Finances/Archive

Update: With the tsunami of volunteers I (John, the admin) am starting to believe that this project could be done non-profit and community driven, in the manner of Wikipedia.

I'm not wedded to for-profit, and realize that people want assurances about selling out in the future &c.

I'm going to put this issue off and post no substantive position until we have a working site and get a chance to catch our breath. This will take about 2 weeks, maybe 4 if we're unlucky.

People can then make proposals and we can discuss assurances and whatnot. If you can hold off on your misgivings until then, we can work on getting the site up and running.

Please continue to discuss, only note that I won't be responding to these issues for awhile.

Here's a copy of my vision for the project, was sent around in one of the mailing list posts. Note that it puts "attract and keep readers" first, before "make money". The intent is to avoid trading off user satisfaction for money - the users come first.

• The purpose of the site will be to attract and keep readers.
• The site is intended to make money
• The site will hire people, and be a good employer
• I intend to listen to community feedback and do whatever makes the site better
• There will be monetization; however, this is secondary to the primary goal, which is to attract and keep readers.
• Users will be monetized (ie we won't sell our user's contact info)
• We won't poach from Slashdot

(Monetization meaning largely what Slashdot does now: advertizing, merchandise, and job postings.)

Note: this is only a proposal! This has never been done before, and I have no idea at this time whether it's feasible, or even legal.

You can leave comments in the space below

Business model variants

Centralised, for profit Decentralised, hosting via a bit--torrent style plugin