Paid archive: how SA will kill the vitality of comments and community. FIX

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After thinking on this a few days, I've concluded SA is making a massive mistake with its paid article archive. Please backtrack before you totally wreck what's good about SA. A few issues:


  1. The best feature of SA is ongoing reader comments on its articles, as company news changes  and a thesis is proven or disproven. You're basically killing the vitality of that. Once people get out of the habit of making informed comment on articles they can read and continue to read, they will not go back.  
  2. Seventy five dollars a month is too much. Thirty dollars a month is too much. I say that as someone who subscribes to three SA Marketplace services, and I've paid as much as $300 a month for single SA Marketplace services in the past. I might pay a token $10 or $20 a year for archive access, because without a vital comment stream.... 
  3. ... the SA archive really isn't that valuable at all. It's mostly old news and old speculation that goes on to be proven or disproven in time. The truly astute or comprehensive article is quite rare, probably less than 1% of articles would be publishable in traditional sources. I certainly wouldn't rely on the SA archive to reliably give me a "deep dive into less-followed companies" or other marketingspeak. That's frankly wishful. 
  4. What was previously good about SA was that almost ANYONE could write and publish quickly. Previously you had choruses of voices weighing in on a stock, some professional, some amateur, some astute, some not-so-astute: many points of view. Readers could read everyone's take and reach their own conclusions. Now there is no ability to compare and no competing voices  from the archive.
  5. As a marketplace subscriber to three services, I am frankly ticked off that you would abruptly lock me out of the archive, as well as hiding the articles I've taken the time to comment thoughtfully about. I've supported SA for a long time, and your thanks to me for this support is to ambush me with a change that breaks SA's entire model. 
  6. As a consumer I do not like it when companies break trust with their longtime customers. Not long ago Evernote pulled a similar stunt: massively jacking up subscription prices and breaking the longstanding paradigm of "Your data on your devices."  I had used Evernote for seven years and was a subscriber and fan. In one afternoon I pulled all of my data out of Evernote and put it into Microsoft OneNote; I haven't been back since. Users lost often don't come back once they lose patience. Your format and your platform is replicable. 
  7. In addition to reversing this ill-conceived policy, SA leadership should consider meeting to craft a small-scale "SA Commmunity Bill of Rights" to help guide future policy, and give angry and future members of the community of what you generally will and will not do. The businessfolk in you probably bristle at the idea of handing any sense of control to the rabble -- after all, this is your property to monetize -- but "community" cuts two ways. If you want it, you can't just dictate to it, you have to appreciate it and grow it. Places like Facebook have little sayings and mini lists of users rights: one of Facebook's taglines is: "it's free and it always will be". If you're going to ask people to make a commitment of time to your community, you need to give a better sense of what they're buying into. 
  8. Finally, if an issue driving this change is mobile ad revenue, or ad revenue generally, it may be partly because your mobile application(s) need a lot of help. They do only a subset of what the website can do, including frankly basic things like offering an integrated SA Marketplace chat. One user in one of our groups reports there is a separate "SA Chat" app, but he also reports that it was eating 10 gigabytes of cache data. Android users can enable "Desktop Mode" to get some functionality of the SA website back on their phones, but I have not found a way to persist this setting as I navigate between pages and articles: I'm continually led back to the lame mobile app. Many kids these days just don't use desktop or notebook computers that much, and an online property that doesn't do mobile is disadvantaged. 
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stocksman99

The useless comment being a placeholder so you can continue to comment and read the post?  That behavior does make sense, another unintended consequence of the current policy.  My issue is the reduction in comments.  Many of the stocks that I had followed had comments weeks or months later.  I cannot currently pay for a service that would degrade these comments long term.  Cutting off the public ruins the site IMO.  The lifeblood of any bulletin board.   I would like to see Seeking Alpha set up permanent bulletin boards for each stock symbol, that is independent of the articles, and that the public can participate in without a paywall.  Another suggestion is to have an advanced search that is not keyed by only symbol or stock name.  I have tried to search terms like "contrarian", and it does not get me any results.  A general bulletin board could help here too.

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kennethfine

Just as a single data point, not conclusive of anything, in the FCEL article I linked above, about 1/3rd of comments attached to the article were two sentences or less.  (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4157498-fuel-cell-energy-worth-wait?v=1521837575&comments=show)  A number of the longer comments were junky and could/should arguably be deleted. About 1/6th of the comments in the FCEL article were discussion of SA's adventures in paywalling and comment policy. 


