* some better tools for searching, tagging, tracking my history, etc to allow me to better use and self organize their docs on 'mdn plus' would be a useful service. it may also give them some more insight on how people are using it and what areas are of bigger utilization.
* tools to allow me to ask private questions in areas of their docs, with some prioritization for answers/responses.
* IDE plugins - I think there's one for IntelliJ Ultimate, but not specifically from MDN. Having more direct access to MDN info while inside my IDEs would be something probably worth paying for. I suspect they may get some useful data on when/where people are having trouble. I wouldn't even mind contributing some of my source code snippets back from within the IDE if it would help give more examples to MDN.
* a couple years back, a friend started a podcast experiment of just reading MDN docs for javascript. It was... a bit different, but trying out some other formats for their docs. perhaps a Q&A podcast where mdn folks answer some of the answers (taken from the paid-Q&A bullet point above). (but yeah, they fired a bunch of people last year, no?)
$2-$3/month, if there were/are nicer tools to help me track what I've seen, perhaps letting me add private annotations so when I come back I can jog my own memory... I would try that, at least for a while (I think I'd get use out of that). $10/month - for just some 'premium' content? Probably not. $50/year would, for me, probably be an upper bound (unless/until I see more potential benefits).
EDIT: had not seen 'down below' - they have 'Bookmark and annotate free and paid content for reference across devices.' as a feature - possibly along the lines of what I was thinking above. Signed up for waitlist.
I wish they’d clarify if the money is used to support MDN or not. I wouldn’t be opposed to supporting MDN patreon style, and if it comes with “perks” like articles, sure, why not. But I would do this to support MDNs core documentation, not because I’m dying for technical deep dives.
That said $10/mo is a bit steep for me. And in any event, if they don’t make explicit that the money goes to support MDN upkeep and development then it’s a nonstarter. I’m not giving Mozilla money to fritter away on another rebrand or whatever else they want to use it for.
"We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis."
But then again, once they have the money, they are free to do what they want with it. Marketing is not binding. It all comes down to this: Do you trust Mozilla?
I’m fully alright with $5 - I saw $10 and immediately thought $5 would be reasonable. If any MDN folks are reading - $10 seems a bit too steep. Especially since this is in US $, it would seemingly put this service out of reach for a lot of people. Perhaps that’s not a concern to the foundation, but works against the principles of the open web in my mind.
Obviously it would be nice if everything everywhere was always free, but docs and opensource suffer a lot from lack of sustainability when based on voluntary donations. Companies simply have no incentives to pay for anything.
There are surely tens of thousands of companies worldwide, whose employees rely on MDN on a daily basis. There are poor startups among them, but many of those companies have pretty deep pockets. If just a small percentage of those employees ask their bosses for this $5/mo. sub, this can improve things considerably. For now everything is free, so no one has an incentive, or a way, to pay.
As developers, we are collectively guilty for never asking our employees for anything which costs $$$. Many of us (me including) assume that asking for a few bucks sub is almost a crime. Or we don't want to deal with stupid bureaucracy and an arcane process to set up the sub.
Personally I hope the experiment will work. Let's see in a few months.
I think the best model would be something like: subscribers get the premium content immediately, other people with a few weeks/months delay. This would keep a healthy balance and keep the incentives in place for people to pay.
> Or we don't want to deal with stupid bureaucracy and an arcane process to set up the sub.
More like this IMO. There tends to be a lot of process with this sort of thing, which makes me reluctant to bother. Especially if I'll have to do it over and over again.
Everyone's suggesting lower price levels, but I'd suggest they have a higher enterprise price level. I bet a lot of medium-large corporations would pay a few thousand a year for all of their employees to have access to this new top-tier MDN plus. Would probably have to support the usual rigamarole of corporate POs and billing and tools to administer accounts with large numbers of users.
Even the copy suggests you're better off not getting this, waiting at least a year for the content to be posted "every month," then subbing for a single month to read it all.
Maybe the Wikipedia/donation model would have been a better play for MDN then this, particularly as freemium was originally about micro-transactions, not $2 more than the cost of Netflix's Basic tier.
Now it falls into the uncanny valley of: Too "product" to be a donation, and not really enough of a product to be a real product.
It seems to be an A/B test, it's $5/m on my side. Which seems fair to me, although I agree about the product angle; I don't care at all about extra content or features, I'd rather just pay to keep MDN going and have everything available to everyone.
