[HN Gopher] MDN Plus
___________________________________________________________________
MDN Plus
Author : bpierre
Score : 459 points
Date : 2021-05-27 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (developer.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (developer.mozilla.org)
| Someone1234 wrote:
| The $10/m right now seems on the high side.
|
| 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.
| jmchuster wrote:
| 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."
| worble wrote:
| 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| You're right, looks like an A/B test. You can see it here:
|
| 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).
| [deleted]
| moron4hire wrote:
| Where does it say $10/mo? I see $5/mo or $50/yr.
| [deleted]
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| _Microft wrote:
| Delete the cookies for _developer.mozilla.org_ (*) and refresh
| the page, with a bit of luck, you 'll be in the $5 per
| month/$50 per year group ;)
|
| (*) Keep in mind that this might have unwanted side effects.
| bhauer wrote:
| This reminded me that I wanted to donate to MDN. And I just went
| on a quick journey through the MDN web site to find how and where
| you can do that. It's not clear to me at all how or even _if_ you
| can donate to MDN.
|
| Am I missing something?
|
| Elsewhere in this thread is a link to a separate organization
| called "OpenWebDocs," which appears to be an outside consortium
| that contributes to MDN. So perhaps donating to them is
| approximately the same in that you're donating to a group who
| will then contribute time writing content.
|
| _Edit: Perhaps MDN is not a stand-along thing, and the way you
| help fund MDN directly is by donating to Mozilla? Can anyone
| clarify the relationship of these various parties?_
| zeusly wrote:
| It's under Open Web Docs: https://opencollective.com/open-web-
| docs
|
| https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-open-web-docs-to...
| wbamberg wrote:
| > Elsewhere in this thread is a link to a separate organization
| called "OpenWebDocs," which appears to be an outside consortium
| that contributes to MDN.
|
| Yes, that's what Open Web Docs is. It's funded by individual
| and corporate contributions, through
| https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/. The money goes to
| pay writers (currently 2 full time, but we are hiring 2 more)
| to create and maintain independent open web documentation
| ("open" in the sense of accessible to everyone, "independent"
| in the sense that it shouldn't represent any one company's
| view). Currently our work is pretty much entirely focused on
| MDN, although that's not necessarily going to be the only thing
| we ever work on. Our 2021 high-level goals:
| https://github.com/openwebdocs/project/blob/main/2021-goals....
| .
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Afaik MDN maintainence is under the Mozilla Corporation (which
| also works on Firefox), the for-profit under the Mozilla
| Foundation (which primarily works on internet advocacy). You
| cannot directly donate to the Mozilla Corporation, and money
| donated to the Foundation can't be used in the Corporation
| (it's not _that_ easy to avoid taxes).
| hyko wrote:
| Why is every paid for service called "Something Plus" these days?
| Who started this trend?
| have_faith wrote:
| I'm a long time MDN and Firefox user but I'm struggling to see
| the benefit of this beyond one free article a month? all of the
| other "features" are trivial without the subscription (bookmarks,
| save as pdf...). Seems like a very weak offering.
|
| It feels like this could have landed with a bit more punch and a
| more compelling sell and it could very well evolve into something
| very valuable but I can't see the appeal right now.
|
| Another commenter mentioned $10 a month but I'm seeing $5 at the
| moment. Right now there's just no features I'd consider paying
| anything for. I would happily pay $5-$10 a month though for
| something more fleshed out, more regular high quality technical
| deep dives and some other benefits that justify a regular
| subscription.
| handrous wrote:
| > save as pdf...
|
| Unless they intentionally break it somehow, my print dialog can
| already do that to any page.
|
| Actually it's even easier: "file -> export to PDF" is an option
| in Safari. Saves a couple clicks.
|
| I get the idea, but including that on the list of premium
| features is really weird. Are they just not going to provide a
| print stylesheet at all, unless you pay? Maybe that's it.
| nashashmi wrote:
| These don't seem like features that should be behind a paywall.
| jakub_g wrote:
| 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.
| ufmace wrote:
| > 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| If they're going to start collecting/producing high level tech
| articles/content, they should just start a magazine like Stripe's
| Increment Magazine, put effort into the look of it etc and ride
| the subscription method off that.
| greatgib wrote:
| It looks like that it is the final straw to prove that Mozilla
| has completely lost its way...
|
| For any startup or company it is normal to provide "premium" paid
| service and "advanced" content/knowledge to the subset of
| internet users that can afford it.
|
| But ... this is the Mozilla foundation. Too much paid silicon
| valley executives transformed a structure dedicated to find funds
| to protect an "open internet" into a for profit structure that
| prostitute itself as much as needed to make money just for being
| profitable.
|
| We saw it coming with Firefox evolution being neglected to
| instead waste money on numerous "outreachy" things.
|
| Just for memo, here is one of the 10 points of the Mozilla
| manifesto:
|
| "The internet is a global public resource that must remain open
| and accessible"
|
| Looks like that a "premium paywalled content website" will have a
| hard time pretending to be "open".
| brundolf wrote:
| This is a neat idea, but unfortunately I'm not seeing anything
| super compelling in the premium features. Quality deep-dives
| exist elsewhere on the web. Browsers already have bookmarks. A
| customizable compatibility table just... doesn't sound useful.
|
| I'll keep an eye on it, I hope they succeed, but I don't see many
| people paying for these features as they stand
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Is this Mozilla's first non-free (as in speech), non-open source
| product?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Imagine a dystopian future where you google something like
| "document queryselector API" and now have to ignore both of the
| top two hits from W3Schools _and_ MDN as useless spam-filled low
| content sites.
|
| _shudder_
|
| I hope we don't go down that road...
| schleiss wrote:
| it's interesting where this is going especially after the layoffs
| a few months ago. The old HN discussion can be found here:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Should've done this _before_ they slashed all the staff working
| on it. Seriously, what the hell is going on at Mozilla HQ - their
| CEO is a nutbar.
| sequoia wrote:
| 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.
| abraham wrote:
| On one of my devices it lists $5/month so they seem to be
| testing different amounts.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| HerminaC wrote:
| We are indeed reading this feedback. And I get your point -
| thanks!
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| That's awesome - I'll keep my eye on pricing. I'd be glad
| to support you.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| Yeah, I have little interest in any of the listed
| services. But, I'd be happy to contribute a couple
| dollars a month to a "pay what you like to support us"
| tier. Either way I'll probably sign up if it's priced
| reasonably (or tiered), but imo it's definitely worth
| marketing "support MDN" prominently for this.
|
| Two issues I found:
|
| 1) I had no idea there was a waitlist til I read another
| comment here; I wasn't going to expand the article, and
| the signup CTA is gated behind doing that 2) the signup
| button seems to do nothing? I even tried opening it in
| Chrome (Firefox is my primary browser)
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Five bucks would be a no brainer amount for me. Ten would
| make me pause and consider if I really needed it.
| agogdog wrote:
| If you use MDN once or twice a month it's still well worth the
| $10, IMO. I use it way more frequently than that.
| Zababa wrote:
| $5 a month when I'm using my regular web browser (chrome), $10 a
| month when I'm using private navigation. $10 a month on Firefox
| too. Maybe because I'm in Europe and it's adjusted to
| salaries/cost of living?
| asciimov wrote:
| I see $5 a month on Firfox/Linux in the US.
| zaarn wrote:
| It's a random A/B test. If you clear your cookies, there is a
| 50% chance it'll change to the other.
| wtmt wrote:
| India, with Firefox Focus here, seeing $10 per month/$100 per
| year. Clear cookies and repeat again a few times, and it's $5
| per month/$50 per year.
|
| This has nothing to do with cost of living or purchasing power
| parity. It's just random testing.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| At first glance, this feels a little distasteful. I've always
| thought of the MDN docs like Wikipedia; a non-profit public
| resource. Attempting to monetize it feels... wrong somehow.
|
| So long as the docs themselves remain under CC-BY-SA though guess
| it's not really a problem. The premium features they currently
| offer seem reasonable, and if things ever get _too_ out of hand
| the community could always just move to another site. It also
| doesn 't sound like something I'd pay for though, so not sure how
| successful it'll be.
|
| On the positive side, more funding to maintain MDN could turn out
| to be a good thing in the long term. I guess we'll have to see.
| agumonkey wrote:
| yeah a bit the same but if they need money to keep valuable
| operations like MDN going then making a way to get some cash
| this way doesn't bother me more than that
| Zababa wrote:
| I don't really understand how offering better content against
| money is worse than asking for money regularly like Wikipedia
| does (especially when they seem to just consume more and more
| money).
| oefrha wrote:
| A paywall shuts out financially disadvantaged groups and
| limits the circulation of knowledge. Donations don't, however
| annoying the banners are.
|
| Whether overly abundant donations are misallocated is a
| completely orthogonal issue.
|
| Note that I'm not saying we are entitled to anything; but
| slapping the MDN brand on a premium subscription service does
| tarnish the original brand a little.
| [deleted]
| Zababa wrote:
| On the other hand a paywall may mean that people writing
| content are the one that gets the money, which creates an
| healthier ecosystem that doesn't depend on donation of
| money or time (as opposed to wikipedia).
|
| Wikipedia misallocating funds does tarnish the original
| brand a lot, especially when most people that contribute
| content are doing it for free.
| oefrha wrote:
| > Wikipedia misallocating funds does tarnish the original
| brand a lot
|
| Which has nothing to do the donation model.
|
| Wikimedia can pay full time content writers if they want
| to.
|
| Mozilla can also use the subscription income to pay CEO
| comp if they want to.
|
| Allocation of funds has close to nothing to do with the
| acquisition of funds, unless the acquisition comes with a
| specific mandate, which neither Wikipedia donations nor
| the subscription service here has.
| Zababa wrote:
| You're right, I wrongly assumed that MDN Plus money would
| stay on MDN Plus or at leasat MDN, but they said nothing
| of the sort.
| feanaro wrote:
| But as far as I understand the source article, MDN Plus is
| not a paywall to the type of content that is already on
| MDN. What's going to be behind a paywall are a kind of
| technical essays which are not currently on MDN and some
| convenience features.
|
| Is my understanding incorrect?
| oefrha wrote:
| That's why I'm mainly taking issue with slapping the MDN
| brand over the seemingly not terribly related information
| service.
| [deleted]
| account42 wrote:
| Having a paid option disincentives improvement of the non-
| paid option.
| Zababa wrote:
| As long as they're not using the donation money to fund the
| paid option (which, to be fair, Mozilla has an history of
| doing), I don't see how.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| That's assuming that revenue from MDN plus will go only
| to fund more premium content.