Numbers and metrics can often be used by the confident and/or insecure to prove whatever desired point they want to make. More interesting would be to do a carefully objective analysis of comment content: get a disinterested collection of experts to grade comment coherence, insight, and quality among a random selection of articles pre-paywall and post-paywall.  I don't pretend to know what the outcome of this study might be, but it would be interesting to read through the results whatever they are. 


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SA Jacob Maltz
Quote from stocksman99

The useless comment being a placeholder so you can continue to comment and read the post?  That behavior does make sense, another unintended consequence of the current policy.  My issue is the reduction in comments.  Many of the stocks that I had followed had comments weeks or months later.  I cannot currently pay for a service that would degrade these comments long term.  Cutting off the public ruins the site IMO.  The lifeblood of any bulletin board.   I would like to see Seeking Alpha set up permanent bulletin boards for each stock symbol, that is independent of the articles, and that the public can participate in without a paywall.  Another suggestion is to have an advanced search that is not keyed by only symbol or stock name.  I have tried to search terms like "contrarian", and it does not get me any results.  A general bulletin board could help here too.

stockman99, Thanks for your feedback.  I wanted to share with you that this morning we rolled out a major improvement to the StockTalk feature on symbol pages which will allow the conversation around a company or fund to continue outside of the comment stream of paywalled articles.   We plan to roll out other features such as hash tagging and user tagging which will make the "All StockTalk" page more useful.   If anyone has any feedback on features that you want to see in StockTalk, I would love to hear about it, please PM me or write a StockTalk here :-)  https://seekingalpha.com/stocktalk/all

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Crabpaws
Quote from SA Jacob Maltz

stockman99, Thanks for your feedback.  I wanted to share with you that this morning we rolled out a major improvement to the StockTalk feature on symbol pages which will allow the conversation around a company or fund to continue outside of the comment stream of paywalled articles.   We plan to roll out other features such as hash tagging and user tagging which will make the "All StockTalk" page more useful.   If anyone has any feedback on features that you want to see in StockTalk, I would love to hear about it, please PM me or write a StockTalk here :-)  https://seekingalpha.com/stocktalk/all

Thanks for making the effort to ameliorate the complaints in this and related threads. Have you ever seen the discussions attached to stocks etc. on Yahoo Finance? Worthless.


Offering a platform for general comment only replicates other areas of pointless blather on the Internet. But I guess it's a stab at maintaining "community" here.

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Crabpaws
Quote from kennethfine

Just as a single data point, not conclusive of anything, in the FCEL article I linked above, about 1/3rd of comments attached to the article were two sentences or less.  (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4157498-fuel-cell-energy-worth-wait?v=1521837575&comments=show)  A number of the longer comments were junky and could/should arguably be deleted. About 1/6th of the comments in the FCEL article were discussion of SA's adventures in paywalling and comment policy. 


Numbers and metrics can often be used by the confident and/or insecure to prove whatever desired point they want to make. More interesting would be to do a carefully objective analysis of comment content: get a disinterested collection of experts to grade comment coherence, insight, and quality among a random selection of articles pre-paywall and post-paywall.  I don't pretend to know what the outcome of this study might be, but it would be interesting to read through the results whatever they are. 


Sadly, I fear many of the commenters here are resisting the reality -- and SA staff is enabling their delusion.


The public beach where we all used to gather has become private. If you don't pay the membership fee, you cannot use the beach.


"Community" will continue without you, with maybe a smaller number but higher-income beachgoers enjoying the campfires.


If you want to hang around the gates, there are forums for you there at the Internet rabble level.

That sums up SeekingAlpha's commitment to community.

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stocksman99
Quote from SA Jacob Maltz

stockman99, Thanks for your feedback.  I wanted to share with you that this morning we rolled out a major improvement to the StockTalk feature on symbol pages which will allow the conversation around a company or fund to continue outside of the comment stream of paywalled articles.   We plan to roll out other features such as hash tagging and user tagging which will make the "All StockTalk" page more useful.   If anyone has any feedback on features that you want to see in StockTalk, I would love to hear about it, please PM me or write a StockTalk here :-)  https://seekingalpha.com/stocktalk/all

Thanks, its something that probably has been needed.  Years ago when Yahoo and Silicon Investor were better, we had fantastic boards and interactions.  Hopefully you can figure out how to implement this to prevent the bad things that happen on forums.


Will you have keyword search for articles, instead of just company name or symbol?


