My fellow admins, I come to you today to propose an inspired idea.
Smogon is free - we all know and love this. But the downside of this is that many of our Posting heroes often create content that we do not adore. That's where my new idea - which I am tentatively calling "Plebian Posts" - comes in. Under this model, a user would have the option to erase any Post they come across - I suggest leaving the cost open to the Poster's discretion.
Presented below is a "quick" mock-up of what a paywalled Plebian Post could look like:
You will notice that the preceding Post is still visible - in order to maximise profit, I think it would be wise to make it such that whole threads cannot be made Plebian, but rather each individual Post.
Something of this sort has recently been announced on Tumblr, to great public excitement - the Smogon userbase will almost certainly welcome this in a similarly enthusiastic fashion (perhaps even without any death threats! Wow!).
To pre-empt a couple of questions:
Will this replace [404 CONTENT NOT FOUND]?
No. There is enough difference between the two models that we can run both concurrently. In fact, it seems like an excellent money-making wheeze to have both; imagine a user finally coughing up for [404 CONTENT NOT FOUND] to see a funny Post, only to be forced to see a terrible Post that one of our payees has done the excellent service of hiding from the masses.
Will this replace Premium Posting?
No, not at all. In fact this has the possibility to augment the opposite service, in that all good posts in a thread may be hidden behind a pay wall where the bad posts will have been forcibly erased. It will be very difficult for the free tier of user to understand anything that is going on.
You keep mentioning "profit" and "making money" from this. How do we do that from a Poster-controlled paywall?
I grant you, my presentation has been somewhat vague on this front so far. We will be taking a cut of the profits - I suggest no less than 100%. This means, of course, that the actual poster in question will receive no money, but we are framing the overall community health as the main benefit here. With any luck BKC and the rest of the namby-pamby "pay your contributors" brigade will think this is giving money to posters and not raise any stink from what we're proposing.
I trust you all agree with me that this is a brilliant plan with no possible negative outcome, and eagerly await your feedback below.
Oh, and do make sure this doesn't leak, will you? I want to keep it as a nice surprise for the plebeians.
//Gato
MOD EDIT: THIS POST WAS FOUND TO HAVE CONTAINED CONTENT PERTAINING TO SMOGON G*LD AND HAS BEEN EDITED ACCORDINGLY
Smogon is free - we all know and love this. But the downside of this is that many of our Posting heroes often create content that we do not adore. That's where my new idea - which I am tentatively calling "Plebian Posts" - comes in. Under this model, a user would have the option to erase any Post they come across - I suggest leaving the cost open to the Poster's discretion.
Presented below is a "quick" mock-up of what a paywalled Plebian Post could look like:
You will notice that the preceding Post is still visible - in order to maximise profit, I think it would be wise to make it such that whole threads cannot be made Plebian, but rather each individual Post.
Something of this sort has recently been announced on Tumblr, to great public excitement - the Smogon userbase will almost certainly welcome this in a similarly enthusiastic fashion (perhaps even without any death threats! Wow!).
To pre-empt a couple of questions:
Will this replace [404 CONTENT NOT FOUND]?
No. There is enough difference between the two models that we can run both concurrently. In fact, it seems like an excellent money-making wheeze to have both; imagine a user finally coughing up for [404 CONTENT NOT FOUND] to see a funny Post, only to be forced to see a terrible Post that one of our payees has done the excellent service of hiding from the masses.
Will this replace Premium Posting?
No, not at all. In fact this has the possibility to augment the opposite service, in that all good posts in a thread may be hidden behind a pay wall where the bad posts will have been forcibly erased. It will be very difficult for the free tier of user to understand anything that is going on.
You keep mentioning "profit" and "making money" from this. How do we do that from a Poster-controlled paywall?
I grant you, my presentation has been somewhat vague on this front so far. We will be taking a cut of the profits - I suggest no less than 100%. This means, of course, that the actual poster in question will receive no money, but we are framing the overall community health as the main benefit here. With any luck BKC and the rest of the namby-pamby "pay your contributors" brigade will think this is giving money to posters and not raise any stink from what we're proposing.
I trust you all agree with me that this is a brilliant plan with no possible negative outcome, and eagerly await your feedback below.
Oh, and do make sure this doesn't leak, will you? I want to keep it as a nice surprise for the plebeians.
//Gato
MOD EDIT: THIS POST WAS FOUND TO HAVE CONTAINED CONTENT PERTAINING TO SMOGON G*LD AND HAS BEEN EDITED ACCORDINGLY
Last edited by a moderator:
