Some news from LWN
It has been some time since our last update on the state of LWN itself. That's somewhat by design, as we'd rather be writing about the community and the code than ourselves. Occasionally, though, we do like to update our readers and subscribers on the state of the operation, especially when there is some news to report, as is the case now.
We'll start with the sad (for LWN and its readers) news: Nathan Willis, who has been an LWN contributor for many years and an employee since 2012, will be stepping down at the end of September to pursue an unmissable opportunity to study one of his non-journalistic passions: fonts and type design. We will miss him, but we believe strongly in following our own paths in life and wish him well.
Nate will continue to contribute articles to LWN. But we suspect that the intricacies of Béziers, brush strokes, and kerning are going to take a lot of time and attention, meaning that we will be needing somebody to help fill his shoes. Thus, LWN is hiring. If you would like to write full-time for one of the most discriminating readerships in the world — but also one of the most interesting, engaged, and supportive readerships — we would like to hear from you. This is your chance to make your mark on one of the community's oldest publications.
Speaking of "oldest," the basic format of LWN's Weekly Edition has changed little over the last 18 years. Some pages have come and gone (long-time readers will remember the desktop page, or the once-interesting "Linux in the News" page), but substantive changes have been few indeed. That format has served us well over the years; among other things, it helps us to ensure that each edition covers a wide range of topics. But it can also be somewhat limiting; it is a sort of treadmill of slots to be filled each week that makes it hard to focus on specific areas in response to what is happening in the community.
In an attempt to address those issues, and also partially driven by the prospect of being editorially understaffed for a while, we may start to experiment a bit with the format of the edition. There will be no radical or abrupt changes, but you may see us trying out some ideas from one week to the next. As always, we will welcome feedback or suggestions for changes that readers think should be made.
LWN is, of course, a subscription-supported operation. Growth in the number of subscribers is thus critical to the growth of LWN as a whole. Unfortunately, that growth has not been happening for a few years; in the last year we have, in fact, seen a slight decline. Our financial situation is secure for now, but we would like to see subscriptions grow, which would help provide even more security as well as more resources to expand what we do. So we would like to ask our readers: if you are reading this without a subscription, please consider how LWN is created and whether it is worth supporting. If you routinely provide subscriber links to friends, please consider encouraging them to subscribe. If you work in a company with an interest in Linux, consider asking your employer to get a group subscription for everybody there.
Along the same lines, advertising revenue, which was never a huge part of LWN's income, has shrunk in recent years; this is not unique to LWN, as the whole industry is complaining about the problem. We have never felt particularly good about advertising in the first place; it is an industry with more than its share of privacy problems, and the ads we get are often not appropriate to LWN's readers. We would like to drop ads altogether, but can't quite afford to do that. If, however, subscriptions were to return to a growth path sufficient to replace the revenue we would lose, we would happily consider leaving advertisements behind. There is no doubt that LWN would be better without them.
In summary, LWN looks to be heading into a period of moderate change. One thing
that will not change, though, is our commitment to producing the
highest-quality coverage of the Linux and free software community available
anywhere. With your support, we'll be at this for a long time yet.
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Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 3, 2016 21:43 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Thank you Nathan for all the work you have done here in the years.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 3, 2016 22:51 UTC (Wed) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 3, 2016 22:53 UTC (Wed) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]
Nate -- thanks so much for all of your hard work over the years; best wishes for success in your future endeavors.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 15:27 UTC (Thu) by xorgy (guest, #103618) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 18:21 UTC (Thu) by xman (subscriber, #46972) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 3, 2016 23:47 UTC (Wed) by cengizIO (subscriber, #106222) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 0:14 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 0:22 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
I wonder if you'd be willing to write a bit about fontology once in awhile? I'd be interested.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 1:12 UTC (Thu) by fredex (subscriber, #11727) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 0:39 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]
W.r.t. LWN, I really enjoy the format. That said, I'm looking forward to what our inventive editors have in mind for the future!