In regards to article comments, I don't think you are going to see people invest as much time in there knowing they only have 10 days.  And if they miss the article, then they can never comment, even if they have knowledge to offer, if they are not behind the paywall.  I find the comments much more useful than the content of the articles many times.  In fact I have gotten ideas for new stocks from these comments.  There is always unintended consequences of actions, which I am sure is being noticed.


Are you not losing a lot of SEO for your articles being behind a paywall?  The link juice that comes from people linking to your articles (which cannot happen with a paywall) is a loss to your overall site.

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kennethfine
Quote from SA Jacob Maltz

stockman99, Thanks for your feedback.  I wanted to share with you that this morning we rolled out a major improvement to the StockTalk feature on symbol pages which will allow the conversation around a company or fund to continue outside of the comment stream of paywalled articles.   We plan to roll out other features such as hash tagging and user tagging which will make the "All StockTalk" page more useful.   If anyone has any feedback on features that you want to see in StockTalk, I would love to hear about it, please PM me or write a StockTalk here :-)  https://seekingalpha.com/stocktalk/all

All I see is an interface with short blurbs, very similar to Twitter, and a few replies on those blurbs. Is the the major new feature you're talking about? It doesn't seem to have much at all to do with articles and article comments. Though this presentation has its strengths, I can't imagine an ongoing durable conversation centered around this sort of design. Am I looking at the wrong thing?   


The strength of a written article is that it can articulate a thesis about an company or group of companies, and a strength of comments attached to that article is that the discussion is generally guided and informed by the content of that article. I don't see any such unifying structure here. 


Is there any assurance or promise that the StockTalk discussion won't be paywalled sooner or later? Based on precedent, if it becomes useful or popular, SA may decide to monetize it by paywalling it. If you intend for it to remain free forever, SA's leadership should probably articulate that really, really clearly: many people aren't going to waste their time creating content that vanishes with the whims of policy. 

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SA Jacob Maltz
Quote from kennethfine

All I see is an interface with short blurbs, very similar to Twitter, and a few replies on those blurbs. Is the the major new feature you're talking about? It doesn't seem to have much at all to do with articles and article comments. Though this presentation has its strengths, I can't imagine an ongoing durable conversation centered around this sort of design. Am I looking at the wrong thing?   


The strength of a written article is that it can articulate a thesis about an company or group of companies, and a strength of comments attached to that article is that the discussion is generally guided and informed by the content of that article. I don't see any such unifying structure here. 


Is there any assurance or promise that the StockTalk discussion won't be paywalled sooner or later? Based on precedent, if it becomes useful or popular, SA may decide to monetize it by paywalling it. If you intend for it to remain free forever, SA's leadership should probably articulate that really, really clearly: many people aren't going to waste their time creating content that vanishes with the whims of policy. 

Thanks for your feedback.  Even though StockTalks has been around for a while, we have not improved the feature for quite a while, so it is still early days in terms of content and community.

Our plan is to add features to StockTalk and see how it develops and how people use it, given that it is a more open platform with no limitations on size of posts, but is controlled by our moderation team.  


While it is impossible for management to give "assurances" or "promises" around features like this,   I can tell you that we have no plans to put StockTalk behind the paywall and we would like to make it useful for our community.   We envision that it may be used to continue the discussion and share information on a stock even if there is no recent article on it.   We will also add hashtagging to allow for community driven discussion on topics of interest to you.    We have now updated the StockTalks UI on Quote, Portfolio and Author /User profile pages, as well as the "All StockTalk" page, and we are actively working on further improvements.

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aznnp77

I see that they've taken my suggestion and implemented something to force people to turn off their pop-up blockers in order to read articles, which I am completely fine with. Hopefully with the extra ad revenue they're able to revert back to letting small timers like myself read older articles to get background information on companies we could potentially want to invest in.


P.S. I read one of the non-paywalled articles a couple of weeks ago about a stock that I've been following closely, and the author didn't even present the factual information correct. You expect people to pay for opinion articles where the authors barely take the time to research a stock before giving their opinion?

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aznnp77
Quote from 14596212

@daniel

Solution: Post useless comments within 10 days, to avoid the paywall in the comment section. This can't be your intention and your standard.


Maybe there's a difference in the statistics between a stock/theme, which is covered daily and once a year.

That's a good idea. Wish I knew I could do that. I think I'll do that from now on if they don't get rid of this pay wall. Thanks. "Just commenting so I can read the comments in the future"