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posted by on Sunday April 19 2020, @03:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the economics dept.

So, COVID-19 (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, whatever you call it) sucks a bit for your health but it turns out it sucks a lot for the economy. So we're extending any subscriptions that were going to expire before then out to June first (this may be extended a time or two depending on how well our savings hold up). Yeah, we know we're an extremely small cap entity and that's not going to make a whole lot of difference but it's something we felt we should do anyway for a couple reasons.

First, we as a corporation do not have paid employees. The only people we give money to are our hosts, our registrar, our CPA, and the revenooers. Which we're going to have to continue doing regardless and which we can currently afford to do for a month or two without dire risk of having to make infrastructure cutbacks. Putting money into us during this nonsense doesn't help much in directly putting food on someone's table or keeping jobs from going poof, so we'd prefer you guys put anything you were going to send us to work where it will help at least a tiny bit in keeping the businesses that your neighbors work at afloat. Which is to say, spend it locally.

Second, we're quite fond of the folks who've chosen to financially support the site and we don't want them to get dinged because of something that wasn't remotely their fault.

Now we're not shutting down the site's subscription functionality. If you feel a desire to contribute anyway, we're happy to oblige and we're not going to tell you that you can't. We're not the bosses of your wallets and it would mean extra work for me when I don't really have time to do much of anything code/admin-wise.

Also, we're only doing this automatically for current and new subscribers; we don't want to hit people who weren't interested with an unsolicited email about subscription expiration when we have to shut the extensions down. They may have quit subscribing or even frequenting the site and it's annoying as all get out to keep getting emails from sites you stopped doing business with on purpose. We're happy to handle it manually, though, if your subscription ended any time since the first of the year. Just drop a comment to this journal entry (NOT to THIS story!) and I'll take care of it as often as I have time (at least once a day).

That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mix of discussion, debate, yelling at each other, and trolling.

(Oh, and you can still submit stories, too! Hint hint! --martyb)

 
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  • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Monday April 20 2020, @09:35PM

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 20 2020, @09:35PM (#985229) Journal

    Many companies have closed down, reduced staffing, and generally speaking there are far fewer ads available.

    Even those that don't have to are reducing spend.
     
    I suppose if everyone reduces advertising, the amount you need to do for the same result goes down as well. Be awfully nice if that was to become a trend.
     
    What's really needed is someone artistic to come up with a great funny SN meme we can put on shirts and other on-demand stuffs that we all want to buy at a ridiculous markup.
     
    I dunno.....Maybe riff off the conveyor belt [imdb.com]....'crackers' have news headline bubbles coming off them. A soylentil on the conveyor belt is reading one bubble that is fully opened into a story.
     
    Course movie studios aren't known for being friendly if you use their IP.

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