I'm surprised by this model being so consumer focused. I think if they offered some kind of enterprise plan where my team could share and highlight critical sections, configure our official support matrix and such, I'd be willing to pony up a few hundred a year from my budget.
This really looks more like something to get companies to just shell out for. "Oh, you all already use MDN every day for your documentation? Sure, we'll pay for MDN Plus and get a nice bulk discount."
I think they're targeting this at the kind of people who are almost happy to donate money to MDN just to see it continue.
The exclusive content just seems like a way of pushing would-be donors over the edge.
It's sort of similar to LWN. The articles are top notch but available for free after a delay (likewise, anything truly useful on MDN+ will leak out on to other platforms). People who subscribe to LWN just want to support the efforts and make sure the content continues to flow, they're not really concerned with the exclusivity of getting it first.
Mozilla fired the people working on this because it was not a revenue stream. How is that surprising?
The Mozilla Corporation exists to partially make money just like any other corporation. How can HN both complain when Mozilla sheds dead weight, but also diversifies revenue?
Mozilla shepherded MDN into the hands of the community quite well imo. They busted their butt to make the content easy to contribute to through GitHub.
Please have some perspective on situations instead of "Hur dur Mozilla fired these people".
I wasn't totally against this until I discovered the A/B testing thing with the subscription costs. Something about that stinks. Just name your price and I'll think about it, don't be shady about it.
The price for every subscription you have was likely A/B tested. It's very standard and not shady.
Subscription prices vary by all types of audiences for subscription-based models, test segments are just one of them, and one of the least shady in my opinion. It's a brand new product and they're gauging the right price.
It is shady. I expect Amazon, Netflix and their like to do this. Mozilla is supposed to have more integrity, after all their mission is to "build a better internet" and "empower" people. Just because something is industry standard doesn't mean you have to do it as well, especially when you place yourself above others morally.
They are naming different prices for different people.
You walk into a bar and the guy in front of you orders a beer for $5. Looks good, so you order the same thing. The bartender says, "For you it's $10." Do you feel fairly treated?
I find hiding all of these articles behind a walled garden a little distasteful. I remember the times when I couldn't have afforded access to such information. Back then, this kind of stuff would have been published in a magazine, and that magazine would have been on the rack of my local bookstore, where I could have flipped through it to decide if it was worth my money.
That magazine would have charged a subscription fee right?
You can "flip" through MDN's other (free) articles, or the excerpts they've provided here to decide if it's worth your money.
How is reading free content on your phone harder than walking to a bookstore? (Also this seems like a paywall, not a walled garden.)
I remember those times too, but there were no magazines for me to flip through to learn CSS float-based/table-based layouts. I had to look at ::shudders:: W3Schools.
> I find hiding all of these articles behind a walled garden a little distasteful.
Did you click the link? The second blob of text, above the fold and not easy to miss:
> Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone. We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis. Again, nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs!
The experience you describe at the bookstore mirrors the proposed experience for MDN Plus rather well, actually.
Readit News
* some better tools for searching, tagging, tracking my history, etc to allow me to better use and self organize their docs on 'mdn plus' would be a useful service. it may also give them some more insight on how people are using it and what areas are of bigger utilization.
* tools to allow me to ask private questions in areas of their docs, with some prioritization for answers/responses.
* IDE plugins - I think there's one for IntelliJ Ultimate, but not specifically from MDN. Having more direct access to MDN info while inside my IDEs would be something probably worth paying for. I suspect they may get some useful data on when/where people are having trouble. I wouldn't even mind contributing some of my source code snippets back from within the IDE if it would help give more examples to MDN.
* a couple years back, a friend started a podcast experiment of just reading MDN docs for javascript. It was... a bit different, but trying out some other formats for their docs. perhaps a Q&A podcast where mdn folks answer some of the answers (taken from the paid-Q&A bullet point above). (but yeah, they fired a bunch of people last year, no?)
$2-$3/month, if there were/are nicer tools to help me track what I've seen, perhaps letting me add private annotations so when I come back I can jog my own memory... I would try that, at least for a while (I think I'd get use out of that). $10/month - for just some 'premium' content? Probably not. $50/year would, for me, probably be an upper bound (unless/until I see more potential benefits).
