MDN Plus

#1

Post by bpierre » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

MDN Plus
developer.mozilla.org

Re: MDN Plus

#2

Post by javajosh » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

A little bit scary but also possibly cool. Scary because freemium and paywall go hand in hand; cool because "technical deep dives by experts" sounds good.

Re: MDN Plus

#3

Post by timdorr » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27296014

Re: MDN Plus

#4

Post by brodock » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

I'm happy they are finding ways of monetising that don't rely on adtech

Re: MDN Plus

#5

Post by gilrain » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

When they laid off a bunch of their technical writers, there was an outpouring of desire for a way to pay for MDN.

Let's hope those voices follow through!

Re: MDN Plus

#6

Post by terminalserver » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium to be viable.

Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing.

Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web”

Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed, it’s not our job to document the web”

Google : “we’re a advertising company, it’s not our job to document the web”.

Facebook... etc

Amazon ... etc

And so on ...

Re: MDN Plus

#7

Post by chris_engel » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

I strongly dislike the idea. It reduces deep knowledge to people who can pay for it. The web should be open for anyone. (yeah, Its already not like this, I know)

Re: MDN Plus

#8

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

If EU really cared about privacy, EU would fully fund Mozilla.

Re: MDN Plus

#9

Post by viraptor » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

I like their approach. Out of all possible options for funding, they managed to keep the core available, independent of other commercial influences, and offer extra quality content to subscribers. This could've gone bad in so many ways, but I'm hopeful for the project's future.

Re: MDN Plus

#10

Post by DenverCode » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

>Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone. We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis. Again, nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs!

Sounds good.