|
| I don't think that is true (maybe I missed something from
| their page?), which means they will always have the
| incentive to make more premium content in order to
| generate more revenue, especially if they need it to
| cover the expenses.
| Zababa wrote:
| You're right, this is a assumption I made that may be
| wrong, and in that case my arguments don't hold.
| 015a wrote:
| Because there are tons of people who cannot pay for services
| like this (lower class, students, third-world countries,
| etc), and learning how to build and deploy technology is
| powerful leverage to improving their quality of life.
| ArcFeind wrote:
| I mean it's not like web development tutorials and blogs
| haven't filled the internet with free content for years to
| learn everything you could possibly want. freecodecamp will
| take you from nothing to hirable, for free.
| mimsee wrote:
| This feels more like a service rather than it being a
| subscription-based donation. It's not called Wikipedia Plus.
| Zababa wrote:
| If it's to pay technical writers I don't see the problem.
| Wikipedia on the other hand ask for donations that seems
| absorbed by some kind of administrative black hole. https:/
| /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... ht
| tps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim.
| ..
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Self Wiking Ice Cweam Cone
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone
| Zababa wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't know the phenomenon had a name.
| [deleted]
| city41 wrote:
| I think this is the right step to take for things like this.
| There are massive corporations with cash galore that use open
| source and publicly available resources and rarely give
| anything back. With MDN Plus, there's a chance now that devs at
| these companies will get their company to pay the subscription.
| We need more programs like this.
| ______- wrote:
| > Attempting to monetize it feels... wrong
|
| On a long enough timeline, all free and libre services done out
| of the good will and charitable efforts of contributors and
| maintainers, will eventually succumb to some sort of
| monetization strategy. I know in my case, and last time I
| checked, I don't work for free.
| sequoia wrote:
| > Take MDN with you: Download MDN documentation and deep dives
| for access offline.
|
| _(Don't tell anyone about wget!)_
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Or httrack! It's old as fuck but it still works.
| claytongulick wrote:
| Just for the purposes of N+1 feedback:
|
| I agree with many other posters on here. I don't have much, if
| any, interest in the services mentioned, but I would happily sign
| up for $5/mo to support MDN which is the single most valuable dev
| resource I have available to me. At my experience level, much
| more useful that (for example) stackoverflow, which I rarely use.
|
| Given that all of my income is indirectly derived from my ability
| to locate high quality documentation on HTML and JavaScript APIs,
| pitching in $5/mo would be a no-brainer for me to support the
| continued development of such high quality content without ads.
| MikusR wrote:
| Reminder that Mozilla fired the people that wrote the content.
| archerx wrote:
| And the CEO got another yearly raise.
| sthnblllII wrote:
| Not just a raise, she got 3 million dollars.
| dfabulich wrote:
| MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles
| is not the right approach. (Can you think of _anybody_ who makes
| real money selling deep dives on the web?)
|
| We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass
| to access to the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room.
| Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're
| interested in, and provide that.
|
| This is how basically all Patreons work. People buy those
| subscriptions like hotcakes, they have excellent margins, and the
| subscribers are reliably very satisfied with the result.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Yeah.. If I were to throw down for something like this I would
| actually like for the content to be made available for free
| after a period. So, I would just be supporting.
|
| However, back to the topic of corporate sponsors.. I see a
| distinct lack of calling out who the sponsors are? We all know
| a lot of VERY big companies shut down their own doc efforts to
| throw in with MDN; why not sell them call-out spots on a list
| of sponsors? Tiered even? Doesn't have to be super intrusive
| but would potentially open up funding channels within those
| large companies.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "real money."
|
| On the fully indie side of things Michael Hartl has been doing
| it for a while with Ruby, front-end technologies, and seems to
| be doing OK for himself. I don't know what kind of profit we're
| talking about but it seems that it's enough to keep at it.
| https://www.learnenough.com/
|
| Then there's Udemy. Max S. has 1.4 million "students" which I
| believe means his courses have been purchased a combined 1.4
| million times. If we assume an average selling price of about
| $10 that's a lot of money even when we subtract Udemy's cut of
| the money. https://www.udemy.com/user/maximilian-schwarzmuller/
|
| In general, be thoughtful when considering what you think
| "makes money" on the web. While not easy to achieve, there are
| a lot of folks making very good livings selling things on the
| web. But of course it's not going to make headlines if they are
| "only" making $100K or $500K. The press is only really
| interested in gaudy public stock offerings worth billions.
|
| In the specific case of MDN, it certainly seems like they could
| sustain themselves using this model. If 10,000 people sign up
| and pay $10 a month that's $1.2 million/year in revenue.
| Certainly enough to pay for a rack of servers, some dedicated
| staff, and a rotating cast of outside contributors to write the
| articles.
| dfabulich wrote:
| Hartl sells books, not articles, which he sells as
| "tutorials" (classes). You're not meant to read and enjoy
| just one chapter of his book "Learn Enough Git to Be
| Dangerous" in isolation; he doesn't just send out a "deep
| dive" article each month on whatever he wants.
