LWN is one of the, if not the single, highest signal tech publications around. I hope they're able to maintain a stable subscription service. Being user funded, and avoiding having to maintain allegiance to advertisers, is likely part of why their quality is so high.
Not only that but lwn is one of the main sites that gets submitted to HN all year round (not daily, but maybe nearish to daily). So the audience here on HN has been exposed to it over the years. I'm not sure what more they could do to get new subscribers, I certainly hope they figure that out or how to get new ways to earn revenue without having to go the ad route.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lwn.net
I’m occasional lwn reader and I had no idea there are subscriptions there!
That's the thing though. You can get all the value from LWN through here. Even if it wasn't for them tolerating subscriber links being posted on HN, the week-long delay isn't nearly enough an incentive to actually subscribe, rationally speaking.
Rationally-speaking, maybe not. I’ve been a long-time subscriber. When I first subscribed, my day-to-day involved embedded Linux and getting the “breaking news” was pretty valuable. These days I still do that somewhat but I’m stuck on a crusty vendor kernel and anything I read about a kernel newer than 5.15 is going to land on my desk in approximately 2028… but I still subscribe, mostly with a patronage mindset: I don’t acutely get value from the subscription every week, but I think it’s a community service and I’m happy to pitch in a few bucks to keep it alive.
Same as me. I started subscribing LWN when I was a Linux enthusiast from my early college days, because the content was so good and interesting. Nowadays I barely read it but I still keep my subscription alive, just because I think the content is worth it.
Wouldn’t rationally speaking you’d want to support them to keep them around? Or did you mean selfishly speaking?
not saying parent feels this way but the target class of this website often does not separate the two. we're still sloughing off the goofballery of objectivism, i guess.
we're still sloughing off the goofballery of objectivism
Are we though? I certainly don't sense the volume of FYIGM entitlement decreasing.
They literally fearmonger for a permanent underclass, it’s definitely not decreasing
This is pretty close to "I shall stand under this tree during the storm to stay dry, and if this tree starts to drip on me I'll just run over to that other tree and stay dry there" thinking. If LWN goes away, that value leaves HN too. Rationally speaking.
I think the generosity and straightforwardness are a big part of the attraction for many subscribers.
They've always respected their readers and I hope that continues to pay off.
Agree. I don't read it every week, but I greatly appreciate the quality (both of the technical content and the lack of advertising/sensationalism/clickbait) when I do read an article. Happy to pay to support this style of tech reporting and journalism.
Selfishly speaking is the word you were looking for.
Easy to say until they have to eventually make the hard decision to shut down.
Rationally speaking, if you're getting value from it, you should be interested in its continued existence and therefore subscribe.
This is why nobody likes economists.
TBF, economists, if any group, would understand the freerider problem and what it leads to if there are too many of them.
You’d think, but in practice their entire policy prescription seems to come down to “well if they didn’t want me to have it, they should’ve bolted it down, this is really an incentives problem, if you look at it.”
Well for me, at least, it's those features that make me a subscriber. If not for those I wouldn't do it
I'd argue otherwise.
Crab-bucket mentality aside, what they do is extremely important and hard to do.
I can't write an occasional blog post without wrestling with my ideas and words, and they constantly churn out this high quality material, without ever slowing down. They deserve what they earn.
OTOH, thanks for nudging me towards subscribing to LWN a bit more.
Edit: Just subscribed. Thank you.
Seriously? You joined HN 2 hours ago just to post "tech writers are little people unworthy of a decent living"?
Classy.
Ah yes, reward the people generating the value less, that should be a neutral move vis a vis the value of the product.
That's such a weird take away, you're comparing Mozilla which has a diverse set of employees, versus an organization whose sole purpose is to hire high quality technical writers, which is already pretty niche.
If I can't have something, you shouldn't either, why didn't I think of that! Chud
I don't use Linux (on the desktop, I use it on headless machines), yet I still agree with this statement.
When I saw that title, I thought the note would be about their "incredible journey", fortunately that is not the case.
LWN is one of the cornerstones of my very successful career.
Starting from the beginning, I have (at least) read through every story and every article, every week, since 1998. Especially in the beginning, there was a lot in each article I didn't understand. I would try to do some digging into those topics.
One way or another, just the weekly exposure to absolutely top notch technical writing was foundational to me.
When newer folk would ask me how to really get good with Linux, I would always point them to LWN.net.
I've been a subscriber since the beginning. That small investment is the least I can do given the incalculable value LWN has brought to me.
Sorry to be that guy, but... Please consider donating a significant amount to them, given that they have been a cornerstone of your very successful career.
I did something similar in the past, in relation to Ubuntu, and I never regretted it, even if that money would have been very useful if spent in other ways.