One suggestion is to have more direct contributions by some of the community leaders---through interviews or ask-me-anything type sessions. LWN is enough of of an important publication that lots of interesting people routinely comment on relevant articles, but it might be worth having more extended pieces where they could elaborate on their work in a question-answer type format. I'd love to hear more from people involved either in technical stuff, legal stuff, or community/outreach work; the last two possibly even more so, since they sometimes get misunderstood by the community. Possibly having an AMA where only subscribers can submit questions might encourage more subscriptions, and maybe reduce the trolling that one often sees on that format.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:23 UTC (Thu) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
It may be interesting to investigate something like "promoted comments" in Ars Technica, where the editors select particularly insightful or interesting user comments and let them appear promimently below the article.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 2:53 UTC (Thu) by miahfost (subscriber, #51602) [Link]
Another support option
Posted Aug 4, 2016 4:12 UTC (Thu) by akkornel (subscriber, #75292) [Link]
Another support option
Posted Aug 4, 2016 9:13 UTC (Thu) by rav (subscriber, #89256) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 4:14 UTC (Thu) by stybla (subscriber, #64681) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:18 UTC (Thu) by babout (subscriber, #109677) [Link]
Autosize-Ad & More ADs on Mobile
Posted Aug 4, 2016 4:38 UTC (Thu) by thwutype (subscriber, #22891) [Link]
Autosize-Ad & More ADs on Mobile
Posted Aug 4, 2016 11:21 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Autosize-Ad & More ADs on Mobile
Posted Aug 4, 2016 21:42 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Cheers,
Wol
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 5:14 UTC (Thu) by cstanhop (subscriber, #4740) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 5:58 UTC (Thu) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 6:05 UTC (Thu) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 10:22 UTC (Thu) by zack (subscriber, #7062) [Link]
As a fellow typography nerd :-), I'm sure he is going to enjoy every bit of his new gig, so all the best for a bright—and properly kerned—future.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 10:33 UTC (Thu) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]
Enjoy!
improvement suggestion
Posted Aug 4, 2016 11:17 UTC (Thu) by tadmini (guest, #41980) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 12:01 UTC (Thu) by karim (subscriber, #114) [Link]
try @lwnnet on twitter...
Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:37 UTC (Thu) by miahfost (subscriber, #51602) [Link]
Criticism from HN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 12:19 UTC (Thu) by codewiz (subscriber, #63050) [Link]
There's a thread on Hacker News on this article.
There are a quite a few comments criticizing LWN's old-school design, which at first may seem a bit surprising, coming from a website with the looks of HN, but they have a few good points on comments:
Compare LWN and Hacker News. Both are very simple, but the comment section of Hacker News has an emphasis on content, and metadata is showed in a very simple and toned down way. ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP). On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated!
And another one:
Let's look at the article's comments. It is so hard to actually follow the conversation between the users. The article's title is repeated multiple times and has a red background. Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment.
I'll add my own personal note on usability: having to type HTML markup when posting comments feels clumsy and unnecessarily hard. Nowadays, everyone's using Markdown and it there's a wide choice of parsers for all languages. I'd actually suggest removing the plaintext and HTML formatting options altogether. And in the spirit of HN minimalism, I'd also go ahead and remove comment titles, which are rarely edited to describe the post and always contribute to clutter.
Criticism from HN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:31 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]
Writing a comment in plain text is nice and convenient, but I find it mildly irritating when I decide halfway through to insert a link or a bit of formatting, so I have to switch it to HTML and then go back and <p> over it all, and I still haven't figured out the right way to get that purple quoted-text style in HTML. Some variant of Markdown would help there, since it avoids the sharp transition from plain-text to plain-text-plus-a-bit-of-formatting.
> I'd also go ahead and remove comment titles, which are rarely edited to describe the post and always contribute to clutter.