|
| It is absolutely possible to make money selling
| classes/tutorials (e.g. via Udemy or any of a variety of
| other online class platform), but MDN is already committed to
| making its classes/tutorials available for free
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Tutorials
|
| It's an essential component of MDN Plus that they have to say
| exactly what they say in TFA: "Nothing is changing with the
| existing MDN Web Docs content -- this content will continue
| to be free and available to everyone."
|
| As a result, MDN can't practically sell books OR classes.
| What's left? VIP access.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| In your parent post you suggested that nobody's making
| "real money" doing this. I provided counterexamples.
|
| Yeah, sure, slightly different models. But plenty of people
| are selling this kind of content and achieving financial
| success -- and that's without the benefit of MDN's brand
| recognition. Clearly, it can be done.
|
| What is your point now? That these counterexamples don't
| have the exact same % mix of free vs. VIP content as MDN is
| proposing, therefore MDN can't financially sustain itself?
| Seems like quite a supposition. I see a wide variety of
| free/VIP % mixes out there. Doesn't seem like there's one
| right answer or magic formula.
|
| MDN may or may not succeed with this model. As with most
| things it comes down to execution. It's relatively new
| territory for Mozilla so I'm not convinced they'll pull it
| off. But it's not like some wild and untested/disproven
| model.
| webmaven wrote:
| > MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive"
| articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody
| who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?)
|
| Sure. They're often called "ebooks".
| twic wrote:
| > We know how to do this "correctly."
|
| Charge for the "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" content?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| > Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep
| dives on the web?
|
| It can be done on a small scale. The name escapes me but
| somebody big in the React world recently put out a course and
| made well over 5-6 figures in the first day of preorders alone.
|
| Now whether that scales to fund an entire organization or
| corporation remains to be seen.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Yeah, except didnt they just get rid of most of the team.
|
| "Deep Dives" can be farmed out to contractors and you dont have
| to worry about paying employees.
| throwanem wrote:
| Or keeping the free content up to date, since you're
| concerned about revenue streams now and that isn't one of
| them. "Nothing is changing," indeed...
| truth_ wrote:
| This was my exact thought after seeing this. Selling Deep
| Dives? Who would pay for that?
|
| I would always trust open, free deep dives under open scrutiny
| and criticism more than something behind a paywall.
|
| Even if this is from Mozilla.
|
| A premium chat room/forum would have been miles better.
| ygjb wrote:
| A premium chat room or forum doesn't make more sense because
| the people Mozilla would be paying to staff that channel are
| already on several open forums and most are willing to answer
| questions (even if that answer is RTFM and a redirect to an
| MDN page).
|
| Yes, they got rid of most of the team, bu the remaining team
| members that are there and pretty much all of the community
| contributors would quit if they were suddenly transitioned
| into paid tech support roles.
| Farow wrote:
| I feel like substack has proved that high quality writing can
| be monetized really well by providing contracts in the range of
| $200k/year for some of its writers.
| joduplessis wrote:
| Oof, not a good look for Mozilla. Totally get the need for $ -
| but I don't know anybody who would pay for this, esp. with other
| companies like Google producing so much content around web
| technologies.
| la_fayette wrote:
| I absolutely hope that this experiment works out for Mozilla.
| However, I think there is no need for such a service. The web is
| an open platform, there is no secret knowledge. As an advanced
| web developer you can find out everything on your own, as a
| beginner you can use free MDN tutorials (or other websites).
|
| They could offer certificates for different levels of web-
| development skills. Based on the popularity of MDN this could
| work out well...
| FriedrichN wrote:
| 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.
| alphabravoB wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| I mean..aren't they doing exactly that?
| gilrain wrote:
| 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?
| paxys wrote:
| This is already happening for literally everything that you
| buy. And no, I don't care whether someone else paid less or
| more than me for something or got it for free. If I don't
| think the price is fair then I'll say no and move on.
| abraham wrote:
| They aren't charging people different amounts, they're
| testing waitlist signup interest at different amounts.
| Presumably once they gauge interest a single level will be
| applied to everyone.
| gilrain wrote:
| In the mean time, people are being charged different
| amounts. They are literally charging different people
| different amounts. You might think that isn't a big deal,
| but how can you insist it isn't the case?
| edu wrote:
| They're are not charging anything to anybody yet, you can
| get in the waitlist and answer a survey which explicitly
| asks if you think the price is to high, fair or to low.
|
| Moreover next to the price there's a disclaimer that the
| "Price is subject to change".
|
| To me it seems that they're just running an experiment to
| determine what's the price they should put to the
| service, which seems smart and correct.
| whelming_wave wrote:
| How can I sign up for a subscription, then? I seem to
| have missed it on the page.
| moosebear847 wrote:
| If you sold ice cream on the street and needed to figure
| out how to become profitable, would you be so opposed to
| trying out selling at $5 one day and $7 the next? Or would
| this be too unfair to the people that paid $5?
|
| It's the intent I guess. The bartender story seems to imply
| a bad reason for the discrepancy (some type of unfair
| discrimination), while in this case it's to find out if you
| can charge more to eg capture back more of the value people
| are getting from you. Which doesn't seem so bad.
| webmaven wrote:
| Testing different prices on different days doesn't give
| you as much confidence (price sensitivity can vary by day
| of the week, weather, etc.).
|
| Then there are tests that would be hard to run even on
| different days, like doubling your nominal price and
| splashing a "today only 50% off" or "buy one get one
| free" offer.
