I haven’t been wholly successful at this, but I’ve tried to get all of my anger posting done at 2p2. Well Named has given me 20 infraction points! (for suggesting Juan Valdez would have liked to have been driving the car in Charlottesville if he thought he could get away with it. - is that out of line?)
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Do we know how much money the ads will bring in or do we have to wait a little bit to see?
I think figuring out how much money they generate would be a nice first step and the community can discuss what to do with that money or whatever.
Micro has been posting that, $3.67 yesterday and something like that today?, so assuming that holds that’s prolly 2-3x patreon monthly atm
I don’t know how the money will end up being distributed, but zikzak’s ideas for how it might be distributed were definitely not favoring people who put in early work like he did.
The undemocratic coup is how you ended up in the position to make this decision unilaterally. The $7.78 is corrupt gains stolen from the users. And I agree with the point you’re making here: it’s not worth it.
Instead of starting a poll in the governance forum (which is hidden, it would be better if it were more visible), a decision was made by 1-3 people to go along with this banner ad idea with the goal of paying those 1-3 people an unknown amount of money, with no plan to ever cap those payments in the future.
When users finally find out about the ads, one of them complains and is told if he doesn’t like it he can leave and also he’s a dick for even bringing it up in the only thread about it.
And somehow I’m the asshole
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I was trying to get the right reference, I think I have it. You’re like the House of unstuck, while Cuddy is the composite of the people running the hospital err website
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You could try laying off the Stalinist coup accusations. Essentially anyone could have been part of this and as far as I’m concerned still can. In fact I would happily transfer my responsibilities to you.
Like what is the end goal here? Is it to be a self-contained, sovereign residence for the former inhabitants of 2p2 Politics? Or is it to be something more?
It seems like this place is trying to be all things to all people. We want diverging view-points, just not the normal right-wing bullshitters. We want a socialist experiment, but someone has to take charge.
What was really the problem with the old place? It’s been made very clear that all the effort behind this wasn’t made altruistically. What’s the deal yo?
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I’m asking rhetorically.
But I know, I know. Anyone could have done it. And here you are, having done it.
I think this is worth discussing a bit. I would like to see the site grow too but I’m ambivalent about how because while it would be cathartic to attract and then dunk on morally rudderless internet dorks, do you really want that element unchained (so to speak) here? I’m not saying it’s impossible to break through to some of them, but jesus is it bad reading like 99% of the time.
For example, I had an idea here about starting some threads dedicated to specific podcast episodes (don’t have to be political) and then whoever cared would try to listen to the episode and we take a deeper dive in the thread; you drop something about Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson in the title I gotta believe google or bing will direct us some dorks. Go to a deplorable reddit sub, drop a link, etc…
I didn’t make this decision unilaterally, and the only reason I ended up as one of the admins is because nobody else was willing to do the work. Do you want to take over for me instead? Because aorn it’s a pretty god damn unrewarding job. How quickly can you get up to speed with Discourse, not to mention Rails, Ember, Docker and Nginx? You can probably skate without the Ruby and JS, but you’re definitely going to have to know the other two if you want to keep this site up.
Also required:
- Basic Linux sysadmin
- Coordinating with some guy you don’t know in CA who registered the domain, and managing the DNS entries
- Setting up SPF and DKIM so the domain doesn’t get spoofed for spam and get blacklisted
- Configuring one of your own personal email accounts to work for site emails to avoid extra costs
- Paying the fucking bills out of your own bank account
- Manage multiple SSL certificates
- Setting up linked Google and Twitter accounts for logins
- Registering with and monitoring search engines
- Dealing with endless shit like this thread
- Managing backups and updates
- Monitoring Exiled to make sure some asshole doesn’t change his avatar to include frontal nudity and put our biggest source of traffic at risk
That’s just off the top of my head. There’s definitely a lot more. Do you want the job? lmk. PM me a resume.
Yeah, I am to some degree. Has anyone stopped you from doing anything? Have you tried to do anything? Have you asked if you could do something? Have you done anything on your own and asked anyone to help? As far as I know, not a single person was excluded.
Not you.
Why would I do that?
I asked what was wrong with the old site and what the goal is here?
It’s past my bedtime and I’m well past done for the day, but for me none of this is about the revenue per se, it’s about building something bigger. I believe there is potential for a lot more from this community and I want to help create a platform that makes that possible. A neccesary part of that imo is that this site be allowed to try to generate income. Without that there’s going to be a very low ceiling on what can be accomplished.
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These are fair questions but if you want to grow the site this place is yugely better, I suggest never bringing up the old place again, I’d echo Tone’s sentiment here:
How does that not read like Mark Zuckerberg?
Just the other day, before the ads, I was browsing the site enjoyably and I thought to myself, “this is great. This is a community forum with fantastic posters discussing interesting topics that I enjoy reading, and there are no ads, there’s no need for ads because we’re funded by donations and members donating their skills and time”
And then the ads show up and I was a little bothered but not that bothered. Then as I was browsing I thought of a product I hadn’t considered buying in months. I didn’t do a search for it, I didn’t even say it out loud, it was a thought fully contained within my brain. And yet somehow, though this pernicious Google ad algorithm, an ad for that product popped up at the bottom of the page. It unnerved me. Not just because it reminded me that google has completely owned my mind, but it felt like an even greater invasion because I was seeing it on a site that I felt was as a safe haven from this kind of capitalist bullshit.
So from my perspective the ads are fucking with my user experience.
I then read the thread about the ads and I see a post from zz saying “we’re just trying to get paid for our time”. Which I didn’t think they would do because they’re not professionals and they resisted paying outside professionals to work on the site in the past. So I asked how long we have to put up with these ads and the response was thuggish, like, “we don’t have to answer to you”, and it just reeked of corruption. There’s no oversight, there’s no plan to limit the payments, the whole model for the website shifted from a community to the same type of business that i thought we all hated at 2p2. Where now I’m producing content that one or two people are making money off of. And they’re good guys, they’re great guys, they’re not Mason malmuth, but I still don’t like it.
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