I will be doing just that today.
I know the editors visit these discussions: please, next time use a more descriptive title! I nearly had a fit when I saw that, really thought LWN is going down like it almost did 20 years ago.
Happy to pay the new price, even though I can only afford the cheapest tier.
You'll be happy to know the title has been updated. Apologies for any undue concerns we have caused. :)
Now we need the HN mods to come in and edit the title of this thread, I had the same thought as OP when I first saw it lol
> even though I can only afford the cheapest tier
Their pricing is at US levels not world levels.
HN needs to update the title too!
> The LWN site has been improved in a number of ways, with features like articles in EPUB format,
This is the single biggest feature that makes me keep my subscription going. The convenience to read longer form offline on my ebook reader makes me wish all other long form content websites would have the same.
I just noticed that too.
Do they offer a facility for automatically mailing the epub file to a specified e-mail address (I'm thinking the Amazon Kindle conversion e-mail) --- that might push me over into a subscription.
Are there more things like LWN for other fields/subjects? A math LWN of sorts, for example? I would happily pay for it too if it follows this model.
In general high quality niche stuff is very expensive e.g. Heavy Reading for teleco or Willmot magazine for quant finance.
I'd pay for something that was 'SemiAnalysis, but high quality'. Perhaps that's getting too much into insider territory?
Depends on what you're looking for. In a previous life we subscribed to some semiconductor analysis pubs that we're insanely deep dives into the industry. But they weren't so much technical deep dives as stuff a industry sector trader wants to know. And AFAIK they were very, very expensive.
Yeah, I'm aware a lot of stuff is catered towards traders. I'm someone who's more interested in the technology itself.
I'm there with you. I keep an eye out for IEEE pubs, and papers out of schools that have microelectronics specialist programs, and the occasional vendor pub that isn't marketing, but there doesn't seem to be a rollup site for curated deep dives.
Seems like only yesterday when they last increased their prices but it was, in fact, back in January 2022 - time flies!
I'll have been an LWN subscriber for 22 years as of next week, and am very happy to continue to be one. It's easily the most worthwhile subscription I currently have.
The lesson is that if you keep writing good content, people will keep paying
Thanks LWN team for the honest and straightforward post! The prices you ask are well worth it for the incredible value that LWN provides.
I forgot to renew my subscription a while back and it has been a bit busy, will renew now.
If LWN isn't your exact thing, consider donating to a project you get outsized value from. For me it's neovim, for you it might be something else!
Speaking of high quality publications, I wish we could get AnandTech back :( On some older blogs, I still stumble on dead links, and very few of them are on internet archive..
Although I seldom use Linux as main desktop, LWN is one of the services I keep subscribing to.
If you want stuff to exist in the world, pay for it. Work is work, and expecting things to be free, or to never raise their prices, is a good way to ensure that they don't last.
Ah, can't help but think of Atlas Shrugged. For all its flaws, it had a few chapters that described this idea well.
LWN is The publication for serious Linux kernel news. It's well worth the money.
I've been a long term subscriber. I don't read it every day, but more like a few times a week and there is always good stuff.
I highly recommend subscribing if you can. It's really one of the great ones and it's still oldshool style, not a lot of fluff, just nerds presenting nerdy news.
I think LWN is not just the best linux news site or the best tech news site, or the best new site. I think it's actually the best website. I just can't think of anything else that comes close in terms of quality of information.
If you have any professional connection at all to Linux then $11/mo is an absolute bargain!
Also, if you have any sort of buying power: make sure you company pays for a group subscription, and maintains it over the years. I try do that here. Nudge your colleagues to use the subscription and send them the occasional article!
This reminded me that I'd let my LWN subscription lapse after a credit card expired. Just renewed for a year and turned on automatic renewals (at least until the next credit card expiration).
I will be paying the new rate, and with pleasure. LWN is great.
How about new sources of revenue?
I -- and perhaps many -- would be interested in buying an archive of all the past issues (as PDFs and XML sources).
You could also license to AI corps.
i'd been meaning to subscribe for…the better part of my life. just did, and if you're reading this and have the means you should too
better late than never, and especially good now that every single day most of us are reading so many words that don't mean anything
Tried making an account but seems to take quite a while (forever?) getting the corresponding email. I guess their server is taking a beating due to this article.
Update: received it after ~40 minutes.
The server was fine, but we have a throttle that kicks in if we get a flood of new account creations at once to ward off spammers and scammers. We're keeping an eye on the queue now to ensure that these are waved through quickly. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Subscribed. For the next year, goal is to spend more time on lwn and less time on hn lol
> There are few things we like less than raising prices, which is why we have done it so rarely. It would be far better to keep LWN as inexpensive as possible and make it up in volume. Subscriber growth has stalled, though, in recent years, making that strategy unworkable for now. We are working on schemes to bring in more subscribers again, but that is a long-term process; getting there requires some short-term help.
