On Jan 7, 2009, at 7:44 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> What's going to happen is that we're going to decide on a number of > accounts we believe we can support and then give out that many codes. > Priority to users who are willing to pay, and probably everything else > is first-come-first-served (except those who are volunteering who will > of course be on the site from the beginning). The invite codes are a > method of controlling growth in a predictable manner. (Which > translates to: we need to balance people paying with buying servers. > We can't buy servers until people pay, but people can't pay until we > have room for them. Catch-22 that requires some careful balancing.) > > At the same time we need to balance so as to let enough people in > (i.e., if we don't have enough, we don't get network effect, and > hinder overall growth - possibly killing it). So we'll err on the > side of 'get lots of people, and deal with the site being a little > slow'. I should also add: for those of you who remember the old LJ invite code system, we're not going to be following it exactly. (For those of you who don't remember it: it was "each free user got one invite code after having an account for a week; each paid user got one invite code per month of paid time", with some extra opportunities to earn invite codes such as via Support, etc.) Assuming we can get the technical details of it worked out properly (ie, we can code it in time), we'll be releasing invite codes in batches spread out over the existing active userbase, as we can support additional growth. This means that as we can support additional traffic, you (the Dreamwidth user) will receive additional invite codes, without having to do anything to "earn" them. One thing we will be keeping from the old LJ invite code model is the "pay to create an account" option; if you don't have an invite code and can't get one, you will be able to buy paid time and bypass the invite-code process to create an account. With the economy in the shape that it's in, we know that people aren't in a good position to be paying for luxuries on the internets. However, with the economy in the shape that it's in, we're super determined that we're going to be building Dreamwidth in a sustainable fashion. Look for more information on the economics of the site -- along with our price points and account structure -- coming through soon. --D -- Denise Paolucci [email protected] Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations. Coming soon! _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
