why should I (or anyone, for that matter) pay for a news aggregation site that shouldn’t have such high expenses based on analysis of their traffic volume and what they actually offer? how many people actually work for Edhat full-time, not volunteers or people who work for Edhat’s corporate owner Peter Sklar/coolmaps.com? why are their expenses so high after selling merch, having advertising and a paid classifieds service, and on top of that being owned by a business that surely has the overhead to pay for the small expense that those other things don’t cover to run Edhat?
being held hostage for money just to have full commenting ability is atrocious behavior and brings out morons like you. people like you are exactly why I don’t give money to Edhat ever, jackass. go back to complaining about how poor you are and how high gas prices are while you’re pissing money away just to comment on a site that actually doesn’t employ any actual journalists, they just show you where all the journalism about SB can be found.
I guess Edhat’s paid subscribers are so elitist that they feel if you don’t pay you shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to Edhat. this comment was removed by the board nanny for obvious reasons:
the post this comment was left in can be found here: http://www.edhat.com/site/tidbit.cfm?nid=43482 and as far as I can tell, there aren’t any Ed”hate”rs that were posting in that comment thread.
this kind of attitude displayed is despicable. if anyone needed a reason to not give their hard earned money to Edhat this is a good one. when their own members become so rude as to do such jackassed things as purposefully shut down a comment thread to paid subscribers only you know all their subscription policy has done is divide their readership and create an elitist class that think they are better than you and act accordingly. who wants to be part of an online community like that? I certainly don’t.
since Edhat lacks a system to report problematic posts I sent them an email explaining how this is a clear abuse of the commenter rules and that members exploiting this should not be tolerated and have their accounts suspended. time will tell to see if Edhat does the right thing or decides to unfairly protect their paid members and truly show how elitist the Edhat community is.
Published by Andy, on November 23rd, 2010 at 9:26 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized. | No Comments |
Edhat used to be a decent site. sure, it’s full of silly, useless content. but it also is a pretty decent resource for the latest news in Santa Barbara. however, the powers that be in recent months have decided that unless you’re willing to fork over money that users should be limited to what they contribute to the site. I’m referring to how Edhat has made it’s subscription plan to encompass it’s commenter policy.
if you are not a paying subscriber to Edhat, you cannot do the following as a commenter: posts capped at a certain character count, one post/hour per article limit, no posting between 9PM-6AM, no posting of links, no posting in articles that have had 3 or more comments deleted. this is on top of Edhat’s ruthless commenter rules in place which are supposed to maintain civility. whether those are limiting are debatable but that’s not the issue here. nor is the fact that on a personal level it’s shocking to see the kind of people Edhat brings out among it’s commenters in this community, especially when it comes to rudeness, ignorance, and just plain stupidity. I could go on all day about how much it pisses me off when people rag on something aimlessly either because they don’t know better or just don’t care and would rather blame someone else for their problems.
anyway, Edhat claims they need to create incentive to get people to give them money so they can fund their operation. in some ways that’s a fair point. their paid subscription does have lots of other advantages without impeding on member’s ability to contribute, like participating in Edhat contests, discounts on merch, no ads displayed, and other little things. and yes, running a website costs money. but Edhat didn’t start out limiting people like they do now to get people to subscribe. it used to be a purely donation based deal. was the goodness of SB locals not enough for Edhat?
then there’s the cost of the whole thing. FIFTY TWO DOLLARS A YEAR! oh they are like any other company and market it as being cheap at a dollar a week, but in reality fifty two bucks is expensive to in the end get a fancy handle and unrestricted commenting privileges. they offer a discount subscription for twenty six dollars a year for students/unemployed/seniors/etc but even that’s highway robbery and I’m surprised they offer that. I hope people abuse that since it’s basically an honor system thing and refuse to pay the full fifty two bucks a year. to put into perspective what you get for that kind of money, this website costs ninety eight dollars a year to operate. I have unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth and more than enough MySQL database access to keep me happy. it certainly does way more at less than twice the cost. I also subscribe to Consumer Report’s online service, which costs twenty six dollars a year, same as Edhat’s discount subscription. I think I get a little bit more usefulness out of their service since I use it frequently instead of just paying to have the privilege to comment on something freely.
in the end the whole thing is a joke. Edhat should drop it’s comment restrictions AND lower it’s paid subscription price. if they are so hard up for money and want to keep doing crap to basically force people into paying for a subscription maybe they should start putting out financial statements about what their operating costs are like and what income to date totals are. and if subscriptions really are barely cutting it then they should focus on other sources of income such as advertising, more prominent forms of selling merchandise, etc. not to mention, Edhat is owned by coolmaps.com, a full on business that surely can partially fund this operation if Edhat’s proprietor is that serious in making it stick around for a good long time.
this is why even if Edhat changes it’s ways I will never give them my money, and neither should you. they are so mismanaged about it without transparency that it would be wrong to do so.