|
| Real-world price testing is so much harder to pull off,
| it isn't as common, which is part of the reason web A/B
| tests seem jarring when the curtain is pulled back.
| clusterfish wrote:
| Except you're not ordering anything here,just looking at an
| ad mentioning the expected price, subject to change.
| efficax wrote:
| You want to find the price that fits the market. It's not
| shady, it's best practice!
| admax88q wrote:
| I'm very excited to see all the people who said they would pay
| for something like MDN find a reason why they won't pay for this.
| Zababa wrote:
| Here's the link of the opencollective of Open Web Docs, the
| organization financing MDN: https://opencollective.com/open-web-
| docs
| nsonha wrote:
| the offline thing kind of reminds me of MSDN back in those days
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Awesome. I'm happy to support MDN.
|
| My only hope is that they make it a "pay what you wish" with
| $10/month as the minimum price.
|
| Frankly I would be happy to support "regular" MDN in such a way
| as well. This is an important cornerstone for all front end
| developers. The promised "premium content" is a cherry on top,
| but is not necessary for them to have my support.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Nothing is changing is bullshit. They will now have economic
| incentive NOT to include content in the free docs, but rather in
| the MDN Plus. As end-users, I'm sure we will soon see outdated
| articles in the free version.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| I'll likely toss them the $10/month they are suggesting, MDN is
| priceless and helps me make an income daily/weekly!
| offtop5 wrote:
| I really like this. MDN can't be maintained for free after all,
| it's by far the best resource I've found for web development.
|
| The next time I have a web dev job I'll buy this
| kumarvvr wrote:
| For 100 USD a year, You could buy about 10 - 15 courses on
| Udemy.com
|
| And compliment it with free resources on the web.
|
| I don't see the attraction of what Mozilla is providing.
|
| Perhaps companies can have bulk subscriptions or they have some
| sort of revenue sharing deals with authors.
| mrzimmerman wrote:
| I donate to my local NPR station. This feels very much along the
| same lines and I'm down.
| javajosh wrote:
| A little bit scary but also possibly cool. Scary because freemium
| and paywall go hand in hand; cool because "technical deep dives
| by experts" sounds good.
| timdorr wrote:
| Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27296014
| brodock wrote:
| I'm happy they are finding ways of monetising that don't rely on
| adtech
| _Microft wrote:
| They should have been paid _out of the advertising budget_ of
| Mozilla if someone there had the insight that no other campaign
| that they could have run with that money would have furthered
| the goodwill of web developers towards Mozilla /Firefox more
| than MDN did.
| gilrain wrote:
| When they laid off a bunch of their technical writers, there was
| an outpouring of desire for a way to pay for MDN.
|
| Let's hope those voices follow through!
| ArcFeind wrote:
| Honestly blown away by all the comments being upset that a
| service with real costs is charging money to cover those costs.
| And the weak as shit excuses about why they won't pay money for
| this. It's like complaining that OnlyFans exists because pornhub
| is free.
|
| It's $5/mo or $10/mo if you don't want to pay for it, there's the
| whole rest of the internet to get free web dev content from, not
| to mention the rest of MDN which they host and provide to you for
| free.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| One of the depressing realities of software and the internet.
| It's especially depressing that people that likely build and
| sell technology for a living think like this.
|
| I've been thinking about donating to Mozilla for a while - even
| though I don't use their browser, I think they're an
| indispensable force of good on the internet -, but haven't
| gotten around to it. This could prove like an excellent value
| proposition for me and if it's any good they can count on my
| money.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Glad to see they're including content and articles as well. I
| used to swear by MDN for HTML help, but ever since I bit the
| bullet and just read the HTML spec I find going directly to the
| (free) source a far better option. Not to mention there's a
| developer version of the spec that cuts out the implementor
| details and lets you focus on developer details.
|
| But now they are competing with free content from Smashing and
| CSS-Tricks and lessons from a variety of free sources, including
| Google who has great course content.
|
| I just don't see this saving Mozilla.
| mileycyrusXOXO wrote:
| Mozilla just let me donate directly to fund the projects I love.
|
| instead of creating all these services that I'm not really sure
| if the money is going to the whole company or actually supporting
| development of these product I use
|
| I would donate to MDN, I would donate to Firefox development
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Nobody would donate to the CEO and board's salary though, and
| that's the unfortunate problem.
| terminalserver wrote:
| With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of
| Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up
| with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium
| to be viable.
|
| Presumably that's because they can't link your identity to it or
| something, making it nit worthwhile doing.
|
| Apple: "we're a hardware company, it's not our job to document
| the web"
|
| Microsoft: "Internet Explorer failed, it's not our job to
| document the web"
|
| Google : "we're a advertising company, it's not our job to
| document the web".
|
| Facebook... etc
|
| Amazon ... etc
|
| And so on ...
| rchowe wrote:
| Having the browser vendors write documentation might be an
| issue because they will all write it for their own browser.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I don't think that's the negative you think it is. It would
| provide a lot more clarity on how the browsers differ.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I wouldn't be including Microsoft in that list. Microsoft's own
| documentation is excellent.
| terminalserver wrote:
| Microsoft shut off their documentation in favor of MDN.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Well, they also put a quarter mil into MDN.
| fnord123 wrote:
| So, one month of Mitchel Baker's salary.
| croes wrote:
| Have you ever looked at MS documentation of the SharePoint
| REST API?
