OP 30 November, 2021 - 09:12 PM
(This post was last modified: 30 November, 2021 - 09:51 PM by Mastiff. Edited 2 times in total.)
Disclaimer: If you can't read more than 20 sentences without passing out please just go crack PayPal or whatever the fuck you do.
Leechers are a thorny issue, or are they?
Let's start with a premise: at the heart of Cracked is piracy. What do you do when you can't or don't want to pay for a digital content? You pirate it.
Everything that happens on Cracked is based on the intention of spending less, or nothing at all, for a product or service offered by someone.
I want to make another analogy with piracy. In many European countries, piracy is illegal, but it is not prosecuted as a crime because someone who pirates a digital media does not have the economic means to pay for it or does not intend to pay for it, so they would not take advantage of it unless it got pirated.
The same goes for leechers. Leechers are piracy within piracy: they are unable or unwilling to pay for something, so they come to Cracked, which serves this purpose and is the reason for its success, to get it. However, the problem arises when Cracked imposes itself on them by saying: if you don't contribute by publishing content or buying an upgrade, you are the scum of society and get permanently banned.
A small digression: notice how warez doesn't work this way. Being a leecher has no consequence because you can't be restricted from torrenting something, and you aren't considered a leecher if you distribute content to at least one other person (the >1.000 ratio rule). On Cracked, since seeding is not possible, you have to come up with your original content, which is like saying: if you pirate a movie, go to a cinema with a camera to bootleg a film yourself. It doesn't make much sense since you pirate a movie because you can't access it yourself.
The never-ending leeching bans would work were it not for the fact that to ban evade, you only need a new email and IP address.
The automatic ban has no advantage other than increasing the count of registered users, counter that can be altered at will.
My suggestion is to stop banning leechers, because it is a measure that does not bring any benefit, and to remove the posting limits entirely. Before anyone starts screaming, "but Mastiff, if you don't ban leechers, they will take over the site, leech everything, enslave our contributors and fuck their wives!"... it's already happening, but we are still here, and people who enjoy the community or the marketplace still upgrade.
Where do you think most of the 2.65M users come from? Who posted 13.77M posts?
There are 30 times more posts than threads. Just banning leechers doesn't work.
We know the primary purpose of continuously banning leechers is to hope that they sign up again, pretend not to be banned leechers, upgrade (which ultmately benefits one person, not the community itself), and continue leeching silently, but it's clear by reading the statistics that it's not working. Let's look at two statistics: the average active users are 0.18% of overall users, and the average active upgraded users are even lower. We're talking about a number with many 0s.
These numbers tell us that people who sign up to take something and leave do not care about the community or upgrades, and they could not care less about bans. But even if they did, why would a ban-evading leecher upgrade knowing that multi-accounting is against the rules, that their favorite leaker will repost stuff posted on Cracked on Telegram or Eternia, that lots of users intentionally post garbage content with clickbait titles?
Whether you like it or not, those who do not intend to pay will not pay, and you will not be able to keep them out of the site, but they can at least change their mind if they engage with the community or plan to stay on the site for a long time. If you want to convert users into customers, you have to work on the site's quality (meaning that this suggestion won't change everything, but it could be a first step) and not kick your potential customers off the site. It's a successful business model if you have something to offer, and plenty of companies offer free plans that don't entirely ban their customers for not paying within a reasonable time frame.
Leechers are a thorny issue, or are they?
Let's start with a premise: at the heart of Cracked is piracy. What do you do when you can't or don't want to pay for a digital content? You pirate it.
Everything that happens on Cracked is based on the intention of spending less, or nothing at all, for a product or service offered by someone.
I want to make another analogy with piracy. In many European countries, piracy is illegal, but it is not prosecuted as a crime because someone who pirates a digital media does not have the economic means to pay for it or does not intend to pay for it, so they would not take advantage of it unless it got pirated.
The same goes for leechers. Leechers are piracy within piracy: they are unable or unwilling to pay for something, so they come to Cracked, which serves this purpose and is the reason for its success, to get it. However, the problem arises when Cracked imposes itself on them by saying: if you don't contribute by publishing content or buying an upgrade, you are the scum of society and get permanently banned.
A small digression: notice how warez doesn't work this way. Being a leecher has no consequence because you can't be restricted from torrenting something, and you aren't considered a leecher if you distribute content to at least one other person (the >1.000 ratio rule). On Cracked, since seeding is not possible, you have to come up with your original content, which is like saying: if you pirate a movie, go to a cinema with a camera to bootleg a film yourself. It doesn't make much sense since you pirate a movie because you can't access it yourself.
The never-ending leeching bans would work were it not for the fact that to ban evade, you only need a new email and IP address.
The automatic ban has no advantage other than increasing the count of registered users, counter that can be altered at will.
My suggestion is to stop banning leechers, because it is a measure that does not bring any benefit, and to remove the posting limits entirely. Before anyone starts screaming, "but Mastiff, if you don't ban leechers, they will take over the site, leech everything, enslave our contributors and fuck their wives!"... it's already happening, but we are still here, and people who enjoy the community or the marketplace still upgrade.
Where do you think most of the 2.65M users come from? Who posted 13.77M posts?
There are 30 times more posts than threads. Just banning leechers doesn't work.
We know the primary purpose of continuously banning leechers is to hope that they sign up again, pretend not to be banned leechers, upgrade (which ultmately benefits one person, not the community itself), and continue leeching silently, but it's clear by reading the statistics that it's not working. Let's look at two statistics: the average active users are 0.18% of overall users, and the average active upgraded users are even lower. We're talking about a number with many 0s.
These numbers tell us that people who sign up to take something and leave do not care about the community or upgrades, and they could not care less about bans. But even if they did, why would a ban-evading leecher upgrade knowing that multi-accounting is against the rules, that their favorite leaker will repost stuff posted on Cracked on Telegram or Eternia, that lots of users intentionally post garbage content with clickbait titles?
Whether you like it or not, those who do not intend to pay will not pay, and you will not be able to keep them out of the site, but they can at least change their mind if they engage with the community or plan to stay on the site for a long time. If you want to convert users into customers, you have to work on the site's quality (meaning that this suggestion won't change everything, but it could be a first step) and not kick your potential customers off the site. It's a successful business model if you have something to offer, and plenty of companies offer free plans that don't entirely ban their customers for not paying within a reasonable time frame.
