Live data from Hacker News

MDN Plus

developer.mozilla.org

11–20 of 222 posts

Re: MDN Plus

#11

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)

> 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!

Re: MDN Plus

#12
post #4

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

They should have been paid out of the advertising budget of Mozilla if someone there had the insight that no other campaign that they could have run with that money would have furthered the goodwill of web developers towards Mozilla/Firefox more than MDN did.

Re: MDN Plus

#13

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…

“As of February 2021, OWD top financial contributors are Microsoft, Google, Coil, and Igalia”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs

Re: MDN Plus

#14

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)

As far as I understand, the MDN documenting the standard (HTML5, CSS, etc.) will stay freely accessible as it is. I prefer this than having trackers & ads on the site... which would be completely contrary to their values anyway.

Re: MDN Plus

#15

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…

That's assuming that those companies want outside developers to be knowledgeable. That's a questionable assumption. If anyone here remembers how old Microsoft used to operate and why people went to get MS-something certificates you know what I mean.

"Free" documentation is often designed to give you barely enough info to start using their products, but not much more. And we're kind of used to this by now. MDN, FreeBSD hanbook or the original set of Smalltalk books stand as exceptions and reminders what things could look like if motivations were different.

Re: MDN Plus

#16
The $10/m right now seems on the high side.

Even the copy suggests you're better off not getting this, waiting at least a year for the content to be posted "every month," then subbing for a single month to read it all.

Maybe the Wikipedia/donation model would have been a better play for MDN then this, particularly as freemium was originally about micro-transactions, not $2 more than the cost of Netflix's Basic tier.

Now it falls into the uncanny valley of: Too "product" to be a donation, and not really enough of a product to be a real product.

Re: MDN Plus

#17

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…

Having the browser vendors write documentation might be an issue because they will all write it for their own browser.

Re: MDN Plus

#18
post #13

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…

“As of February 2021, OWD top financial contributors are Microsoft, Google, Coil, and Igalia” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs

I believe they've also been contributing to the docs themselves since Google shut down their own effort (may have just been a section of web.dev?) a few years back.

Re: MDN Plus

#19

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…

I wouldn't be including Microsoft in that list. Microsoft's own documentation is excellent.
Post reply on HN