EDIT: had not seen 'down below' - they have 'Bookmark and annotate free and paid content for reference across devices.' as a feature - possibly along the lines of what I was thinking above. Signed up for waitlist.
That said $10/mo is a bit steep for me. And in any event, if they don’t make explicit that the money goes to support MDN upkeep and development then it’s a nonstarter. I’m not giving Mozilla money to fritter away on another rebrand or whatever else they want to use it for.
"We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis."
But then again, once they have the money, they are free to do what they want with it. Marketing is not binding. It all comes down to this: Do you trust Mozilla?
I would believe Mozilla if they said “100% of the funds will go to MDN” but they don’t say that.
Dead Comment
There are surely tens of thousands of companies worldwide, whose employees rely on MDN on a daily basis. There are poor startups among them, but many of those companies have pretty deep pockets. If just a small percentage of those employees ask their bosses for this $5/mo. sub, this can improve things considerably. For now everything is free, so no one has an incentive, or a way, to pay.
As developers, we are collectively guilty for never asking our employees for anything which costs $$$. Many of us (me including) assume that asking for a few bucks sub is almost a crime. Or we don't want to deal with stupid bureaucracy and an arcane process to set up the sub.
Personally I hope the experiment will work. Let's see in a few months.
I think the best model would be something like: subscribers get the premium content immediately, other people with a few weeks/months delay. This would keep a healthy balance and keep the incentives in place for people to pay.
More like this IMO. There tends to be a lot of process with this sort of thing, which makes me reluctant to bother. Especially if I'll have to do it over and over again.
Everyone's suggesting lower price levels, but I'd suggest they have a higher enterprise price level. I bet a lot of medium-large corporations would pay a few thousand a year for all of their employees to have access to this new top-tier MDN plus. Would probably have to support the usual rigamarole of corporate POs and billing and tools to administer accounts with large numbers of users.
Even the copy suggests you're better off not getting this, waiting at least a year for the content to be posted "every month," then subbing for a single month to read it all.
Maybe the Wikipedia/donation model would have been a better play for MDN then this, particularly as freemium was originally about micro-transactions, not $2 more than the cost of Netflix's Basic tier.
Now it falls into the uncanny valley of: Too "product" to be a donation, and not really enough of a product to be a real product.
https://developer.mozilla.org/api/v1/plus/landing-page/varia...
If you nuke the sessionid cookie and reload you'll either get "$5 a month or $50 a year" (variant 1) or "$10 a month or $100 a year" (variant 2).
(*) Keep in mind that this might have unwanted side effects.
The exclusive content just seems like a way of pushing would-be donors over the edge.
It's sort of similar to LWN. The articles are top notch but available for free after a delay (likewise, anything truly useful on MDN+ will leak out on to other platforms). People who subscribe to LWN just want to support the efforts and make sure the content continues to flow, they're not really concerned with the exclusivity of getting it first.
Deleted Comment
The Mozilla Corporation exists to partially make money just like any other corporation. How can HN both complain when Mozilla sheds dead weight, but also diversifies revenue?
Mozilla shepherded MDN into the hands of the community quite well imo. They busted their butt to make the content easy to contribute to through GitHub.
Please have some perspective on situations instead of "Hur dur Mozilla fired these people".
> The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation
> The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."
That's why; it's not so 1 + 1 = 2. There is a ton of discretion and leeway baked into their mission on matters like MDN.
I'm conducive to the possibility that Mozilla has, as another commenter has said, "lost its way".
Subscription prices vary by all types of audiences for subscription-based models, test segments are just one of them, and one of the least shady in my opinion. It's a brand new product and they're gauging the right price.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
Deleted Comment
You walk into a bar and the guy in front of you orders a beer for $5. Looks good, so you order the same thing. The bartender says, "For you it's $10." Do you feel fairly treated?
You can "flip" through MDN's other (free) articles, or the excerpts they've provided here to decide if it's worth your money.
How is reading free content on your phone harder than walking to a bookstore? (Also this seems like a paywall, not a walled garden.)
I remember those times too, but there were no magazines for me to flip through to learn CSS float-based/table-based layouts. I had to look at ::shudders:: W3Schools.
Did you click the link? The second blob of text, above the fold and not easy to miss:
> Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone. We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis. Again, nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs!
The experience you describe at the bookstore mirrors the proposed experience for MDN Plus rather well, actually.