I feel they're slightly more useful in the "unread comments" view, which displays the comments outside their normal threaded context, since people edit the titles frequently enough to help distinguish sub-threads (particularly useful in articles that mention systemd and therefore have hundreds of comments). But when reading a whole article the sub-threads are visible through indentation, and the comment titles do seem to change infrequently enough that they're pretty useless.
Maybe the article comments view could omit the title bar (and replace it with a more subtle comment divider), *if* it's equal to the previous-in-tree-order comment's title; but still display it if someone explicitly edits the title to indicate a new sub-thread. Or maybe that kind of inconsistency would be a terrible idea, I'm certainly not a competent designer...
> they have a few good points on comments
Incidentally, if they're basing that on this particular article, I think this article is actually kind of a worst-case demonstration - lots of short repetitive technical-content-free comments with very little nesting, which significantly worsens the content-to-metadata ratio. It works better with technical articles where people tend to write much longer comments, and I'm happy for LWN to focus on optimising for those instead.
Criticism from HN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 20:27 UTC (Thu) by ABCD (subscriber, #53650) [Link]
Writing a comment in plain text is nice and convenient, but I find it mildly irritating when I decide halfway through to insert a link or a bit of formatting, so I have to switch it to HTML and then go back and <p> over it all, and I still haven't figured out the right way to get that purple quoted-text style in HTML. Some variant of Markdown would help there, since it avoids the sharp transition from plain-text to plain-text-plus-a-bit-of-formatting.
To get the purple quoted-text style when entering text in HTML, you need to use <font class="QuotedText">...</font> (Note that <span> is disallowed in LWN comments, even though that would normally be the correct method).
old-school is better
Posted Aug 4, 2016 17:45 UTC (Thu) by lacos (subscriber, #70616) [Link]
Relative timestamps in discussions (and on bug tracker comments) are the plague. For one, you can't sensibly copy & paste such timestamps. "7 minutes ago", relative to when? Doesn't make sense in any other context.
old-school is better
Posted Aug 4, 2016 23:35 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]
I don't know if LWN does that but it is an advantage.
old-school is better
Posted Aug 5, 2016 12:28 UTC (Fri) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link]
old-school is better
Posted Aug 6, 2016 1:28 UTC (Sat) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]
Just waiting on that last part to become reality... :(
[1]:https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the...
old-school is better
Posted Aug 18, 2016 12:05 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]
Personnally, I would really some way to tag the comments, complements, contributions, discussions.
In a positive way I mean, like: here is some work for the aimless browser programmer.
I would love to see the information in comments (or articles) seed further than in a few brief instants.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:27 UTC (Thu) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
I'm young enough of a reader to only remember "Letters to the editor" section :)
Good luck to Nate and long live LWN :)
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:45 UTC (Thu) by DoofusOfDeath (guest, #110164) [Link]
Would you consider tweaking the definition of the "starving hacker" level? I'm sure some people don't meet the level's requirements, and yet cannot afford / justify a more expensive membership at the moment.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:48 UTC (Thu) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:49 UTC (Thu) by bjourne (guest, #99019) [Link]
Longer-term subscriptions
Posted Aug 4, 2016 13:58 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
Unfortunately, our deal with the credit-card processor doesn't allow us to sell subscriptions more than one year in advance. They're afraid we'll take the money and flee to North Korea or something, leaving them on the hook.
Longer Term Subscriptions
Posted Aug 6, 2016 4:18 UTC (Sat) by dfa (✭ supporter ✭, #6767) [Link]
I second Virtex, "name your price" as a (bi)annual promotion, new subscriptions, sure, but I hope also an opportunity for some of us to up our level, too !
Smooth Sailing, Nate ! And continuing thanks to our Grumpy Editor !
