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I haven’t watched it. Why do you think it’s overrated though?

On Tuesday, both CNN and Reuters introduced paywalls, marking a shift from the recent trend of major news outlets stepping away from paid content. Why it matters: With large online audiences, these platforms see minimal risk in charging their most dedicated readers for access. The reality: The traditional media ad market slowdown has made it harder for news sites to sell out their ad inventory. Trading millions of ad impressions for the possibility of steady subscription revenue may prove to be a smart financial move. By the numbers: CNN attracted an average of 159 million unique visitors monthly across mobile and desktop in 2023, making it one of the most popular news platforms. Reuters’ consumer site reaches up to 50 million unique visitors each month. Zoom in: Both companies will offer a limited number of free articles before prompting users to subscribe. CNN’s subscription will be priced at $3.99 per month, while Reuters will charge $1 per week. Notably, both CNN and Reuters have already been gathering user data via registration walls that require email addresses for free content access. These data collection strategies help publishers fine-tune subscription pricing models. The big picture: The shift toward more affordable paywalls, in contrast to premium sites like The New York Times, reflects a broader trend within the industry toward flexible subscription models. • Last year, The Atlantic adopted a more dynamic paywall approach. • Gannett, the largest U.S. local newspaper chain, began easing restrictions on its paywall in late 2022 to boost ad revenue. • Time magazine removed its digital paywall entirely, opting for ad-supported content to expand its audience. Source: https://www.axios.com/2024/10/01/reuters-cnn-website-paywalls

Hey [mention=10]KrissyCakes09[/mention] welcome to the community!

I’ve had about 2-3 other forums in the past, including: • An off-topic/general chat forum (2015-2017) • An admin/webmaster forum (The Admin Effect) (2015-2017).

How do you get your first 100 users? In the clip below, Sam Altman walks through four common strategies to get your fist 100 users in order of best to worst: 1. Use your network. Email everyone you know and call in favors from anyone you can think of. But if it’s a paid product, make sure you charge them. “People who are inclined to do you favors are going to be too nice in what they tell you. So if it’s a paid product, charge them.” 2. Research people who might use your product and email them asking them to try it. “Conversion rates are low—maybe 2-3%—so you’ll have to reach out to more people. But you can send targeted emails saying ‘Hey, I just made this new product. I’d really appreciate if you would try it out.’ Most people want to be helpful.” 3. Social media outreach, posting to HN, forums, PR, etc. “The important thing to look for here is a traffic source that is sustainable rather than one big pop that then promptly goes away.” Airbnb is an example of a company that made PR work as an ongoing process—they were able to come up with press stunt after press stunt. But it’s hard. 4. Buy ads and point them at your website. “This is the ‘laziest’ and least impressive thing you can do… This is not what I’d recommend. I don’t know of any startup that has gotten big starting this way. I include it because it’s the idea that most people try.” This may sound basic, but I think this advice is important. Getting your first 100 users is mostly hard work. As Sam puts it: “Everyone thinks they’re going to put up this website, tell one person about it, and it’s going to take off like wildfire. But that’s not what usually happens.” What are your thoughts on Sam Altman’s methods on obtaining your first 100 users? Do you agree or disagree with his methods?

If you’re on Reddit, these are some good subreddits that you can promote your communities on. They allow promotion on them. Stumpleupon was worked for me back in the day too as did Digg. I remember getting a lot of backlinks from both sites and a lot of traffic. Another thing that works is releasing a press release. You can either release a free one or a paid one and that’ll get you more backlinks & a lot more visibility as well.

I’ve been using Reddit a lot lately as well. It’s started to become my main social media platform. The main advantage Bluesky has over Twitter is its ‘feeds’ feature, where you can follow and discover content that interests you. This makes the platform much easier to navigate and helps you find new people to follow.

Good evening!

