On 28/02/07, Jason Cartwright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Slashdot has put content on a public network, it serves me what I request, there is no obligation on me to request it all. The deal your informally entering into with Slashdot is that in order to pay for your request taking up thier resources you are served an advert. If you don't like this 'deal' then you shouldn't request the content.
No one informed me of this deal, I've signed nothing obliging me to hold to it. I reiterate, if you don't want end users doing what they like with your content on their PCs, don't put it on a public network. It's up to me what my client displays and how it renders it, if you don't like it, use a private network with terms of use forbidding ad blockers.
Secondly I contribute back to slashdot because I meta-moderate, moderate and submit stories regularly This contribution is of little or no monetary value - and hence doesn't pay for thier salaries/bandwidth/servers etc etc. Know anyone that makes a living from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service?
On the contrary, if no one meta-moderated, moderated or submitted stories etc. OSTG (the owners of slashdot) would either have no site to operate, or have to employ an army of people to do it for them. I'm saving them quite a lot of money, combined with purchases I've made from other OSTG sites (I've bought stuff from Think Geek), overall they have made money from me, despite my blocking of their ads. I have no ethical qualms about it.
it's not the public's responsibility to fix your site design Bugs happen, no matter how good your management/coders/testers are. Best to have a feedback from the end user. J
True, and for Public service sites (Government, Local government, the BBC etc.) and non-commercial sites, I'll give it help, after all it's my money being spent. However I see no need to help a commercial site (radio stations, newspapers etc.) make money, and unless they have good content to draw me in as a regular reader, I'll see no need to help the with their UI design. Secondly, they are providing me with a service for free; what right do I have to complain? I help admin a forum for a firefox extension (I'm not the dev, but I've been using it since the beginning, and giving my time is my way of donating to the project); we get millions of complaints (often rude or abusive) about the extension, despite the fact that the dev is giving away his time and effort away for free, yet people expect more from him than they do if they had paid for the software (of course constructive criticism and feature requests are welcome, but RTFM before coming to the forum with trivial requests please). FYI it's the Wizz RSS news reader that I'm involved in: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/424/