| kevingadd wrote:
| How's MDN's sharepoint documentation?
|
| The point is that the MSDN documentation for HTML and IE
| was quite good, and then it was deprecated in favor of
| MDN's superior documentation.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Apple: "we're a hardware company, it's not our job to
| document the web"_
|
| Or, as everyone who's ever had to look at Apple's developer
| documentation knows, to document their own operating system
| APIs.
| debacle wrote:
| I was using a WebRTC feature just yesterday that is listed as
| supported by Safari in modern versions of iOS all over the
| web. I can tell you for certain that it is 100% not.
| xixixao wrote:
| Yes, there are bugs in it that I don't think are documented
| anywhere. We do have working video calling on mSafari, but
| we're actively trying to kill that dependency.
| VoxPelli wrote:
| Microsoft and Google are the top financial contributors to MDN:
| https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs
| kojoru wrote:
| It was a concious decision in 2017 to close Google's and
| Microsoft's web documentation portals so that MDN can be a
| unified source of truth:
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/developers-rejoice-microsoft-g...
| hnbad wrote:
| That's not the entire story. Google still has web.dev, which
| blurs the line between "web platform" features and Google-
| specific or "experimental" features. Neither of the two
| actively promote MDN either (web.dev doesn't mention it even
| where it would make sense).
|
| This doesn't seem as much of an intentional decision of the
| two corporations to promote MDN as an independent resource
| but more likely the result of developers working for these
| companies refusing to compete with MDN.
| falcolas wrote:
| Weird idea - since these big companies all voluntarily
| stopped documenting in favor of MDN, perhaps _they_ should
| pay Mozilla for this (it 's saving them money, after all).
| ratww wrote:
| They do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs
| https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs
| falcolas wrote:
| If Mozilla is still having to do a paid option - MDN Plus
| - they are obviously not getting enough. Looks like
| around the price of one employee for the top funders.
|
| Unless Mozilla is suddenly operating for profit and
| following the ol' "why get some of the money when you can
| get all of the money" business model.
| blackoil wrote:
| They may not be for profit, but they can be inefficient
| enough.
| sp332 wrote:
| You're thinking of the Mozilla Foundation, which is not-
| for-profit. The Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation,
| which is "for-profit" and develops Firefox and MDN.
|
| Money flows from the Corporation to the Foundation every
| year.
| notatoad wrote:
| pretty sad state of things that the top 10 corporate
| contributors bottoms out at $25 in contributions.
| Macha wrote:
| The number 7 corporate donor is below the number 9
| individual donor.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out of
| Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent MDN Web
| Fondation or something. Mozilla seems to have a poor track
| record of maintaining anything as we saw when they fired most
| of the people working on MDN and other engineers despite
| being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or
| other things like email, the whole non-profit Mozilla vs for
| profit Mozilla structure is just awful.
|
| MDN is its only gem left outside of Firefox itself, it's good
| they're doing this though, but only if all proceeds go
| primarily towards MDN itself. I can foresee people
| unsubscribing over funding issues if they find out Mozilla
| foundation is just pocketing profits from this for things
| outside of MDN.
| dralley wrote:
| >despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of
| Firefox or other things like email
|
| In 2021, there is not a chance in hell that any significant
| number of people are going to pay money for their web
| browser. At best (and this is very optimistic) it might
| make a few million dollars from dedicated HN-types, which
| is nowhere close to what Google gives them.
|
| I actually _would_ pay money for a Mozilla-branded email
| service, but running an email service isn 't a walk in the
| park, and I expect all of the typical people would be
| complaining about Mozilla spending time and money on
| something that isn't Firefox, regardless of whether it's
| profitable (see also: all the complaining about Pocket).
|
| Honestly, I wish that Mozilla had acquired Scroll (rather
| than Twitter) and started pushing it harder. That would be
| very in-line with their goals as an organization, and might
| eventually become a significant revenue source.
| ahtaarra wrote:
| Scroll probably would have worked well with Pocket
| because the former could have increased user engagement
| (and, in turn, help better/newer stories end up in the
| top posts/popular category) while in the latter support
| for some paywalled content-providers could be added under
| a single subscription system.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out
| of Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent...
|
| If https://servo.org/ is any measure. Probably not :(
|
| People don't care about browsers until it's too late.
| [deleted]
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Google has great web documentation, I still have this tab open
| from earlier this week:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27233019
| ignoramous wrote:
| Btw, Google does create a _lot_ of content on web development
| (ex on webrtc.org, web.dev, html5rocks.com etc) including on
| various youtube GDG channels and release quite a bit of OSS
| reference implementations too.
| luke2m wrote:
| "As of February 2021, OWD top financial contributors are
| Microsoft, Google, Coil, and Igalia"
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs
| Macha wrote:
| I believe they've also been contributing to the docs
| themselves since Google shut down their own effort (may have
| just been a section of web.dev?) a few years back.
| colllectorof wrote:
| That's assuming that those companies want outside developers to
| be knowledgeable. That's a questionable assumption. If anyone
| here remembers how old Microsoft used to operate and why people
| went to get MS-something certificates you know what I mean.
|
| "Free" documentation is often designed to give you barely
| enough info to start using their products, but not much more.
| And we're kind of used to this by now. MDN, FreeBSD hanbook or
| the original set of Smalltalk books stand as exceptions and
| reminders what things _could_ look like if motivations were
| different.
