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| Author |
Message |
| 10 new of 20 responses total. |
krj
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response 11 of 20:
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Jan 22 20:01 UTC 2002 |
(resp:9 slipped in and is much more economical.)
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krj
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response 12 of 20:
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Jan 22 20:07 UTC 2002 |
um, revision of above:... In 1991 and 1992, Grex *had* no Internet
services, and Grex membership never gave anyone extra modems to
dial into, so the original Grex membership was functionally
equivalent to today's Arbornet Citizenship. If Grex was going to
be really fundamentalist about its founding principles...
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krj
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response 13 of 20:
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Jan 22 20:20 UTC 2002 |
M-net/Arbornet currently has 36 Citizens. Nonetheless, I consider
the Citizen offering a failure, because only three of those people
paid for their own Citizenship. All the rest were bought by
one user who bought 33 two-year citizenships as a way of donating
a large amount of money to M-net. So yeah, the Citizen class has
expanded the pool of voters over on M-net; but now the dominant
pool of voters is a group of people who couldn't even be bothered to
give money to the system themselves, and I don't think that's good.
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jp2
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response 14 of 20:
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Jan 22 20:26 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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krj
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response 15 of 20:
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Jan 22 20:30 UTC 2002 |
(I'll move debugging of the "support" command over to M-net.)
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keesan
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response 16 of 20:
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Jan 22 21:36 UTC 2002 |
Re 13 - was this user perhaps running for office?
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krj
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response 17 of 20:
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Jan 22 21:52 UTC 2002 |
No, there should be no inference of shadiness here;
it was draven, and he made a huge donation to M-net in thanks for
teaching him valuable skills leading to a techie job.
(Yay draven!)
And the idea was to rope most of the active BBS participants
into the small M-net governance pool, either as candidates or voters,
and in the short term it mostly worked.
(One might argue that $15 citizenship-voters would make it easier
to stack an election; but that argument doesn't hold up because
Grex already allows 3 month members to vote, for an outlay of $18.
The difference is trivial.)
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jmsaul
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response 18 of 20:
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Jan 23 02:28 UTC 2002 |
No, draven wasn't running for office. In fact, he declined a nomination.
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mdw
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response 19 of 20:
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Jan 24 00:06 UTC 2002 |
At the time grex was founded, m-net had a complicated 3-tier membership
system, with increased access for more money. I think this created 2
problems on m-net: selfishness, and a future growth problem. The
selfishness, and the reasons for that are pretty self-evident. The
future growth problem was that, as computers got faster and the internet
made dial-in connections a thing of the past, the whole funding basis
was going to evaporate. Actually, that's pretty self-evident today as
well.
By eliminating most of the extra perks, we made membership in grex much
more a thing one would do for the good of the community, and I think on
the whole this has worked. We wanted people to see grex as a community,
not as an ISP, so while we never enjoyed the fantastic income m-net had
for a few years, we have a solid and committed membership today. By not
creating a preferential access arrangement to phones, we were able to
migrate much more naturally over to the internet, and were never in a
position where we were discriminating in any material way against
visitors. I don't know how much more fundementalist than this you can
get.
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steve
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response 20 of 20:
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Jan 25 02:33 UTC 2002 |
How wonderfully said.
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