I can see why they’d want to keep bumping prices occasionally (to keep up with inflation). Why do they need plans to increase subscriber growth, though, are they not currently profitable? It seems like they must have hit a steady-state by now.
If we can grow the number of subscribers, we don't need to raise prices for the ones that have supported us all this time; I would find that preferable. Besides, who doesn't want a broader reach?
Sure. Just, raising prices in line with inflation is not really raising them in a real sense. You are trying to give people a discount. :)
Inflation means that hosting costs increase. On the site they also mention being under heavy scraper load which also isn’t free.
Then the writers probably also need compensation increase, at the very least to be a responsible employer so that the employees can deal with inflation.
Inflation happens regularly, normally, or when world leaders emit another chaos bomb, and they do not raise prices immediately causing a lower income/costs ratio. In order to keep up with that without raising the prices in between you need more income and that comes from more payers.
The title has changed to A note on subscription prices from LWN. It may be worth editing this title to match.
> prices have changed considerably
I'm not doubting it, but I wonder what costs have changed for them?
Food and shelter if nothing else. Gotta pay the upkeep on the meat robots!
Good. Increase the subscription prices against what the users think. There are no ads at all. But of course not everyone will agree and want it for free.
Many know they want it for free. If you don't pay at all then it will force LWN to begin to place ads on their newsletter to cover the costs.
There is no realistic in-between other than actually paying for your services.
Anyone still opening distrowatch.com? Another classic
This is literally the first I've ever heard of LWN (in over 20 years of being a professional engineer) so clearly they could be doing better marketing.
If you are not working with Linux kernel you don't need it. Those who are, are likely already subscribed
It is fairly Linux-focused fwiw
They've also done good coverage of CPython development, like the JIT story currently on their home page.
> A note on subscription prices from LWN
Not enough of a spine to say "We're increasing LWN subscription prices"?
Also, nice editorializing in the submission: "A Note from LWN". Yeah, a "note".
What subscription level will finally make them increase their article CSS's line-height from "affront to eyes" to "actually legible"?
Nobody has ever asked us to do that; I take it you would prefer a larger line spacing?
If nothing else, we can easily add a customization option for that.
Firefox plugin? Script Monkey? Ctrl+ to zoom the page? Reader mode?
Sure, but I meant for all the site's visitors
If you read LWN, surely you are not scared to use a few "advanced" options in your browser...?
I was a web dev for ~20 years, so well aware of options available.
> I meant for all the site's visitors
tl;dr - LWN is raising their prices 20%.
I have no opinion since I'm not a subscriber, just adding for clarity since the title is ambiguous.
I guess most people are about to unsubscribe from LWN.
I don't think there news articles are even worthy enough to be paywalled at all this days.
Do you have a third thing to be wrong about so we can declare "ignorance trifecta complete"?
Sorry guys, for my inequity, but whats LWN
It is one click from that article to the homepage, which offers a blurb on the site.
https://lwn.net/
LWN, probably about to discover people are paying high prices for all manner of things and will find that LWN is, sadly, a disposable entity to pay for.
You could also see if it's something your employer allows you to expense. It's still cheap enough that it's something most managers can just approve directly, depending on organizational structures.
I suspect everybody likely to do so has already done so. Anybody who thinks $6 a month is a lot of money will also think $5 a month is a lot of money for something that they can get for free by waiting a week.
5 to 6 dollars is not much in terms of a donation. In terms of a subscription, though...One thing is voluntary if you find value, the other is mandatory to get to the value unless you are willing to wait.
I think you're reinforcing my point. Both $5 and $6 a month are a lot of money to many people. LWN isn't "about to discover" this, they've likely already discovered this in their release + 1 week traffic over the years since they set the price at $5/month.
It's been my experience most people, regardless of what point you make, feel like you are reinforcing their points these days.
Based on the initial response, it does not, in fact, seem like this is the conclusion.
They could always bump down a tier if needed, they have 6 months to decide anyway.
A dummy take on the LWN subscription price increase without valid reasons why.
This account, `thataccount` has only negative comments that contribute naught.
I did not use LWN ago, and am worried the future of it.
It outputs content and the users read the articles. I think the value of the model is not big.
The most important knowledge and experience is from your own practice, thinking, experiment, and reality.
If the price is too high, many users maybe think it is not worthy of the price, especially because there are many free and useful knowledge on Internet.
No open mind, Cannot tolerate criticism， Only donwvote.
The future looks even bleaker.
