I too kept a membership as long as was a student. The fact that the ACM sent dozens of spam messages after I was no longer a student and didn't want to pay the

I too kept a membership as long as was a student. The fact that the ACM sent dozens of spam messages after I was no longer a student and didn't want to pay the $200 fee also burned me on them. I'd still pay $50 a year. I'd even pay $20 a month for the months where I'm doing research intensive stuff. I'd pay $2 for a paper probably. But given the fact that I can find nearly every paper that I need elsewhere it's often hard to justify $200 a year for an organization that I'm not terribly fond of. Other major annoyance -- even if you get a paper accepted at an ACM conference, you have to pay the several hundred dollar registration fees. I think if there were an alternative organization with backing from a handful of notable computer scientists, that made membership more ubiquitous, built a community around computing research and streamlined things like the peer review process, it could be pretty powerful.