Allow non-paid users to get email copies of their comments?

[brooksmoses]

Title:
Allow non-paid users to get email copies of their comments?

Area:
comments

Summary:
To encourage cross-site community, it should be as "frictionless" as possible to comment on DW. One of the barriers for (paid) LJ users is that, in order to get emailed copies of their own comments, they have to have a paid account on DW as well. This means that I can't ask people to only comment on my DW entries without notably inconveniencing several of my friends. I suggest that this particular feature be made available to all commenters, including OpenID accounts.

Description:
One of the goals of DW, as I understand it, is to foster online community -- and, in particular, to make it appealing for people outside of DW (e.g., people on LJ) to comment on posts on DW. In my opinion, this is critical for DW's usefulness to me; the comments that I get from my friends (and the conversations they have in comments) are a key part of the reason that I post.

There is one key reason that commenting on DW posts is unappealing to many of my LJ friends (and was unappealing to me before I got a paid DW account). On LJ, I am used to getting emailed copies of my own comments, which I use for archival purposes. On DW, one has to have a paid account in order to get these copies, even if one is logging in via OpenID from a paid LJ account. This is annoying, and a barrier to conversation; see, for instance, this post from a friend of mine: http://lcohen.livejournal.com/794820.html.

Furthermore, making commenting features paid-only is contrary to the idea of having interworking between sites; if there were a dozen LJ/DW/etc. sites that had thriving communities, a person would either have to (a) limit themselves to participating in communities of people on one site, (b) have paid accounts on all dozen sites, or (c) make do with fewer commenting features even if they have a primary paid account. This doesn't scale well.

In that context, my taking my posts to DW from LJ is an antisocial move for my LJ friends; it takes away their features when they comment on my posts. That's a strong incentive for me to keep my primary posting "home" on LJ.

Thus, I would recommend that commenting-related features not be paid-only, but be open to all accounts including in particular OpenID accounts. And I'd particularly recommend this for the "email a copy of my own comments" feature; as Lisa notes in the post I linked to, that's useful for tracking conversations -- which is particularly important when multiple sites are involved. The aspect of having a copy of one's comment to archive is also something that's to be important to a number of people.

(I recognize that this does risk some revenue loss; in fact, this feature was initially the one reason that I bought a LJ paid account. I do think the problems of not having it outweigh that, though, as it's also one of the main reasons that I'm not currently actively using my DW account much.)

Poll #2805 Allow non-paid users to get email copies of their comments?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 55

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
5 (9.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (1.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
39 (70.9%)

(I have no opinion)
10 (18.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[denise]

*That's* worth considering, if someone could figure out how to make it work. The ability to sponsor paid-ish activities for visitors to a journal would be terrific. Couldn't do, "you get five extra userpics when you're here," but could potentially have "anyone can edit comments in my journal."

Please do suggest that, because I think it's worth discussing!