| moocowtruck wrote:
| so the best way to come up with more money is to squeeze it out
| of devs ?
| chris_engel wrote:
| I strongly dislike the idea. It reduces deep knowledge to people
| who can pay for it. The web should be open for anyone. (yeah, Its
| already not like this, I know)
| tiagod wrote:
| Agreed. Normally I wouldn't be that surprised at this, but I
| thought of Mozilla as a nonprofit that wouldn't just gatekeep
| access to some information to those that have the money to pay
| for it (Could someone in Iran or Cuba even pay for this if they
| wanted?)
| city41 wrote:
| On the flip side, corporations that make a ton of money off of
| this information, rarely, if ever, voluntarily pay for it. It's
| a hard problem to solve.
| hn8788 wrote:
| Nothing is stopping people from writing their own articles on
| other sites for free. Developers aren't owed free articles to
| read, and if people want to be compensated for the time spent
| writing articles, then they should be.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Your other option is W3 which fills their site with ads.
|
| If I could, I'd pay Google 50$ a month directly to disable all
| of their advertising across all sites which use ad sense.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> 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!_
| elliekelly wrote:
| Are there any studies about how long the corporate "nothing
| is changing" line actually holds true? My gut says maybe
| 18-24 months? Perhaps I'm cynical but I see "nothing is
| changing" and I can't help but assume a change is all but
| inevitable and they're just going to slow walk me to it.
| ale42 wrote:
| As far as I understand, the MDN documenting the standard
| (HTML5, CSS, etc.) will stay freely accessible as it is. I
| prefer this than having trackers & ads on the site... which
| would be completely contrary to their values anyway.
| baggachipz wrote:
| > As far as I understand, the MDN documenting the standard
| (HTML5, CSS, etc.) will stay freely accessible as it is.
|
| For now. Once you let the monetization genie out of the
| bottle, Death by a Thousand MBA's is almost certain.
| airstrike wrote:
| This false equivalence between MBA degrees and poor
| management really has to stop. It's a pretty bigoted take
| and I'm always disappointed to see that on HN, even though
| I half expect it coming into most threads these days.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Found the MBA!
|
| In all seriousness though, the MBA in and of itself isn't
| necessarily "bad". However, the "maximize shareholder
| value" mantra and the sheer volume of MBA's invading a
| company are the problem. There are so many now, every one
| of them looking for a way to appear valuable. The
| training cements this ever-increasing desire to wring
| more productivity and efficiency from an organization;
| the long-term effects of which are usually user-hostile.
| But it's a slow strangulation, so it never appears
| immediately sinister to anybody unless they've seen it
| happen before.
|
| People are starting to come around to this, and coupled
| with the sheer volume of MBA's it's become a meme of
| sorts. It seems to me these days that "not all MBAs are
| greedy pricks, but all greedy pricks are MBAs".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If EU really cared about privacy, EU would fully fund Mozilla.
| mantas wrote:
| Mozilla's CEO would loooooove this
| johnnycerberus wrote:
| EU should sponsor directly the contributors of open-source
| software without any middleman. A contributor can switch
| companies like socks, giving money to corporations is
| pointless. Also, contributors have to apply to be granted
| funds. The EU can't really babysit.
| 1_player wrote:
| Sure, but it's not EU's _job_ to fully fund Mozilla. And since
| when the European Union has to give money to an American
| corporation? Last I checked the USA is the biggest economy in
| the world, and incidentally where Mozilla, inc. is legally
| based.
| jlelse wrote:
| Then Mozilla would need to move to the EU.
| krono wrote:
| Here are some news articles that might make you rethink that:
|
| - https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
|
| - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-mozillas-layoffs-
| an...
|
| Help out, sure. To fully fund them would be taking it too far.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Fully funding means they can put better governance in and
| throw the captain overboard if need be.
| krono wrote:
| Could would should. It'd be great, but there is zero
| indication that it would actually happen.
| sintaxi wrote:
| Why would you want the government deciding who gets funds?
| hnbad wrote:
| "The government" isn't deciding who gets funds. The EU has
| public funding programmes and grants and you can apply to
| them if you meet the requirements:
|
| https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/funding-grants_en
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/find-funding/eu-
| fu...
|
| I can't think of any programme that would work for Mozilla
| though, especially given they're a US-based for-profit
| company wrapped around a US-based non-profit.
|
| The purpose of these programmes is typically to either
| contribute to regional development that is in the EU member
| states' interest, or to help implement policies the EU has
| passed. There are arguments to be made about how well the
| member states' (or their citizens') interests are represented
| in the EU's electoral structure, or how effective these
| programmes are in general, but saying this is "the government
| deciding who gets funds" is absurd.
| eis wrote:
| If Mozilla was a european non-profit I would agree it would be
| great to have EU funding. But a foreign organization where the
| management are extracting millions and millions of dollars for
| questionable performance at best while firing vast amounts of
| employees? No way.
| Zababa wrote:
| I agree. I'd like EU to sponsors Firefox development, but not
| by directly sponsoring Mozilla itself, especially not the
| Mozilla Foundation. Reducing reliance on Google and having
| people whose jobs is to challenge the hegemony of Google and
| Apple on web standards would be really nice.
