6 ms·

Metafilter's $5 sign-up fee is incredibly smart. I imagine it brings in a decent amount of income and it really keeps the community top notch.

sjs382 16y ago
A $5 registration fee is one of the things that killed kuro5hin.org. God, I miss k5.
- starnix17 16y ago
  How so? People weren't willing to pay it?
  - sjs382 16y ago
    Well, a major aspect of the community was dupe accounts, temporary accounts, and novelty accounts. The fee killed that. That wasn't the entire community, dont get me wrong, but it was enough to slow activity to the point where it wasn't very interesting anymore.
- boredguy8 16y ago
  As a long-time member of K5 with a pretty low uid, I seem to recall there being some open question about how earlier fundraising efforts were apportioned. There were also problems in that the initial setup of k5 was completely user-driven and user-generated with votes on the mod queue determining what was good. Early attempts to 'control' the crapflooding issue was to create the "diary" section, which functioned as license to post anything you wanted. The $5 fee was a reversal of that approach AND didn't add anything for users (Scribd?), so people mostly left.
  - sjs382 16y ago
    I wish there was a mass-migration of some sort. K5 was the most well-rounded community I've ever been a part of. I wish this could be recreated. :-/
  - sien 16y ago
    K5 needed more user generated content. Metafilter posts are links strung together. They are easier to do. Another thing that probably drove the decline of K5 was the rise of blogs for everyone. Why post at K5 when some bunch of goons could remove what you regard as worth publishing while on your own blog it went live always?
silentbicycle 16y ago
Well, that and their top notch moderators! Jessamyn is exceptional at breaking up arguments, for example. Metafilter is quite an outlier in terms of online communities that have survived, thrived, and kept a high signal-to-noise ratio.
joshmillard 16y ago
Notably, the main function of the signup fee is to throttle growth of the userbase by eliminating most of the lazy driveby traffic, not to generate cash. In that respect, we could be charging $1, or in theory even "charging" some non-fee annoyance, and probably get about the same effect. But $5 is a nice round number -- enough to be a tiny moment of consideration in a web where membership fees for commenting aren't the norm, but not so much that it's going to cause almost anyone with a reasonably sincere interest in the site or the community from making that investment. And so $5 it is. And while we absolutely don't spite the income from the signups -- it's a nice side effect of the signup-throttling process and helps with costs some -- it's really not nearly enough to cover payroll for three full time mods and a full-time programmer/developer. The bulk of our revenue is from ads running in the archives.

sjs382 16y ago

A $5 registration fee is one of the things that killed kuro5hin.org. God, I miss k5.

starnix17 16y ago
How so? People weren't willing to pay it?
- sjs382 16y ago
  Well, a major aspect of the community was dupe accounts, temporary accounts, and novelty accounts. The fee killed that. That wasn't the entire community, dont get me wrong, but it was enough to slow activity to the point where it wasn't very interesting anymore.
boredguy8 16y ago
As a long-time member of K5 with a pretty low uid, I seem to recall there being some open question about how earlier fundraising efforts were apportioned. There were also problems in that the initial setup of k5 was completely user-driven and user-generated with votes on the mod queue determining what was good. Early attempts to 'control' the crapflooding issue was to create the "diary" section, which functioned as license to post anything you wanted. The $5 fee was a reversal of that approach AND didn't add anything for users (Scribd?), so people mostly left.
- sjs382 16y ago
  I wish there was a mass-migration of some sort. K5 was the most well-rounded community I've ever been a part of. I wish this could be recreated. :-/
- sien 16y ago
  K5 needed more user generated content. Metafilter posts are links strung together. They are easier to do. Another thing that probably drove the decline of K5 was the rise of blogs for everyone. Why post at K5 when some bunch of goons could remove what you regard as worth publishing while on your own blog it went live always?

silentbicycle 16y ago

Well, that and their top notch moderators! Jessamyn is exceptional at breaking up arguments, for example. Metafilter is quite an outlier in terms of online communities that have survived, thrived, and kept a high signal-to-noise ratio.

joshmillard 16y ago

Notably, the main function of the signup fee is to throttle growth of the userbase by eliminating most of the lazy driveby traffic, not to generate cash. In that respect, we could be charging $1, or in theory even "charging" some non-fee annoyance, and probably get about the same effect. But $5 is a nice round number -- enough to be a tiny moment of consideration in a web where membership fees for commenting aren't the norm, but not so much that it's going to cause almost anyone with a reasonably sincere interest in the site or the community from making that investment. And so $5 it is. And while we absolutely don't spite the income from the signups -- it's a nice side effect of the signup-throttling process and helps with costs some -- it's really not nearly enough to cover payroll for three full time mods and a full-time programmer/developer. The bulk of our revenue is from ads running in the archives.