Originally published at: Boing Boing launches ad-free subscription - Boing Boing
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How will this premium experience interact with discourse? Will subscribers get redirected to the premium experience away from the non-ad free version?
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I’d pay $.10 a day to have the article summations stop disappearing after 15 seconds.
I’d honestly pay mostly for an ad free BBS experience, as it’s 95% of what I interact with around here.
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As I understand it, it won’t interact with Discourse at all going forward. Commenting will instead take place on Substack’s commenting system* and be limited to premium members only. The Discourse BBS will be turned into a read-only archive.
[This is not a personal endorsement of the change, just an answer to your questions.]
[ETA: premium is hosted on Substack.]
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Since you mentioned Substack, it is worth noting that Substack hosts and monetizes publications from hate groups and has expressly stated that they intend to continue doing so.
I don’t feel great about any of this.
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The ability to create new topics or change titles has already been removed from the bbs. We’ll see what substack is like, but
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So you’re making a place where the articles aren’t constantly bouncing up and down and making things hard to read because of rotating ads with uncontroled size changes at the top of the page?
But if it’s not constantly bouncing the text we’re trying to read up and down, would it still be right to call it boing boing?
I mean, I get the draw, but couldn’t the same effect be had just by actually enforcing uniform size restrictions on the ads like a sane website would do?
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Haven’t seen a website that doesn’t bounce around in a long, long time.
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Does this include the mobile experience - will that be ad-free as well?
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It’s not just that there’s been a lot of ads for a while now, it’s the egregiousness of how they exhibit the absolute worst kind of web advertising possible. Pop ups on load. Sketchy content. More pop ups as you scroll. If you leave the page unattended too long, sometimes it forwards to a completely different sketchy site. Posts that are clearly sponsored trying to get you buy Microsoft 365 or whatever. From the Punk beginnings of the blog/zine, and the contributors who started it, it sure seems like a long fall. But maybe that’s just me. Not sure I’ll subscribe, but everyone gets to make their own decisions.
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For a long time I have assumed that the boingers expect everyone to use an adblocker on their site, which has always worked fine.
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Substack’s comments are not going to replace Discourse, at least not in a good way. I think that’s a bad thing. Our best threads are ones that are not spun off from topics.
As for ads: what ads? I haven’t seen an ad on BoingBoing ever, but I run with shields up all the time. So I’ll happily subscribe, already done so, but I think Discourse should stay.
And the whole “Substack is evil” thing is a concern, for sure.
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or just peruse the BBS for the hot topics garnering comments and never have to visit the Front Page.
i will make the move, but adverts have never been an issue for me here on the message board.
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Until I saw this fact, I was willing and ready to hand over the cash. I give Kottke $60 a year with no hesitation.
But I just can’t support Substack in any way. Ugh.
If it’s not too late, BB should really check out the alternatives - https://www.citationneeded.news is a great modern example of this business model done right.
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Change is inevitable.
Substack, though… that raises major concerns.
It’s like moving your bar into a building where there’s already a tenant who runs a Nazi bar; they allow a lot of fascist, phobic and just outright hateful content.
Too close for comfort.
That said, I already have a substack account which I never really use.
I guess we’ll see how it goes.
And if “how it goes” ends up being ‘awry,’ I’d just like to say:
So long, and thanks for all the “free” ice cream!
It’s been as real as anything on the internet can be.
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I will try but I have concerns. Sounds like there is a good chance you will be closing the best bits of BoingBoing. The BBS has been amazing over the years. It has been a safe space for some amazing people and I don’t want to lose that aspect. It has been educational with a diverse pool of experience and viewpoints. I would say that is at risk with the proposed changes. We will see.
This post had me going from
To
Fairly quickly.
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I can answer this!
As of today, new Boing Boing posts will not be created here on the BBS. Since BB posts have a five-day posting period before they lock, that means that the last of those posts will close by Friday.
Once this happens, I will also lock the remaining community topics as well, essentially making the BBS read-only.
Each BB post on substack (at premium.boingboing.net) will have a comments section, the same as today, and the community has already set up threads in BB’s substack chat (at Join Boing Boing’s subscriber chat) for all the major community threads.
As mentioned, everyone gets a free 7-day trial of premium, so please feel free to head over and have a look!
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