3/3/11 EDIT: when I say I only pay 98 dollars a year to host this site, you might be thinking ” well you don’t have shit for internet traffic.” I forgot to mention my webhost package also hosts slamburglars.comwhich had it’s biggest month in January this year for traffic with just over 41k unique visitors. the previous month saw a record 546k pageviews. my host didn’t even flinch, and it has both a blog and a forum that use plenty of server backend. compare this to Edhat’s claimed 70k+ unique visitors and 1.4 million pageviews for January and I find it hard to believe that their operating expenses are so high for not even double the unique visitors and less than triple the pageviews.
they will tell you it is, but read thru their posts and it most definately is not. it’s a blog, just like my site is. a blog of photos, happenings, and op ed’s on local matters, not unbiased journalism that could actually be considered news.
an example would be a recent post about the high number of permits to sell alcohol there are in the city. the article immediately shows bias by mentioning BevMo as the SB View staff has long been opposed to the company’s new store opening in the San Roque area. from the get-go it’s obvious the post author’s intent is to enrage SB residents over the amount of liquor licenses not in general but in an attempt to generate further opposition to the opening of BevMo. the article may not explicitly state that but it certainly didn’t need to mention BevMo, either if that wasn’t their intent.
the article then proceeds to compare the number of licenses per capita to various other upscale coastal towns in the Greater Los Angeles area. to the average person that might seem OK but in reality it’s a highly inaccurate portrayal of the situation. for starters the article does not even break down the numbers into it’s two most basic forms: on and off sale licenses. on-sale licenses are those issued to places such as restaurants, bars, clubs, etc…places where you would consume your booze on location and not exit the building with it. sure you could leave drunk and do a lot of damage by driving or whatnot but I’ll address that issue in minute. off-sale licenses are those for places that you go to get your 30 pack. grocery stores, liquor stores, the lot. so if we look at off-sale numbers only, it drops the number of licenses in SB from 478 to 125. that’s still higher per capita compared to the other cities listed in the SB View blog, but by nowhere near as much.
the other overlooked issue is that SB has three things going for it that the other listed cities don’t that explain the high number of on-sale licenses: it’s home to a major university, it’s a big tourist destination, and home to multiple top shelf wineries. therefore, it stands to reason without much thought that there’s going to be a big increase in the number of restaurants, clubs, bars, places to buy beer, wine tasting rooms, and so forth associated with those things.
the thing that gets me is the day after this half-baked blog post goes live is KEYT picks up the story, which should never have been one in the first place. at first I thought, “well, another strike against professional journalism over at KEYT,” but at least they did follow through by looking into the matter instead of just looking at a couple of numbers and crying holy hell. they interviewed people who also mentioned the deal with being a tourist destination and also talked to the SBPD who said despite the high number of alcohol permits things have not gotten out of hand in years. even lamer is after the story was posted to KEYT’s website was that the “Editor” of SB View’s blog commented on the post congratulating the author for KEYT using the post as a source for the story. it’s suspiciously duplicated enough that it’s possible it might have inspired them to run the story but they pulled the same facts from the same source credited on the View’s blog post and nowhere did they actually credit the View for anything, nor did they mention BevMo since they actually are unbiased, professional journalists. the topic, the facts from the ABC’s site and the cities compared to are really the only things that are the same as the View’s post.
to Anna Kappa: please stop posting unintelligent garbage on the internet so obviously aimed at inciting opposition towards BevMo without at least presenting all the facts. I don’t know what you think you are, but you are just another amateur blogger on the internet.
to the SB View: if you’re serious about actually being a “news” site, stop inserting your personal bias into posts regarding things happening around town. maybe take on a blog writing staff that knows how to write unbiased content. otherwise my own personal website could be as much a “news” site as the View is.
EDIT: PS…please get a better host if you’re serious about running a decent site, the one you run currently is horribly unreliable. maybe you should hit up the link to my webhost on the right.
selling a ‘99 Jamis Aurora. 62cm frame. low mileage. not abused. great condition. only flaw is the shifters, the ones on it currently are…eh. the old ones are still mounted but broken.
asking $350 OBO. this bike was $600 new in ‘99 and the 2010 model MSRP’s over $1000! local pickup in Santa Barbara only.
