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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (41026)	2/7/2001 1:41:39 AM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

The question is about character and quality. I don't know where you draw the line around the definition of "virtual community". Are the Yahoo stock boards a virtual community? If so, I choose virtual isolation. You say SI needs a new home. I agree. But it's in the jam it's in now because it's a free lunch, and there is no free lunch. I bought a "lifetime membership" for $100 three years ago. Lynn doesn't pay, she got grandfathered in. A bunch of people were given free memberships recently. A lot of people in this virtual community have money and are a great advertising demographic for various products, but one reason we're here is because we don't want to look at a lot of ads. No ads, no membership fees, no revenue: how is that supposed to work again? The servers and wires and SAN's and SI Bob's aren't free. We need a new home...a home that's going to pay for all that out of the goodness of its heart? Or a home that's going to say, 'ya'll come, we sell YOUR eyeball counts. It's free and public but you have to look at ads'. Then you have Yahoo. Is it possible to keep it free of ads and vanishingly low in cost to members? I'd pay a few bucks a month to keep it like it is now. I don't need my lifetime free membership. I'd even look at an isolated tasteful ad now and then. The thing is, I agree with Lynn. I don't think anybody's going to fund anything just for warm-fuzzies of community for its own sake. But a community of affluent and articulate investors, man that's got to be worth something to somebody, even if Crazy Naveen doesn't know what to make of it. Let's hope when INSP dumps SI the new proprietors figure out how to make it generate some revenue without turning it into Yahoo. --QS