CmdrTaco's Journal: Subscriptions, Daredevil & Disease

I got a fair amount of feedback from my last journal entry. Most of it was surrounding my suggestion that Subscribers be allowed to read Slashdot Stories a few minutes before the nonpaying masses. I didn't really get a single negative email about the idea. As usual, the negative nellies in the crowd don't bother emailing me, they just post offtopic in the main site discussions. And then they complain when they are moderated offtopic. I find that amusing. Also, a few people flamed me for not crediting Fark for the idea. Course I didn't actually know that fark did this, but now I do, and someone from there even emailed me to say that the model has worked out for them. Course when I tried to reply, their mail bounced, so who knows if it was all lies lies and more lies :)

It looks to be very likely that we'll do this in the next few weeks. We need to decide on a few minor implementation details for now. First off, what do these stories look like? They won't have a time stamp on them because they haven't been posted yet. Maybe I'll put some sort of graphic there too. Also, we'll have to decide how much of a head start subscribers get. This will vary wildly from story to story because many stories are posted just minutes before they go live. I'm not going to delay important stories just so subscribers get a few extra minutes- thats unfair to the general audience. 15-20 minutes is probably enough.

Also worth noting is that like 20 people resubscribed following that announcement.

Beyond that, this was a slower week for me. Partially because nothing really huge happened, and partially because that illness currently infests my home. Last night was the first night in a week or so that I got a solid nights sleep. And now, as Kathleen is finally getting better, I think its my turn to catch it. The throat is feeling a little raspy, and the muscles are a bit sore. I suspect its going to be an interetsing weekend, if by "Interesting" I really mean, crappy.

A few people asked for my opinion on the Daredevil movie, and since I didn't write a review of it, I'll spill a bit of it here. I thought the first hour of it was really solid. There were substantial problems of course, most notably when DD kills. You don't have to read many issues of the comic to know that this is very out of line for The Man Without Fear. Also, the final Kingpin fight was hugely anticlimactic. Once again the movie was technically very well done, but I just didn't enjoy it as much as X-Men or Spider-man, which is really to bad since I just read the Frank Miller Daredevils a few months ago and there's a lot of really good stuff in there. Bendis's current Daredevil run is going pretty well too, although I don't care much for the artwork.

Speaking of Bendis, I've been going Bendis mad lately. Powers. Jynx. Goldfish. Ultimate Spider-man. I've several hundred pages of his stuff, and my TOREAD queue is bursting with it. If I get sick this weekend, at least I'll have tons of good words and pictures to stuff into my brain.

Beyond that, nothing super exciting to report. Watching Crest of the Stars tonight. Looking forward to it.

Subscriptions

[whydna]

I think that the "TotalSlashdot" system would be great, so long as it offered features that really made it worthwhile.

I think access to the stories before they go live is a great start! If I read a story before it goes live and I'm able to get to the article before it's slashdotted, that's great! But what happens when I log onto /. 10 minutes after the story goes live... it makes having an account rather moot.

I personally feel that slashdot should offer a cached copy of the site/page for its members! This way, if I log on and see a story before its live, i'm sure to get to the site... and if I log on later in the day, I can rest knowing that I'll be able to see what the big deal is about.

Another intersting idea (and I know people are gonna tell me to fark-off on this), would be to limit the number of accounts that are available and sell them like shares of stock. For example, say you allow only 10,000 accounts at some starting price, the 10,001st person to want an account could make an offer for what he/she'd pay for an account, and a person with an account could sell to them. I know its a crazy idea, but it'd be pretty fun to watch the price of /. accounts fluctuate.

Re:Subscriptions

[Mandrake]

limiting the number of paid accounts sounds somewhat like shooting yourself in the foot. I'm not saying it wouldn't be interesting, but here you go: "fark off" :)

Subscribes and dupe stories...

[cymen]

After I read the last journal entry I thought to myself that it would be a good idea to let subscribers vote a story as a dupe. If a certain % of subscribed readers vote it as such the story could be held off the front page until the editors take a look. That way we could avoid more of the "this is a dupe, you're so lame"-type posts.

I have an idea.

[sllort]

As usual, the negative nellies in the crowd don't bother emailing me, they just post offtopic in the main site discussions. And then they complain when they are moderated offtopic. I find that amusing.

What if you made a place for the Nellies to blow off steam? Since it would be a section about Slashdot, you could call it "Meta". Or, instead, you could allow anyone to post to your diary, which would make it kind of a little Meta section. Then no one would have to post offtopic, since there would be a visible On Topic discussion for them.

Also, a few people flamed me for not crediting Fark for the idea. Course I didn't actually know that fark did this

What an amazing piece of irony! Nearly a year ago, when you created a User-Create Discussion in a temporary sid for people to discuss the use of Admin mod points, I suggested that you look into Fark.com's subscription method, where they let registered users see and comment on stories before they were posted. I told you this in a direct reply to one of your comments.

Sadly, you deleted that discussion. But just think, if there was a Meta section, you could have looked back in the archives and realized that I'd suggested this to you already, and then you'd have known that it was Fark's idea, and that it worked great! Imagine how many other great ideas you've missed out on by not having a Meta section! Imagine how much earlier you could have Farked Slashdot!

So in short, I think this proves conclusively that a Meta section is a Great Idea.