Google is launching a new AI-powered search results feature in the U.S. this week, starting with mobile users searching for recipes and meal ideas. This AI-driven update will present a full page of personalized, multi-format results for each searcher. According to Google: “This week, we’re introducing AI-organized search results pages in the U.S. — starting with recipes and meal inspiration on mobile. Users will now experience a full-page layout, offering curated results just for them. You’ll be able to browse various forms of content like articles, videos, forums, and more, all in one place.” Key Features The AI-organized pages will showcase content in different formats, including articles, videos, and forum threads. Google’s goal is to provide searchers with a broader range of viewpoints and sources. Google adds: “With AI-organized results pages, we’re offering users more diverse content formats and platforms, providing new opportunities for content discovery.” Industry Impacts Although Google highlights the advantages of AI-organized results pages, the change raises important questions: 1. Impact on website traffic: Will keeping users on Google’s search page reduce the number of clicks to the original source sites? 2. Potential bias: AI-curated content may introduce bias in how results are presented. 3. Visibility challenges: Businesses may need to adjust their strategies to ensure their content stands out in these AI-structured results. 4. Ad placement: It’s unclear how the new format will influence the visibility of ads. These changes may significantly alter the SEO landscape. New strategies may be needed to maintain visibility in the AI-organized results format. In contrast, Microsoft’s Bing recently expanded its generative search features, targeting complex, informational queries. However, Google’s full-page reorganization sets it apart from Bing. For now, the feature focuses on recipe-related queries on mobile devices, which aligns with Google’s emphasis on mobile-first indexing. Whether or not this approach will extend to desktop search remains to be seen. Google’s Response to Concerns In response to questions about this new feature, Google has provided the following insights: Search Console Tracking When asked about tracking AI-organized search results in Google Search Console, a Google spokesperson noted: “Although we don’t track traffic from every feature separately in Search Console, site owners will still see their traffic reflected. Supported search appearances are outlined in our documentation.” This suggests that while detailed metrics for AI-organized pages won’t be available, overall traffic data will still be accessible. Expansion Plans Regarding when this feature will expand to other categories and regions, Google stated: “When we previewed this feature, we indicated that it would expand to categories like dining, movies, music, books, hotels, and shopping. There are no further updates at this time.” Though expansion is confirmed, Google has not disclosed specific timelines. SEO Guidance When asked whether SEO professionals and content creators need to make changes, Google emphasized that existing practices remain effective: “SEO professionals and content creators don’t need to change anything. The AI-organized search results pages are based on our core ranking and quality systems, which have been refined over the years to surface high-quality information.” What’s Next? While Google’s responses offer some clarification, there are still unanswered questions. The lack of specific metrics for AI-driven results could make it harder for SEO experts to gauge the impact on their traffic. Google’s confirmation of plans to expand this feature across multiple industries suggests that the update could have widespread effects in the near future. Although current SEO strategies are expected to remain relevant, the SEO community will likely need to adapt as this shift in search result organization unfolds. Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-rolls-out-ai-organized-search-results-pages/529078/

Hey UT! How’s it going?

X/Twitter hasn’t been the same social media site since Elon Musk purchased it, and he has made various changes to the platform since taking over. There are more problems on the platform than ever before. So, do you still use Twitter, or do you prefer Bluesky? Bluesky has been on the rise lately, offering a cleaner interface. It also doesn’t have the same issues that are rampant on Twitter. So, which platform do you prefer to use these days? Is X/Twitter still your favorite, or have you switched to bluesky?

Hey [uSER=47]@Unvarnished[/uSER] welcome to the community!

Welcome to the community, Peter! Congratulations on the success of your forum! It’s awesome to hear that you’ve been running it since 1995. That’s a great achievement. We’re glad to have you on board.😁

It’s awful on mobile too. It’s the only software that isn’t fully optimized for mobile phones and that’s a bad thing. ProBoards should offer an option for forum owners using their free hosting to transfer their forums to another provider if they choose, especially since they built the forums themselves. That's one thing I don't like about ProBoards.

I’m usually more motivated and creative in the afternoon and at night, but I’m not as motivated in the morning.

You’ll need to find sites based in those specific countries with the .uk domain extension and try to build links from them. This will help you attract that specific audience. You don’t need to submit your site to Yandex or Baidu, as they will list you automatically, like Google and Bing do. However, I’d recommend looking for directories in the United Kingdom, Estonia, or Scotland and submitting your site to them as well. If there’s a forum or blog catering to those countries, you could join and try marketing to their user base. Reddit, Quora, and Tumblr would also be good platforms to advertise on, as they have a large international fan base.

I get heart burn too, but I get prescribed nexium. I get it bad when I run out, but that doesn’t happen often lol. What’s your favorite pizza toppings? Have you ever tried a fried egg on your burger?

Hey [uSER=51]@flower[/uSER] welcome to the community!

Welcome to the community! [mention=47]Daedalus[/mention] It’s great to see you here.

Russia is planning to ban access to Discord within the country "in the coming weeks," marking another severed connection between Russia and the Western world. Russia cites multiple rulings against Discord for "failing to restrict access to banned information" as a major factor in banning the platform. The Discord ban is expected to heavily impact several Russian game developers who use the platform as a primary source of communication with the gaming community. The proposed ban comes after Russia's state media regulator issued several rulings earlier this month, alleging that Discord failed to block access to content prohibited in the country. This potential ban is expected to have a significant impact on Russia’s gaming community. According to Vasily Ovchinnikov, head of the Organization for the Development of the Video Game Industry in Russia, many of the nation's game developers heavily rely on Discord. The platform serves as a key communication tool with their fans and is also used for customer support. As of now, no domestic alternative to Discord has been introduced. Discord Ban Reflects Russia's Growing Disconnect from Western Platforms A potential ban on Discord in Russia underscores the country's ongoing isolation from Western technologies amid the ongoing conflict. Russia has been pushing to develop its own alternatives to widely-used gaming platforms, including reports of a domestic version of Unreal Engine 5. Since 2022, the nation has already been cut off from several major services and games, such as Sony, Crunchyroll, and Pokémon GO. If the Discord ban goes through, it will be another significant blow to the Russian gaming community. Source; https://gamerant.com/russia-banning-discord-fines-ban/

