Question for Clay and others

[Andy Armstrong]

rudy rouhana wrote:
> 
> In "Slashdot in the Balance"
> 
> http://www.msnbc.com/news/595556.asp?0si=-
> 
> Clay Shirky concluded the article by saying: "One option could be a hybrid
> model, where one version would be hosted on a high performance servers with
> enhanced services, and another being a low performance server. I may actually
> pay to load my pages faster."
> 
> My question is this: "Do they necessarily have to move it to a physically
> slower server, or if they simply created an artificial queue so to speak, would
> that entice you to pay to get at the front of the line"?

Clearly not, but they're already on multiple boxes so it might just be
easier to dedicate a single box to SlowDot.

> A side point, if they did create some annoyance (ie, slow page serves for
> non-premium customers) do you think this would lead the majority of users to
> flock to another site without the restrictions?

In the old days of /. I would have happily paid for it. Not sure any
more. The S/N is way down of late, and while the headlines are still
interesting the subsequent discussion is generally barely worth the
bandwidth.

Also relevant is the fact that I've never really liked the /. user
interface -- I confess that I can never really get stories looking how I
want them. Give me usenet / mailing lists every time.


-- 
Andy Armstrong, Tagish