Longer-term subscriptions
Posted Aug 7, 2016 0:40 UTC (Sun) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]
To be honest mate, I suspect that your own Govt are far more afraid of you lot pissing off to $somewhere_else_that _is_not_the_us.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:39 UTC (Thu) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 14:49 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
😇 🤔 😐 😑 😶 🙄 😏 😣 😥 😮 🤐 😯 😪 😫 😴 😌 🤓
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 17:26 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 15:02 UTC (Thu) by virtex (subscriber, #3019) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 16:12 UTC (Thu) by jlargentaye (subscriber, #75206) [Link]
As has been pointed out in the HN comments [1], LWN lacks a easy-to-find (not to say prominent) "Subscribe" button or link in places like this. It should at least be present in the sidebar for unsubscribed readers.
It could be worth even adding a link within the article.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 16:41 UTC (Thu) by fratti (guest, #105722) [Link]
A few things in terms of content I'd definitely welcome are more in-depth articles about developments in userspace applications, not just the kernel. I love those technical articles, and I'm quite positive there are a number of userspace projects which are active and complex enough to allow for interesting articles too. A few examples come to mind:- kwin, which Martin Gräßlin writes about often on his blog, appears to often be faced with interesting design issues. Perhaps Martin would even be willing to write a one-off for LWN.
- Krita is quite an active project and has to deal with tablet drivers on three different operating systems, and I've seen their devs post some interesting insights on their blog before.
- mpv is a video player with very competent developers which understand their field well and are often faced with difficult problems they need to solve.
- FFmpeg is probably the most popular audio/video library on the planet, and I've seen some of their developers post in-depth notes about video compression formats they were reverse-engineering before.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 20:16 UTC (Thu) by dany (guest, #18902) [Link]
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 5, 2016 7:55 UTC (Fri) by ctreb (subscriber, #4406) [Link]
The trial and tribulations of the people making the part of linux that is in my face and easily accessible did fascinate me at the time. I suspect that this accessibility may attract a few more readers that are less interested in kernel plumbing and systemd flamewars. Bring back the desktop flamewars!? :)
Oh, and good luck Nate. Thanks for all the good stuff you did.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 15, 2016 8:05 UTC (Mon) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]
As for LWN in general, haven't currently renewed because frankly I'm drowning in reading material and trying to weigh the relative relevance of it. I do think LWN does good work and will likely renew at some point.
And I want to see more Grumpy Editor articles, especially a continuation of the series on finance/accounting apps that seemed to get stalled.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 4, 2016 21:41 UTC (Thu) by markrose (guest, #110309) [Link]
1. There should be a subscribe link in the left-hand column. There isn't anything obvious telling me that subscribers are wanted.
2. The benefits of subscribing should be shown before making an account.
I've enjoyed LWN over the years. Thanks!
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 18, 2016 12:22 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]
I wonder if I will not start a kind of "bookmarks page" for the LWN articles with useful suggestions I found since my own starting point.
Why not have a per-account "comment bookmarks" page with an easy button for eliciting them as an additional feature (subscriber-only of course :-).
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 5, 2016 6:23 UTC (Fri) by sohkamyung (guest, #75701) [Link]
You could, for example, set up a minimum $1 level per month for people to support you generally, followed by gradually higher tiers for people who want more content in a timely way or even special features like monthly video recordings of activities at LWN. Anything goes ... };-)
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 5, 2016 12:40 UTC (Fri) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link]
But maybe the current reality is that there are several different, mostly non-interoperable payment systems, and people prefer to stick with the ones they're used to, so if you want to capture the maximum number of subscribers you have to accept payments in all of them. Then, it boils down to whether the subscribers you would get from yet another system is worth the expense of setting it up, which is hard to know in advance.
Other payment options
Posted Aug 5, 2016 7:21 UTC (Fri) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link]
Congratulations for LWN, my company is a subscriber since this became possible. Keep up the good work!Doing some experiments are good. I agree with the notions of having more userland or desktop development or overview articles to draw in more people.
You could experiment a bit with different presentations or comment systems, but I believe this is not your core value. So when in doubt: let things be. For instance I like the way I can do simple HTML markup insead of learning another markup-language-of-the-day. The feature that are highest on my list would be a nice to have an edit possibility to correct typos or links. (Just keep the old version a link away.)
