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Swelteringly hot day. quonsar, sweating like a salty fireboat, pulling a wagon, walks past a bar. Pan back to show the blue marquee: Metafilter Bar & Grill: $5 Cover. He smiles, rivulets of happy sweat gathering in his crow's feet. His smile turns to sadness as he reads a smaller sign on the door: NO FISH ALLOWED. Camera pans over to the wagon, which holds a glass bowl with a goodly sized goldfish.
"You're killing me here, Opus," he sighs.
Cut to inside the club. Everywhere, goateed intellectuals and pointy-headed academics are arguing about inane topics that don't matter. Every so often a phrase rises above the din: "exposed to anus," "the criminally underappreciated Marshall Tucker Band," "I paid five bucks for THIS?," that sort of thing.
quonsar walks into the shot, smiling, giving the thumbs up, squirming to hide the very active flopping bulge in his pants.
And the tagline: Metafilter: 20,000 People Who Think They're So Damn Smart.
Someone in some thread or another was referring to the fact that MeFi is mathowie's site; while I understand what they meant, I got to thinking about whether or not the users who have paid for membership could lay claim to "owning" part of the site; a bit like stockholders. They are supposedly helping to pay for the servers, after all. I took a look at the new user signup page, and read this text:
Due to the bursting size of the community, its use of resources, and the cost of running the servers, all new users have a one-time $5 charge, to help defray these costs. Keep in mind this is a donation towards the server, and not a purchase. If you sign up an account to pimp your product, act like an ass, or generally just do things that break the guidelines you will be booted and there will be no refunded donations.Due to the bursting size of the community, its use of resources, and the cost of running the servers, all new users have a one-time $5 charge, to help defray these costs. Keep in mind this is a donation towards the server, and not a purchase. If you sign up an account to pimp your product, act like an ass, or generally just do things that break the guidelines you will be booted and there will be no refunded donations.
I know that it states explicitly that this is a donation rather than a purchase, but what about the following scenario: Matt spends a few hundred bucks on some kind of ad campaign which results in say, 5,000 new users in a 3 day span or so. That's $25,000 in his pocket. Then he immediately shuts down the servers and sells them, gaining the cash from those as well. All of the new users (and users who had signed up earlier, in varying degrees) got nothing for their money and are out five bucks. Not an amount large enough for most to get up-in-arms about, but this hypothetical evil-Matt has just ripped off an unsuspecting group of strangers for some 50,000 hypothetical dollars. Would he be easy to prosecute in that case? Would the users have a right to a refund, despite the text on the signup page?
posted by ludwig_van at 11:06 PM on December 28, 2004