Looks like we'll be able to agree to disagree without being disagreeable, which I appreciate. So....
When I purchased my lifetime subscription (4/9/1999) the features were plentiful and resources extremely helpful when doing research.
I have to assume you're referring to the Charts and Portfolios the site used to have. We've got Charts here but even as a non-chartist even I know these can't touch the old ones. But we didn't own the old ones (InfoSpace does), and had long exceeded our permission to use them, which was only granted for 6 months from the date we purchased the site.
Those old features are certainly missing. However, even though we're still relatively early in the site's development cycle, we have a LOT more features (very few of which require an upgrade to Premium-Plus) than the site ever had before.
Two main points I want to make about charts and portfolios, though:
1. You didn't need to purchase a subscription to use those. They were available for free. Purchasing a subscription only bought the ability to post messages, view messages in batches of 10 at a time, and during a certain timeframe, not see ads when reading messages. Those paid-for features are still intact, and the list of other features that've been added that you have access to but free members don't is very large.
2. A lot of people seem to miss out on one fact that should be obvious: We *paid* for the site. Setting aside for the moment my belief that there would be no Silicon Investor if we hadn't done so (look at INSP's focus now -- they got rid of everything that wasn't part of their core competency and SI was on that list), it's a safe and correct assumption that though I can't discuss particulars, we didn't exactly pay chump change for the site. None of us at Investors Hub (which is the company that owns Silicon Investor now) is independently wealthy, so we couldn't take this risk and make this investment purely as a hobby. It's a business that needs to not only pay itself, but pay us back the moolah we put on the line. And pay us back for effectively losing most of my services for the 16 months it took to get this new version ready to roll.
Had we not stepped up to the plate, Silicon Investor would be no more and your lifetime subscription to it wouldn't feel very valuable if putting the URL in your browser returned a 404 error. And, being businessmen (despite being huge devotees of message boards and especially SI), we certainly did seriously consider just letting INSP poof the site and letting all or most of the users come on over to Investors Hub, since we were the most viable alternative.
That said, I don't expect everyone to thank me/us for saving SI and actually *doing* something with it (hence all the features it now has that it didn't before, and the features it continues to gain) because not only have I gotten a lot more thank you's than eff you's, but because this was also a business decision and I think we made the right one. Though that's not quite proven yet. We're still way in the hole compared to where we'd be had we just let them turn out the lights and hand us the marketshare at no cost.
Not only is the site worthless, so is my “Lifetime” subscription
You do still have all the features you paid for. And more. Some of the free things are gone.
Well, that’s my freedom of speech rant.
And mine. <g> |