Cloudflare has introduced a new feature, Speedbrain, which can help you speed up your forum if its enabled. Here’s the news post from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-speed-brain Today we are very excited to share the latest leap forward in speed: Speed Brain. It relies on the Speculation Rules API to prefetch the content of the user's likely next navigations. The main goal of Speed Brain is to download a web page to the browser cache before a user navigates to it, allowing pages to load almost instantly when the actual navigation takes place. Our initial approach uses a conservative model that prefetches static content for the next page when a user starts a touch or click event. Through the fourth quarter of 2024 and into 2025, we will offer more aggressive speculation models, such as speculatively prerendering (not just fetching the page before the navigation happens but rendering it completely) for an even faster experience. Eventually, Speed Brain will learn how to eliminate latency for your static website, without any configuration, and work with browsers to make sure that it loads as fast as possible. To illustrate, imagine an ecommerce website selling clothing. Using the insights from our global request logs, we can predict with high accuracy that a typical visitor is likely to click on ‘Shirts’ when viewing the parent page ‘Mens > Clothes’. Based on this, we can start delivering static content, like images, before the shopper even clicks the ‘Shirts’ link. As a result, when they inevitably click, the page loads instantly. Recent lab testing of our aggressive loading model implementation has shown up to a 75% reduction in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time it takes for the largest visible element (like an image, video, or text block) to load and render in the browser. The best part? We are making Speed Brain available to all plan types immediately and at no cost. Simply toggle on the Speed Brain feature for your website from the dashboard or the API. It’ll feel like magic, but behind the scenes it's a lot of clever engineering. We have already enabled Speed Brain by default on all free domains and are seeing a reduction in LCP of 45% on successful prefetches.Pro, Business, and Enterprise domains need to enable Speed Brain manually. If you have not done so already, we strongly recommend also enabling Real User Measurements (RUM) via your dashboard so you can see your new and improved web page performance. As a bonus, enabling RUM for your domain will help us provide improved and customized prefetching and prerendering rules for your website in the near future! [HEADING=1]Enter Speed Brain: what makes it different?[/HEADING] Speed Brain offers a robust approach for implementing predictive prefetching strategies directly within the browser based on the ruleset returned by our servers. By building on lessons from previous attempts, it shifts the responsibility for resource prediction to the client, enabling more dynamic and personalized optimizations based on user interaction – like hovering over a link, for example – and their device capabilities. Instead of the browser sitting idly waiting for the next web page to be requested by the user, it takes cues from how a user is interacting with a page and begins asking for the next web page before the user finishes clicking on a link. Behind the scenes, all of this magic is made possible by the Speculation Rules API, which is an emerging standard in the web performance space from Google. When Cloudflare’s Speed Brain feature is enabled, an HTTP header called Speculation-Rules is added to web page responses. The value for this header is a URL that hosts an opinionated Rules configuration. This configuration instructs the browser to initiate prefetch requests for future navigations. Speed Brain does not improve page load time for the first page that is visited on a website, but it can improve it for subsequent web pages that are visited on the same site. The idea seems simple enough, but prefetching comes with challenges, as some prefetched content may never end up being used. With the initial release of Speed Brain, we have designed a solution with guardrails that addresses two important but distinct issues that limited previous speculation efforts — stale prefetch configuration and incorrect prefetching. The Speculation Rules API configuration we have chosen for this initial release has been carefully designed to balance safety of prefetching while still maintaining broad applicability of rules for the entire site. [HEADING=3]Stale prefetch configuration[/HEADING] As websites inevitably change over time, static prefetch configurations often become outdated, leading to inefficient or ineffective prefetching. This has been especially true for techniques like the rel=prefetch attribute or static CDN prefetching URL sets, which have required developers to manually maintain relevant prefetchable URL lists for each page of their website. Most static prefetch lists are based on developer intuition rather than real user navigation data, potentially missing important prefetch opportunities or wasting resources on unnecessary prefetches.

Elon Musk's social platform, X, has seen its value drop significantly since its $44 billion acquisition, according to a fresh estimate from Fidelity. The asset manager's Blue Chip Growth Fund now appraises its stake in X, previously Twitter, at around $4.19 million, as per newly disclosed information. This marks a 78.7% reduction in value by the end of August. Initially, Fidelity had invested $19.66 million in X through the same fund, based on regulatory documents. This isn’t the first cut Fidelity has made, as the firm valued its shares at approximately $5.5 million in July. With this latest markdown, X’s total valuation stands at roughly $9.4 billion, assuming the original $44 billion valuation from the acquisition, which was financed by both debt and equity. Fidelity and X have both declined to comment on the matter. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/29/fidelity-has-cut-xs-value-by-79-since-musk-purchase/

Thank you for sharing your forum with us! I like the design, it looks great.

It’s a lovely community!