Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby IamNotCreepy » Fri Sep 29, 2017 9:37 pm

Seti42 wrote:Hi. 1st post here. Guess why?


Here, have an upvote. You can do that here.
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby Taluun » Fri Sep 29, 2017 9:40 pm

Seti42 wrote:Hi. 1st post here. Guess why?


Welcome new friend!
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Fri Sep 29, 2017 9:51 pm

...
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby reallifegirl » Fri Sep 29, 2017 10:07 pm

Welp, fuck.

I never quite had the same level of anger at Cracked as a lot of other people have, but I feel like this is definitely a stop sign on the way towards the end. I feel like a lot of these stop-gap measures at money-making are definitely going to alienate people (and God knows I'm not paying that subscription fee) and covers for the fact that the site isn't making the quality content it used to.

It's not even the echo chamber that bugs me that much, it's the *reaches* for content. Have you heard this wild theory about a TV show that makes no sense under even the tiniest of scrutiny? How about griping about a tiny detail in the movie that we've decided was wrong when divorced from all context?

It's not like list-based information or humor is dead, other sites like the AVClub are still chugging along. Fuck, the Personal Experience articles were some of the best things they ever did, and that shit was a goldmine of potential. But eventually it started spinning its wheels, and making people pay for their loyalty to the site/community is a backwards way of going about it. Because it's fucking stupid to alienate the people who are actually spending serious amounts of time on your site, as opposed to the casual droppers-in, and those are the people who are gonna be affected/annoyed by this.
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby KleinerKiller » Fri Sep 29, 2017 10:30 pm

Seeing Cracked slowly crumble warms my heart, even as my anger at them has faded into distant bitterness. This is what you get when you treat your readers like shit and pretend to be the highest and mightiest intellectuals even as you start desperately scratching at the tiniest blister in hopes that a few social media shares will ooze out, Pargin. C'est la vie.

Seti42 wrote:Hi. 1st post here. Guess why?


On the bright side, our community grows a little bit more whenever they hack away at theirs. Welcome, Seti!

reallifegirl wrote:It's not like list-based information or humor is dead, other sites like the AVClub are still chugging along.


Well, AVClub was until they switched to Kinja (the platform sites like Kotaku and Jezebel use), which decimated their preexisting community and near-instantly submerged them in the same kind of endless trash that's been smothering Cracked. Long strings of articles going by with only a double-digit number of comments between them days later isn't something that used to happen. That being said, they at least try to communicate with and give a fraction of a damn about their remaining readers, which still gives them a leg up on Cracked even if I don't see either of them surviving long-term.
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby sorcrachi » Fri Sep 29, 2017 10:44 pm

Oh well. If nothing else comes of it, I finally got around to visiting TCS on my "new" computer, so now I have a bookmark and maybe I'll stop by more often.
It's nice to see a lot of the old names again.
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby DamianaRaven » Fri Sep 29, 2017 11:22 pm

Seti42 wrote:Hi. 1st post here. Guess why?


What you saw in the Orgy Room only happens twice a year, y'know. And since you're new here, guess who gets to clean up the Orgy Room?
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby SandTea » Sat Sep 30, 2017 1:36 am

I think monetizing up/down votes is fine. It was funny seeing the top comment with 4. When I first heard about the wall, my mind thought it was going to be like video games. "Buy a loot box for a chance at 20 down votes! This week only". Those guys know how to rock the addiction model.

The times, they are a changing. A lot of people have concluded it's the platforms fault for not adapting. Then they go on to blame them when they try to adapt. *Shrug* I'm not innocent of this. I do think it's appropriate though, to switch the idiom around for this one. Hate the game, not the player.

I know there are a couple people around who've gotten articles through there so dispute me if I'm wrong but writing those top class articles about science, nature, history, mystery, w/e your preferred thing, is hard. Besides Cracked having probably already covered it, there is usually a blurry "Simpsons did it" line as well. They literally beg us to write for them. My problem is I don't know what I don't know (and laziness). I think that's where the idea for the personal experience articles came from. The need for more strict opinion and serialized ("this week") pieces as well. I'm just saying that only blaming the libcuckflaketarded content is... something about a forest and trees. I've gotten bored.... am still excited about seeing how this changes the comment section. Both theirs and ours. (I saw you pimping tcs deathclaw) 
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby Fun With Mr. Fudge » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:22 am

Howdy, gang! It's been forever and several days. I'm not gonna lie; I missed the discussions here (and having time to read them). But enough about me. I saw this and wanted to (not so) quickly respond:

SandTea wrote:They literally beg us to write for them. My problem is I don't know what I don't know (and laziness).  


I can't claim to be a big authority on writing but I used to contribute to Cracked and still do write elsewhere. From my experience, if you're interested in writing, knowledge surprisingly isn't that big of a barrier. Many of the things I've written resulted from me stumbling across something I found interesting and building on it. It just takes a lot of patience to try reading on things you know little about and trying to pick out the most interesting parts. If I find what I’m writing about interesting enough, somehow the laziness (which I have been guilty of many times) starts to fade.

More generally, I'm ambivalent about the subscription idea. From what I can tell, Cracked does a lot of different things that presumably cost lots of money (making high-quality videos, having their employees travel to Burning man and the occasional foreign country, paying contributors a set dollar amount and then paying people to edit those works, etc.). It makes sense, especially given the advent of Adblock that the company would look for a consistent source of income, since clicks alone can't guarantee that. Even if tons of people read the articles, if many of them are blocking the site’s main source of revenue, it only makes sense for Cracked to go the crowdfunding or subscription route.

That said, of course monetizing comment votes will seem off-putting to a fair number of loyal readers. It seems weirdly specific, for one thing. Secondly, there’s the whole endowment effect at play. Many people who are used to voting will feel like a kind of right is being taken away because it used to be a given. Moreover, I worry that anyone who tries to vote without knowing the deal (which will be many people at the beginning) and then sees they have to pay to do it might feel more upset and inclined to stop reading the articles than if the voting option didn’t exist at all.
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby DamianaRaven » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:27 am

I wonder what's being said on PWoT about this?
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:33 am

DamianaRaven wrote:I wonder what's being said on PWoT about this?

phpBB [video]
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby 52xMax » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:43 am

Looks like it's that time of the year again when cracked does something incredibly douchey/stupid and people start coming here looking for a safe harbor. If I had any pull/recognition, I'd start recruiting for discomforted crackheads like we used to before.
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby sunglasses » Sat Sep 30, 2017 3:02 am

sorcrachi wrote:Oh well. If nothing else comes of it, I finally got around to visiting TCS on my "new" computer, so now I have a bookmark and maybe I'll stop by more often.
It's nice to see a lot of the old names again.



Oh ya, lots of us are still here
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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby JamishT » Sat Sep 30, 2017 7:03 am

I still read at least one article a day...before my shower, and there certainly has been downward trend in the quality of the articles (and a freefall when it comes to Picture...Contests). I'll probably continue with this behavior, but I must apologize to RLG, because I'm not going to pay to automatically upvote your comments like I usually do.

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Re: Cracked now requires a subscription to vote on comments

Postby reallifegirl » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:08 pm

It's all good, man. I'll just accept your upvotes on a spiritual level.
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