “because, freedom”!
PS:
Y’know, there is one ugly suspicion I have about some of these “free information” folk. Call it a wild-assed hunch And it is that SOME of them…
(… did you see the “SOME”? and the “ugly suspicion”, as in, wild-assed hunch? OK. So don’t be asking for no steenkin’ cites)
…long for the “commercialized”, corporatized, capitalistic 'net to fail, either so it can go back to being a privileged preserve of the enlightened few, or so that it will have to be reconfigured as some sort of “public service” operation that will be either free or subsidized to the end-consumer.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Eris,
You’ve been around long enough to remember the boards attempt to raise revenue via banner ads (I remember one that they sold, a Doper bought it, but I can’t remember who). They did try some other models. A whole lot of sites have tried other models. For a very few of them, another model works - like advertising. For most, its subscription, sponsorship, or commerce. The SDMBs sponsor has backed off their committment - not completely - but they aren’t going to do it all anymore. And we’d have to sell alot of mugs to get ecommerce to work. They discussed “voluntary sponsorship” with members who paid getting some sort of sponsor tag - but discarded it - in part because the mods didn’t want to be held hostage to “well I PAID and he DIDN’T”
We don’t know what all was tried (although I heard that the nudy calendar of the mods was almost a go) or considered.
Nightime, on the SDMB LJ community, OpalCat has worked out a way to pay for a subscription without the person who is being subscribed revealing anything at all. If you want, I’d be happy to pay for your subscription like this – I understand your concerns about anonymity, and I hope you see this before the month runs out. It’s just the use of a PayPal link with the correct usernumber of the person being subscribed inserted. If you’re interested, e-mail me – it’s in my profile.
Damn I hope I did the /QUOTE thing right - stupid copy and paste. I digress. At least here in Ottawa, the internet is free. If you don’t mind dial up, at 56k and “suggested donations” www.ncf.ca
What I’d like to add to the thread though is hell yes I’ll pay, and would willingly pay 20.00 per year. I already pay for 1/3 of the high speed network at home, monthly. At 20.00CAD, that adds in an extra 5.479452 cents per day per year. Really, get a grip people.