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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23
Marc Rouleau

Kenneth, this is an exceptionally lucid post. Agree 100%. I wonder if SA management really understands that this change puts the entire platform at risk.


"Your format and your platform is replicable"

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17
kennethfine

Thanks Marc. Hopefully SA does the right thing and reconsiders this. The first effect of this change will be a massive drop in the number of quality comments on SA, followed by a gradual loss of interest and engagement by the user community. Once upon a time, The Motley Fool at fool.com had a really vital discussion community: that's mostly gone.  I don't want to see that process repeated here.   


There is nothing extraordinary about SA's web application platform in terms of its technology. A small team or consultancy at Microsoft could replicate all of SA technologywise and improve on it in a week or less. The chat rooms, the access-controlled posts and areas, the WYSIWIG online editing, the tracking, the metrics, the paywalls, the portfolios, the search (such as it is), the user identity system that tracks and persists occasional anonymous users into permanently-tracked accounts, the association of arbitrary data with anonymous and registered user accounts,  the flexible relational data store,  the transactional replication of cloud-based database entries and files to a locally-controlled server and database server, the 24/7 massively redundant hosting in the cloud.  One week.  


The really interesting thing SA has going for itself isn't technology, it's a community of engaged writers, readers, commenters. Build community please. 

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7357851

Keeneth:  It would indeed be a tragedy if small investors lost yet another forum to openly debate specific stocks.  Charging $75/month will destroy this community.  Thank you for your well reasoned and rationale comment.  Frankly, SA should hire you as a consultant!

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11
Warren Longstockings
Quote from Marc Rouleau

Kenneth, this is an exceptionally lucid post. Agree 100%. I wonder if SA management really understands that this change puts the entire platform at risk.


"Your format and your platform is replicable"

It's funny and ironic that a website that frequently discusses the importance of a) a business' moat and b) upfront and honest disclosures has suddenly forgotten the importance of both

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tom heberle

I agree that this feels like a major ambush against long time faithful SA users.  I certainly will never pay $75 or even $30/month to gain access to old articles.  If the cost were $10 or $20/year, I might consider it.  This will lead to multiple "following" or "tracking" comments posted so that users can retain access to the comment thread of articles they might have an interest in.  The overall quality of comments is going to drop.

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Signup22

SA's silence to all this feedback is very telling

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-6
David Jackson
Quote from Signup22

SA's silence to all this feedback is very telling

It's not. We're reading and considering all the feedback, and also looking carefully at the data -- the number of sign ups for PRO and any changes to usage on the site.

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malka

If you guys have decided to change your focus to Professionals, Investment companies etc. away from the individual investor - you should make a declaration to that effect.  Do you realize that a full on subscription (many pay less as they have discounts galore) to the Wall Street Journal is $28.99 a month???

and SA is $75 a month?  Really????

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kennethfine
Quote from David Jackson

It's not. We're reading and considering all the feedback, and also looking carefully at the data -- the number of sign ups for PRO and any changes to usage on the site.

In addition to "the data," "the number of sign ups", and other metrics that speak to the health of the numbers side of the business, you might want to solicit some outside perspectives on "good business," what's perceived as corporate "integrity," effective and ineffective ways to build online community,  and what behaviors seem consistent and inconsistent with quality corporate governance. (Admittedly, I am making the assumption that you continue to have some interest in the money-making potential of a community of writers and readers).   A disinterested consultant might be a very useful expenditure at this point. The way you guys and gals rolled this one out is really quite surprising.

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Crabpaws

This policy is going to kill SeekingAlpha in Google results. Why click on any SeekingAlpha link if you're likely to hit the paywall?


Of course, that might not be a problem if enough $900/year subscriptions are sold. SeekingAlpha has gone behind a paywall, farewell and good luck.