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How are these old posts invaluable? Do you think a paywall would have generated enough revenue to pay for serving them? If nobody is willing to pay for access,
by criddell 2y ago
How are these old posts invaluable? Do you think a paywall would have generated enough revenue to pay for serving them? If nobody is willing to pay for access, doesn’t that mean they are in fact not valuable at all?
- bdndndndbve 2y agoSuch an insane paperclip optimizing way of thinking. The marginal cost to serve static content is very low as well - if they really didn't want to pay anything they could give it to a third party.
- criddell 2y agoSo what is the value of the old forum posts? To whom is it valuable? Is there somebody out there who would be willing to buy it?
- throwaway562if1 2y agoIn case this isn't trolling, it's valuable to any users who have a question that was previously answered on the forums, and to any users who invested time and energy answering said questions. Neither of these show up as a revenue stream, but instead impact customer retention and onboarding - the absence of community support is a major negative when making a purchasing decision as a new customer.
- numpad0 2y agoThese things are not monetizable but are foundational to monetizations. It's like office ceiling lights. You might as well forgo buildings and gather naked employees with laptops in parking lots from such perspective.
- 1over137 2y agoThings can have value without the need to bring money into the equation.
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoAutodesk made almost 5 billion dollars in 2023. You can host a vBulletin forum with incredibly high traffic for a couple thousand a year. Stop making excuses for shitty companies.
- kstrauser 2y agoAnd that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in reduced support expenses. Deleting this is madness.
- creatonez 2y ago> And that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in reduced support expenses. The calculus has changed a bit. They are losing sales from people using older versions of the software that they wouldn't have provided support for anyways. In Adobe's mindset, for example, Photoshop CS6 is the poison that is holding back subscription sales, not their competitors. So an easy way to frustrate users into subscribing to the latest version... delete the old forum posts!
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoSee I want to say you're right, but also the newer versions have all the same bugs the old ones do.
- faust201 2y agoBut the user pays forever with new version! (Some manager wants bonus now)
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoNot this user! One of my 2024 goals was to get off Adobe, and off I am. And creating hasn't felt this good in years, I shit you not.
- simonw 2y agoA paywall would make them useless, because you wouldn't be able to find them using Google.
- anitil 2y agoAs an example, when I used to work in embedded development I'd come across some weird undocumented behaviour of a peripheral in a device. Inevitably there'd be a post on a manufacturer-hosted forum where someone else had hit and hopefully solved the same thing. To me at the time these were very valuable, but the actual information was created by the community rather than the manufacturer. As to who would pay for it, that's a tough one - my employer wasn't willing to. I suppose it acts as a commons