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.

You can leave comments in the space below.

Business model variants

• Centralised, for profit;
• A pure content provider, community provides web servers
• Fully decentralised architectures.

Ideas on how to make money to finance the operation

• What makes Slashdot so good? The comments section! Why? Because it brings together a large group of smart and intelligent IT professionals who share their collective knowledge.
• -> This is value!
• -> Who has money to spend? Managers, finance guys, etc.
• -> What do they need? Expertise.
• => (1) How about crowdsourcing answers for questions they have? Like "What the heck is WebRTC?", "What are the costs of implementing XYZ in my company?", "Who has experience with XYZ? Why should or shouldn't I buy it?", "How can I solve problem XYZ?"-> Sell "ask Slashdot" posts with an additional "professional review by mods with a lot of karma" feature.
• => (2) How about crowdsourcing reviews and beta testing? Like "I would like to have 100 professionals testing our beta product", "I would like to have 100 professionals reviewing my product documentation", etc. -> This service is payed for and parts of the revenue can even be payed back to the testers/reviewers as an incentive.
• ==> the idea is to make money out of the explicit value Slashdot has, namely its community/commenters.

• Below is a copy from FeatureList#Article_submission - To have funds for all that, we could use:
  • That tipping system (mentioned in moderation section of FeatureList), and everytime you tip someone else a very tiny fraction of that tip goes to altslashdot.
  • Also payments from people desperate to post in thread (or story) where they have moderated (if we decide that this feature is useful, and if it is thread or whole story) - also in moderation section of FeatureList.
  • Failed submitters, who had to give back their cryptocoin reward for their submission plus some extra fraction because their story was hated after it was submitted (think Roland Piquepaille) as mentioned in FeatureList (they can't submit new stories if they don't give back their payments).
  • Also we can simply hope for money from cryptocoin donations address. IMHO that is quite possible if we make this site good.
  • We might consider paying subscribers using cryptocoin.
  • Make a "featured product/serivce -> ask for review" section that charges for having a product reviewed