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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

How are these old posts invaluable? Do you think a paywall would have generated enough revenue to pay for serving them? If nobody is willing to pay for access, doesn’t that mean they are in fact not valuable at all?

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As an example, when I used to work in embedded development I'd come across some weird undocumented behaviour of a peripheral in a device. Inevitably there'd be a post on a manufacturer-hosted forum where someone else had hit and hopefully solved the same thing. To me at the time these were very valuable, but the actual information was created by the community rather than the manufacturer.

As to who would pay for it, that's a tough one - my employer wasn't willing to. I suppose it acts as a commons

Autodesk made almost 5 billion dollars in 2023. You can host a vBulletin forum with incredibly high traffic for a couple thousand a year. Stop making excuses for shitty companies.

And that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in reduced support expenses.

Deleting this is madness.

> And that forum also provides an enormous amount of value to a company, saving them many multiples of that cost in reduced support expenses.

The calculus has changed a bit. They are losing sales from people using older versions of the software that they wouldn't have provided support for anyways. In Adobe's mindset, for example, Photoshop CS6 is the poison that is holding back subscription sales, not their competitors. So an easy way to frustrate users into subscribing to the latest version... delete the old forum posts!

See I want to say you're right, but also the newer versions have all the same bugs the old ones do.

But the user pays forever with new version! (Some manager wants bonus now)

Not this user! One of my 2024 goals was to get off Adobe, and off I am. And creating hasn't felt this good in years, I shit you not.

I’m not in a field where I use any Adobe software, so asking as a bystander: what did you end up switching to?

Replaced Photoshop with Affinity Photo. I didn't say it was a big goal for me ^^; But yeah. It was an adjustment but I cannot get over how fast AF is compared to PS.

I've gotta say that I love Photo. I'm not a professional and I can't speak to professional needs, but for my own simpler needs, it's so much easier and faster than PS. I imagine that's what happens if you don't have 30 years of users screaming if you change their workflow by a single pixel, and can re-invent UIs based on newer ideas.

Such an insane paperclip optimizing way of thinking. The marginal cost to serve static content is very low as well - if they really didn't want to pay anything they could give it to a third party.

So what is the value of the old forum posts? To whom is it valuable? Is there somebody out there who would be willing to buy it?

In case this isn't trolling, it's valuable to any users who have a question that was previously answered on the forums, and to any users who invested time and energy answering said questions. Neither of these show up as a revenue stream, but instead impact customer retention and onboarding - the absence of community support is a major negative when making a purchasing decision as a new customer.

These things are not monetizable but are foundational to monetizations. It's like office ceiling lights. You might as well forgo buildings and gather naked employees with laptops in parking lots from such perspective.

Things can have value without the need to bring money into the equation.

A paywall would make them useless, because you wouldn't be able to find them using Google.

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