In addition I suggest to add more volunteer payment options. Personally I would recommend flattr and bitcoins. Flattr because their "subscribe" model is very good and you can easily see which articles really hit high emotions by also attaching it to single articles. Bitcoins allows for anonymous payments and while there are a number of technical and ethical issues with it, bitcoins probably are the most widespread solution.
Best Regards,
Bernhard
Comment notifications
Posted Aug 5, 2016 17:50 UTC (Fri) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link]
Alvie
Comment notifications
Posted Aug 5, 2016 17:53 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
LWN has had email notifications for years; is there some aspect of the feature that isn't working the way you would like?
Thanks a lot, Nathan
Posted Aug 5, 2016 20:15 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]
While I'm here, my most desirable LWN site enhancement would be collapsible comment subthreads, or maybe a quick link to take you back to the parent comment. Sometimes it'd nice to be able just to ignore the noisy digressions that go on for multiple screenfuls. Maybe just as a slight enhancement of the hide-comment-from-blacklisted-poster feature.
Front page layout
Posted Aug 9, 2016 13:05 UTC (Tue) by Dead2 (guest, #102855) [Link]
Is there already some way of enabling this, or will there be? It is of course not a big deal, but I find it makes the frontpage easier to use when just having a semi-quick look and then later taking the time to actually read some of the big articles.
Keep up the great work :)
Front page layout
Posted Aug 9, 2016 13:12 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
I think that if you bookmark https://lwn.net/Articles/FrontPage you'll get the presentation you want.
Front page layout
Posted Aug 9, 2016 13:14 UTC (Tue) by Dead2 (guest, #102855) [Link]
Thanks though, that is replacing my current bookmark.
Front page layout
Posted Aug 16, 2016 15:01 UTC (Tue) by mbolivar (subscriber, #75534) [Link]
Thanks for the link.
Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)
Posted Aug 18, 2016 19:27 UTC (Thu) by josteink (guest, #110364) [Link]
As a new subscriber, I would love to be able to get the weekly edition in EPUB or MOBI, so that I could easily read it on my Kindle or other ebook reader. It's just so much more comfortable to read on.
Of course I might be able to create a script of sorts which somewhat reliably reworked your HTML to be ebook-conversion-friendly, but it would probably be simpler and better if you provided the MOBI/EPUB directly for download.
How about it? Anyone else think this is a good idea?
Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)
Posted Aug 18, 2016 20:15 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]
Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)
Posted Aug 18, 2016 20:32 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
We actually had a proof-of-concept epub generator at one point, but the project never got finished out. I agree it would be a great thing to have; I'll see if we can't get that done.
Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)
Posted Aug 18, 2016 20:56 UTC (Thu) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]
You can even automate that process if I'm not mistaken.
(Note that I haven't used Calibre's LWN news source myself yet. But that shouldn't deter you from giving it a try.)
Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)
Posted Aug 18, 2016 21:36 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]
I haven't tried it, but it will email a weekly edition to a Kindle (and, perhaps, other devices).
Getting back to the epub support is on our list as Jon mentioned.
jake
Change of format? How about literally changing format? :)
Posted Aug 19, 2016 19:44 UTC (Fri) by josteink (guest, #110364) [Link]
Thanks for the suggestion! That's certainly better than nothing, and simpler than what I would have cooked up.
I'll keep that in a crontab until you guys have something proper set up.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 18, 2016 20:37 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]
This is an annoying behaviour which can turn off readers.
Some news from LWN
Posted Aug 26, 2016 20:16 UTC (Fri) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
2 observations:
LWN doesn't seem to have raised prices since at least 2010, which is amazing, but perhaps overdue :-).
I tried to find out during (and after) the renwewal whar features are available on a project manager level but failed to find out. Perhaps that should be easier to find when one changes his subscription level.
