[theforum] Who shouts loudest?
Lachlan Cannon
lach at illuminosity.net
Fri Jun 11 23:37:50 CDT 2004
I must say, I'm disappointed in what's been going on in theforum today.
Maybe it's just the way I read it, but it seems to me that there are
people here who are trying to bury ideas they don't like by being the
person to shout the loudest.
What is wrong about conducting a debate on whether evolt should put
advertising on its main page, except that the people who are pro-ads
could outnumber you? If they do, then that's democracy at work, learn to
live with it. If they don't, then what exactly do you lose by having the
discussion?
----
Personally, I think it's a debate we need to have. Martin is right that
we'd be stupid to rely upon one income stream, but just because we put
ads more prominently, doesn't mean we have to abandon other ways of
producing income (such as evolters.org). On the other hand, I think that
we should be able to sustain ourselves without continuously having to
ask people to give us more money.
It's true that we do have enough money to sustain a forseeable level fo
hosting for quite some time, however shouldn't we be planing for growth,
not necessarily just in sever load, but in other things we do? It may
just be me being pessimistic, but it seems to me that our community is
slowly stagnating and dying.
How many new articles have been published in the last 3 months? How many
of these were articles of the quality you'd want to see being published
at evolt? How many of those weren't produced by people on this list?
It's obvious to me that we need to do this redesign, and we need to do
*something* to reverse the decline of evolt. It's not a problem for the
web at large, because communities such as SitePoint are managing to
thrive at the moment.
Maybe I'm being an evil corporate money whore, maybe I'm short-sighted,
but I think that we need money coming in to be able to sustain and
reinvigorate our community. Maybe we can offer an amazon voucher for
best article of the month. Maybe we can pay respected Internet
commentators to write a monthly or weekly article for us. Maybe we need
to think about evolt paying somebody part-time to work on the site to be
able to do things as soon as they need to be done (eg, adding RSS
button, answering contacts, moderating -- things that often take far too
long with our current volunteer force). Let's face it, all the people
here are busy, and we're not going to get less busy in the forseeable
future.
Evolt always has been, and always should be a non-profit. Nobody here
has been disputing that. However, it's the view of some of us that we
should provide more for our members while asking less of them, and that
we need money to get things done.
If we can't even debate the issue here without people trying to drown it
out, because it doesn't fit their opinion of what evolt is, then we
mayaswell not have this community, and I for one will tender my
resignation from it. I came to help out behind the scenes of evolt
because I liked what evolt did, and I like the potential that it had. I
didn't come to engage in this sort of bullshit, and if this is all that
the evolt administration has left to offer, then I'd rather offer my
time to a different community.
--
Lach
http://illuminosity.net/
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