Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MDN Plus

developer.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 222 posts

Re: MDN Plus

#151

Post by dblohm7 »

handrous wrote: post #96
colllectorof wrote: post #50

MDN should be a separate company. Personally, I'm no longer interested in supporting Mozilla in any capacity. Their management behaves in a way that's consistent with the idea that it's barely more than controlled opposition to Google's Chrome team.

I don't get how the company had the head-count it did for so long and didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other browsers, for about a decade, let alone do anything new or interesting. Which parts were valuable and interesting? Rust/Servo, and MDN. Which parts get cut? Those. I'd love to see them make a come-back, but it's been so damn long and they're showing so many strongly negative signs that I think…

> didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other browsers

How do you figure?

Re: MDN Plus

#152

Post by handrous »

dblohm7 wrote: post #151
handrous wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how the company had the head-count it did for so long and didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other browsers, for about a decade, let alone do anything new or interesting. Which parts were valuable and interesting? Rust/Servo, and MDN. Which parts get cut? Those. I'd love to see them make a come-back, but it's been so damn long and they're showing so many strongly negative signs that I think…

> didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other browsers How do you figure?

Their last big performance breakthrough was, IIRC, "now merely wastes as much battery as Chrome, which is itself notoriously wasteful". That after years of eating battery like mad.

Re: MDN Plus

#153

Post by joduplessis »

Oof, not a good look for Mozilla. Totally get the need for $ - but I don't know anybody who would pay for this, esp. with other companies like Google producing so much content around web technologies.

Re: MDN Plus

#154

Post by qbasic_forever »

dfabulich wrote: post #133

MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?) We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access to the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that. This is how basically…

> Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?

It can be done on a small scale. The name escapes me but somebody big in the React world recently put out a course and made well over 5-6 figures in the first day of preorders alone.

Now whether that scales to fund an entire organization or corporation remains to be seen.

Re: MDN Plus

#155

Post by ______- »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #26

At first glance, this feels a little distasteful. I've always thought of the MDN docs like Wikipedia; a non-profit public resource. Attempting to monetize it feels... wrong somehow. So long as the docs themselves remain under CC-BY-SA though guess it's not really a problem. The premium features they currently offer seem reasonable, and if things ever get too out of hand the community could always just move to another…

> Attempting to monetize it feels... wrong

On a long enough timeline, all free and libre services done out of the good will and charitable efforts of contributors and maintainers, will eventually succumb to some sort of monetization strategy. I know in my case, and last time I checked, I don't work for free.

Re: MDN Plus

#156

Post by la_fayette »

I absolutely hope that this experiment works out for Mozilla. However, I think there is no need for such a service. The web is an open platform, there is no secret knowledge. As an advanced web developer you can find out everything on your own, as a beginner you can use free MDN tutorials (or other websites).

They could offer certificates for different levels of web-development skills. Based on the popularity of MDN this could work out well...

Re: MDN Plus

#157

Post by truth_ »

dfabulich wrote: post #133

MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?) We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access to the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that. This is how basically…

This was my exact thought after seeing this. Selling Deep Dives? Who would pay for that?

I would always trust open, free deep dives under open scrutiny and criticism more than something behind a paywall.

Even if this is from Mozilla.

A premium chat room/forum would have been miles better.

Re: MDN Plus

#158

Post by ahtaarra »

dralley wrote: post #84
giancarlostoro wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out of Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent MDN Web Fondation or something. Mozilla seems to have a poor track record of maintaining anything as we saw when they fired most of the people working on MDN and other engineers despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or other things like email, the whole non-profit Mozilla vs for pro…

>despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or other things like email In 2021, there is not a chance in hell that any significant number of people are going to pay money for their web browser. At best (and this is very optimistic) it might make a few million dollars from dedicated HN-types, which is nowhere close to what Google gives them. I actually would pay money for a Mozilla-branded emai…

Scroll probably would have worked well with Pocket because the former could have increased user engagement (and, in turn, help better/newer stories end up in the top posts/popular category) while in the latter support for some paywalled content-providers could be added under a single subscription system.

Re: MDN Plus

#159

Post by Ygg2 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #69
kojoru wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a concious decision in 2017 to close Google's and Microsoft's web documentation portals so that MDN can be a unified source of truth: https://www.zdnet.com/article/developers-rejoice-microsoft-g...

I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out of Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent MDN Web Fondation or something. Mozilla seems to have a poor track record of maintaining anything as we saw when they fired most of the people working on MDN and other engineers despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or other things like email, the whole non-profit Mozilla vs for pro…

> I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out of Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent...

If https://servo.org/ is any measure. Probably not :(

People don't care about browsers until it's too late.

Re: MDN Plus

#160

Post by Rapzid »

dfabulich wrote: post #133

MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?) We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access to the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that. This is how basically…

Yeah.. If I were to throw down for something like this I would actually like for the content to be made available for free after a period. So, I would just be supporting.

However, back to the topic of corporate sponsors.. I see a distinct lack of calling out who the sponsors are? We all know a lot of VERY big companies shut down their own doc efforts to throw in with MDN; why not sell them call-out spots on a list of sponsors? Tiered even? Doesn't have to be super intrusive but would potentially open up funding channels within those large companies.

Post reply on HN