Email posting should be free

[bodhi]

Title:
Email posting should be free

Area:
posting, email, pin, blogging, free, paid

Summary:
My apologies if this hasn't already been requested 6,392 times.. but truly the #1 obstacle for me getting attached to using this site is inability to use email posting as a free feature.

Description:
It may make sense from a let's hold off a feature to get people to buy phase, but considering that every single blogging site known to chimp and mankind provide this as a feature, and in today's fast mobile world, most of us wish to post on the go and perhaps edit "on desku" at leisure.

without this feature as free, i suspect many prospective trial users will just not get as hooked into DW.

OT: frankly I'm quite perplexed and disappointed here. I don't really get what DW is for - is this like GM's Saturn? Building a Better LiveJournal? Because it's not really doing that for me.

Sorry, and thanks for listening.

/regrets

Poll #1068 Email posting should be free

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
4 (11.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
12 (33.3%)

(I have no opinion)
19 (52.8%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[denise]

i am still not clear how this site can compete with it given so many users there and the ads are hardly invasive there?

We're not really trying to compete with LJ! (Or Blogger, or Wordpress, or Facebook, or etc...) It's been my experience over the years that when one site pins their sights on another site as 'the place to beat' that you lose the unique character of that particular site; when owners start designing to "compete with site X", they lose sight of what makes their own site special and worth supporting. We're not in this to become super-ultra-mega internet billionaires, and we don't want to become the next Facebook or Twitter; we want to build a solid service for a reasonably-sized, loyal following that will allow me and mark to support ourselves and our families, pay a few people to hack on Dreamwidth full-time, and make sure that we're going to be around for years to come. We're looking to be the mom-and-pop corner grocery store, not Wal-Mart!

We did our calculations, and worked out that we'd need a paid account rate of 5%: if 5% of our users pay for services, we'll be able to keep the lights on and the doors open. Anything over and above that will let us play with some more nifty stuff. It's been going really well so far, too; we've had a remarkably positive response from our early adopters, and we're innovating really rapidly, which makes me so happy, you have no idea.

Both mark and I worked for LJ (he from 2004-2006, me from 2003-2007), and we both volunteered there for a long time before we actually started as employees, so we both have a lot of experience in building online community and in what users want to see from a service. We started DW because we wanted to get a chance to do all the things we never could at LJ, but we both still love LJ and we don't want it to go away; we both poured years of our lives into it, and we're still immensely loyal. DW is just our chance to take things in a different direction; we're trying an experiment in user-driven business model, where the community is involved as much as possible, and where we aren't so much the Voices from On High as the custodians and caretakers of the shared community resources, you know? We're hoping we can make it work. :)

(And, to answer your concerns mentioned in your other comments, both mark and I absolutely appreciate this sort of suggestion from people, as well as people who are curious about our business plans and business model. It's part of our guiding principles to tell you guys as much as you want to know about what choices we're making, because we want people to feel comfortable and secure in trusting us with their content and their online presence!)

[bodhi]

thanks. i am not questioning your judgement at all, i just made my plea and hopefully you saw my resolution was that LJ2ME worked fine for me as a mobile posting tool. the main times i've used email on LJ have been to post photos which of course free members cannot do here (no local storage) and sometimes posting articles or something. so really nothing i can't do manually onsite and so i feel very happy with the service per se and will unsub from this forum thread.

i do hope you succeed! i am very happy to meet you all and it's very exciting to be a part of something new and inventive.