I pretty much figured out the rest of the bullshit of trying to move their Blogger export over to Wordpress. I had to tweak some shit and in the end everything seems to work except the fact that a fair share of comments did not transfer over. fuck it.
the other issue I had was figuring out why the board database wouldn’t import correctly. first of all IPB’s database backup tool sucks. every backup I tried downloading was incomplete. so I got the info to access phpMyAdmin on the old, shitty, free webserver thing they were using and that also took a couple tries to make it export a database backup that wouldn’t cause errors when importing it to this server.
so now everything seems peachy and I can focus on expansions like an image gallery to eliminate the necessity of sites like photobucket and other things to make it awesome. though I won’t be doing that for at least a few days…time to chill.
the fuck? what is it with Facebook just making changes to their shit with little notice? most of them as of late have been tolerable but the one today I experienced just fucking blows my mind. of course I’m talking about the new Profile page format, and especially how it handles your interests, likes, activities, etc. the format is stupid and I don’t like FB telling me how I have to list what I’m into as specific links to pages of those subjects and force the link to be the page title. I’m sorry but I like my static list that I can put whatever I want in my own words. I don’t want it to be when I list “my girl” as an interest FB makes it a link to a page titled as such with a crappy picture. I don’t like how I can’t put something generic/vague down because there is no page for it. and I don’t like that FB forces you to use the new layout. if some people like it fine, but for christ’s sake let those who don’t want it revert back to the original static page style. some people, like myself, enjoy minimalistic stuff like that.
this is why I basically stopped using Myspace. I deleted everyone off my page that I was friends with on FB and rarely check it at all. they started adding all kinds of garbage to their service and tons of bloat, not to mention poor coding. now FB is doing it too. I feel almost clausterphobic using it now there’s so much crap. tons of useless pages for infantile shit like “I bet California can get 1 million fans before any other state” blah blah blah. that and stupid apps like Farmville. I admit, I have used a couple a few years ago when I started out but those ended up sucking and so do just about every other app on FB. that recent episode of South Park about FB really hits home over how annoying it is to constantly get garbage requests to join people’s fucking farms and their mafias and their shitpiles. and of course FB does not make it easy to just have all application requests blocked by default. you have to block each app individually and it’s not the most straightforward process. that and their starting to get sloppy with their coding. I run IE8. I think Firefox is a buggy piece of shit and Chrome I just can’t get used to. I don’t get malware/virus problems because I’m not a computer illitershit. so don’t blame my browser for the following, it’s just FB’s poor coding. 70% of people still pretty much use IE. anyway, whatever hackjobs FB employs to code their warez must be C average college kids. since the new profile page sucks ass and I hate the way it looks I went to go see how I could edit it and decided I’d be better off just deleteing all my interests and whatnot. but no, after having to manually delete one at a time none of it would actually apply to my profile. and when I go to edit my bio they give you the tiniest of text box inputs and it does NOT work at all. it has some fucked up problem where if your text requires scrolling you can’t actually click on/edit anything near the bottom because the text cursor jumps back and forth all over whatever it is you have jotted down. just great. FB coders, please pull your heads out of your asses and stop making such a crappy product.
right now I wish I could just move on to a new social network site, but unfortunately Myspace and FB are it as far as sites where the majority of the people I know and I think a lot of them got fed up with Myspace eons ago so they don’t have that anymore either. Twitter is not a social networking site, it’s a retard’s take on a castrated blog for the texting generation since SMS is limited to about the same amount of characters as each Twitter post. fucking stupid. with no other viable alternatives I guess I’ll just have to refuse to put much if any details in my profile. thanks a fucking bunch FB.
…should really exist, I could really use some fukitol with all that goes on right about now. then again someone should kick my ass and shit on face so maybe I might get motivated again. bloody hell.
so if your cable provider offers a service plan for like 5 bucks a month and your house wasn’t built in the last 10 years, fucking get it. figured out why the cable connection in my house sucks sometimes, 50 year old RG59 coaxial. go. fucking. figure. 256kbps bandwidth felt so prehistoric I was about to go apeshit over it. random intermittent packet loss, TCP timeouts, or even just the overall snails pace can drive you mad in this day and age of plentiful broadband connectivity. I have no idea how I survived with dialup when I was a kid.
anyway I had Cox come out and check things out when the mass quantities of crappy RG59 was realized to include the drop line from the tap on the hill. great. so for now I have a temporary either RG6 possibly RG11 (cable’s pretty bulky and didn’t really see anything labeled) drop line just ran however was easiest. and because of how the old one is buried construction has to come out and dig to lay a new one. haha hope they have fun with that endeavour trying to run the drop thru the retaining wall. but it’s helping. before the new drop I had a -14 dBmv reading downstream with intermittent SNR drops to the low 20s. correcting the drop line alone turned it to -5 dBmv and SNR of about 36 with no dropouts. it’s still kind of crappy though, every now and then the SNR drops but not like it did the other day. for shits, and to prove to my dad the house wiring sucks, I put the modem directly on the drop line and measured again and saw +18 dBmv! not to mention the other side effect was dropping the upstream power from 45 to 35 dBmv. seems like 90% of the wiring to the modem is that RG59 garbage and I learned there might be actually 3 splitters instead of two before the modem. soooooooo I need to get Cox back out here and rewire the house with RG6 and make the modem line only have one splitter. hoping that will bring it to somewhere around +10 downstream and hopefully high 30s upstream, sure would be nice to make this modem last longer…as long as Cox doesn’t roll out some uber fast DOCSIS 3 shit here in the near future and turn it into a dinosaur.
