THIS PLACE SUCKS ! ! !

At least one hamster alredy collects my Euros ...

I think that an all-topics firehose version will be preserved, but it will likely be worked into the site in a way that is demoted in prominence (e.g. requiring an additional click to get to).

The preference goes both ways, some niches really don't want to be in the firehose. The default won't be able to be the firehose for that reason, preserving the option but fundamentally changing the site culture.

What I mean by the cultural shift and how the niche's preference might be to avoid the teeming masses is that the desire to see and comment on everything can — in some cases, I am not speaking of anyone in this thread in particular — end up polluting niches with irrelevant comments. As an example see most attempts to discuss programming, for example, which usually gets a response from a non-programming forum member merely saying they don't understand a thing and making a2k a place that can't currently support that niche. Philosophy threads are another more prominent example, while the ability to filter them always existed it was not prominent enough on the default to custom behavior spectrum to avoid the conflicts that followed (where each philosophy thread had to contend with a bunch of people who didn't like the threads but also wanted to see all).

There is going to be a fundamental culture shift from seeing all to seeing what you opt into. We can preserve an option to see all, but expect it not to be as prominent. This is very speculative, as I am months away from beginning to define the UI design but what I am talking about is something along the lines of having the all-topics firehose an additional click away. The additional click is a bit of friction we are putting up to seeing all, as the desire to have less monolithic microcosms conflicts a bit with the desire for the firehose and as the site scales the firehose will simply become less and less useful, making the preference for it something akin to miswanting (i.e. wanting something that is inevitably going to have a diminishing rate of return).

As the site grows, the value of the firehose for any particular individual decreases. Don't just think of it as topic interests but sheer volume. E.g. if you had a feed of every post that was ever made on facebook or twitter it would be very interesting but it's not humanly possible to even read 5% of them due to sheer volume and the grid would move too fast to do much but a random picking of what you want to read (e.g. by the time you read the titles hundreds more would have been posted etc). So the fundamental paradigm needs to change from opt out to opt in.

This is a long way of saying that you will probably have what you want but it will probably be less easy to get to because what you want isn't great for the site's culture. I want that option too, but I think it should be relegated to a secondary way to browse the site instead of the primary one it is now.

I guarantee that charging $1 a year would decrease site participation by over 60% and it would continue to decrease from there as the value proposition for the paying members decreases (from the departures) and it will inevitably just fuel a collapse of the community once departures fuel departures.

The dollar a year isn't much money but the friction it represents to the user experience is such that most people won't do it. Plus there will be payment processing gaps (e.g. teenagers with no payment methods we can accept, or foreigners who we can't do transactions with).

It would also be the death sentence for certain countries to participate at all (e.g. countries where Americans are forbidden to do financial transactions).

Able2know's aim is to be an open marketplace of ideas, not a tree house club. We cannot achieve our goals with a requirement for membership and the problems it seeks to solve ham-handedly I can solve much more elegantly. Requiring the paid membership would just make it a small tree-house club, and there are plenty of free ways to make one of those (and we want us to be a platform to make them, not constrained to being one of them).

Exactly. I recall you were actually a subscriber of a2k at one point, at a much higher price point than rosborne979 is suggesting (I think it was like $5/month) but swore off the payment processing headaches it engendered.

The money isn't really the attrition, the payment processing is.

I forgot to mention that one of my ideas is to allow you to make such a tree house club and charge for it. Specifically, you'd be able to make a niche group on a2k, and make your own door rules. I thought that the charging for it would be a great way for some of the smaller ones to fix their own noise/signal problem and intend to make ways for groups to set that kind of thing up easily.

But we can't become a platform that supports that kind of thing if we make global door rules that are too restrictive, so we need to find ways to balance openness with that kind of thing. The way I intend to do so is to further support microcosms. When one monolithic community grows into an increasingly diverse one it needs to choose to either support and tolerate diverse microcosms or it must pressure the diverse minorities to adopt their monolithic nature. The latter is nearly inevitably a source of significant societal friction in communities and I prefer the former. To take them to offline analogies we can either choose to be a restrictive country club or we can choose to be an open society that has different cultural microcosms with some degree of separation (not segregation, but the ability to choose fellowship with microcosms, like churches and other voluntary organizations are in an open society).

I want us to be an open society that supports microcosms, I don't want us to be limited to being a microcosm.

Couple things I'd like to see in future release:
-button to mark all posts read
-option to increase number of posts per page. That way people with slow connections can keep a low number and people with faster connections can see more threads per page.
-perhaps a customizable landing page where posts thumbed up by you are at top of list and then new posts below?

My primary intent when I suggested a very minimal "price to play" was to block the spammers who are selling things or promoting their web sites. I have no interest in reducing the variety of legitimate posters on the system (although a "pay to play" system might have that side-effect).

You may be right. You have a better feel for the system than I do. It was just a suggestion to try to block out "spam" and other "garbage" posts (people who have no desire to discuss anything and instead just like to drive-by and shout some crap into the system and then disappear).

If you look at the new posts page - there is new next to some threads - if you click on that, it will take you to the place you let off in a thread


I wonder if selecting "my posts" might give you something close to what you'd like in your 3rd request.

Yep, I do that now, but usually click the username instead of new.



It does sort of, but I often thumb up threads I do not post in.

Goodness gracious great balls of fire.