| hnbad wrote:
| The EU should definitely contribute to the Open Web Docs org,
| which seems to be the financial body for the MDN Web Docs
| specifically. The EU has been paying grants for less useful
| projects than this.
|
| Mozilla, though, not so much. Given the ridiculous paychecks
| its C-level management has been caching in the midst of the
| massive layouts that cannibalized most of its most promising
| projects (including MDN staff), I don't think funding is the
| primary problem holding them back right now.
| mbStavola wrote:
| I'd have been more open to this sort of change if Mozilla didn't
| gut the content team behind MDN last year.
| Androider wrote:
| Surprised at the focus on individual developers. That's a tough
| market.
|
| Company teams where the buyer isn't also an user is the only way
| this is going to make any sustainable money. Sell an MDN Plus
| Teams and Enterprise flavors as upgrades to the free "hobby"
| variant, and market it as table-stakes that every valley dev team
| has an MDN Plus subscription, same as they have a paid GitHub
| account, because what kind of crappy outfit are you even running
| here if your devs don't have MDN Plus access day one? MSDN used
| to be 4-6 figures for teams of various sizes, so asking
| developers how much they'd be willing to pay doesn't really tell
| you anything, I'd be surprised if developers know what their
| GitHub hosting, CI, etc. is priced at.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Beyond the purely technical API documentation, I saw a (small)
| number of what looked like an article tying an entire API
| together and explaining how it works, or giving examples, like
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/...
|
| Are those now going to be paywalled?
| colllectorof wrote:
| MDN should be a separate company. Personally, I'm no longer
| interested in supporting Mozilla in any capacity. Their
| management behaves in a way that's consistent with the idea that
| it's barely more than controlled opposition to Google's Chrome
| team.
| handrous wrote:
| I don't get how the company had the head-count it did for so
| long and didn't even manage to _tread water_ in relation to
| other browsers, for about a decade, let alone do anything new
| or interesting. Which parts _were_ valuable and interesting?
| Rust /Servo, and MDN. Which parts get cut? Those.
|
| I'd love to see them make a come-back, but it's been so damn
| long and they're showing so many strongly _negative_ signs that
| I think they 're long since rotted beyond hope,
| organizationally. Better they're replaced. I don't think
| they're an organization capable of replacing themselves with a
| better upstart of their own making, as Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox
| did to the Mozilla browser, nor of innovating--Pocket and a VPN
| service are their innovative monetization and self-sufficiency
| efforts. Not leaping into any number of promising avenues for
| web services that would benefit from having an open-source-
| friendly but well-capitalized backer offering a paid version
| with a built-in audience to _push the Web and potentially the
| Internet forward_ , but... Pocket and a VPN. How do you miss
| the boat _that_ badly? How many teams building the sorts of
| things Firefox _should_ have been (Signal, Matrix, Gemini,
| IPFS, various open-source social network efforts like Mastodon,
| et c.) are small enough to comfortably fit _within_ the Firefox
| org? Several, I imagine.
|
| What a waste of potential.
| feudalism wrote:
| Because the leadership (CEO) is ineffective at best. Poor
| leadership led to poor decision-making and lack of strategy
| and focus.
|
| I was once a strong supporter of Mozilla but never again.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other
| browsers
|
| How do you figure?
| handrous wrote:
| Their last big performance breakthrough was, IIRC, "now
| merely wastes as much battery as Chrome, which is itself
| notoriously wasteful". That after years of eating battery
| like mad.
| asciimov wrote:
| 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.
| alphabravoB wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| I like their approach. Out of all possible options for funding,
| they managed to keep the core available, independent of other
| commercial influences, and offer extra quality content to
| subscribers. This could've gone bad in so many ways, but I'm
| hopeful for the project's future.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Exactly. And hopefully, such a subscription should be pretty
| easy for web developers to ask their employers for.
| duxup wrote:
| Useful, and a handy way to support MDN. I like it.
| indymike wrote:
| > Nothing is changing
|
| This phrase is used to direct attention away from something that
| is going to change in a big way. I read "we're not going to
| paywall existing content, but we'll be charging for future
| content."
|
| Now that the competition for web documentation is gone, Mozilla
| looks to be moving to cash in on their new-found monopoly on web
| documentation. Ironic, given how Mozilla was started.
| DenverCode wrote:
| >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!
|
| Sounds good.
| dagurp wrote:
| I agree but I wish they wouldn't have attached the mdn name to
| it in the first place
| zzakli wrote:
| > written by industry experts
|
| And the featured post is by someone (RA) who is probably not
| going to contribute regularly to MDN Web Docs. I have plenty
| platforms to read RA's writings besides this service.
|
| If this service is going to support the development of existing
| MDN Web Docs, I would pay for it. But i suspect most of the
| revenue will going to pay for these one-off experts.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Sorry, it's just really off-putting to me that software
| developers who get paid more than average laborers complain so
| much about paid offerings that cost them less than a single
| Starbucks drink. We don't know what the pricing is yet, but there
| are already people discussing what is too much.
|
| I know the demographics here aren't strictly American, but the
| currency conversion is hardly that impactful across major
| developed nations.
|
| There are so many tools in our industry that help you do your job
| on a daily basis that we all pay nothing for.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| A few random thoughts here:
|
| * 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.
| HerminaC wrote:
| Thanks for this, it is very insightful. We have considered part
| of them. Glad to hear you signed up to the waitlist:)
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