[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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