There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the web page that hosts it (http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/).
I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a lot of steps to pay them money.
There's nothing wrong with informing people that you can subscribe! A small Call To Action at the end of every post (Do you like this post? Help support us and get future content directly to your inbox by subscribing) would already do wonders! And having "Subscribe" in the sidebar. (If anyone from LWN is reading: use those words verbatim if you wish)
There's no shame in this being a paid publication. Considering the anti-advertising demographic, many would be glad to help support an ad-free system.
Another problem is that when you subscribe, you choose a number of months for your subscription to last. The maximum you can choose in 24. I just now discovered that my subscription had lapsed. If I had the option to subscribe permanently, I would choose to do so.
I assume this is some sort of principled stand designed to avoid skimming money from people who no longer use their subscriptions but are too lazy to cancel... but it probably means LWN is failing to accept money from a lot of people who would be very happy to be paying.
LWN articles are paywalled, but subscribers can generate public "subscriber links", which are the ones that get shared to HN. This is such a double-edged sword: it's great for visibility, but as you've shown, it means people can read your content for a long time and never even know that subscriptions are available. That trend only gets stronger as more people go through aggregators like HN/Reddit. Hopefully "pledge drives" like this bring in enough new revenue that they can keep the current system going.
They could make it significantly more clear that you are viewing a free preview, provided by the subscriber who shared it with you. It seems like a lost opportunity for conversions to omit this from the page.
Yes this! I just scanned the article page and the front page. Surely there is a subscription link in the header somewhere.. nope.. surely there is subscription information in the nav bar on the left... nope... okay the horizonal bar in the left nav menu probably separates the article related menu items from the site administration menu items and subscription is below the bar... nope. well maybe its down in the footer (scroll scoll scoll).. nope. okay I see the articles in the left are the paid ones because of the green dollarysign, surely that is a link to information about subscriptions... nope.
Okay found it in the middle of a paragraph on the front page. I think the nav could be improved.
Thanks! I missed this — I read the whole article, somehow missed that [subscription] was a hyperlink, then re-read the article and searched for the verb "subscribe".
I'm a subscriber but I don't look at it as a subscription to a weekly magazine but an investment. Enabling knowledgeable people to write in-depth analysis of various patch sets or subsystems of Linux kernel—which rarely change dramatically—ensures that, later on, there'll always be an article in Google search results that'll explain the reason behind certain behaviours in a more approachable manner than reading the source code or doc.txts—they're invaluable but a bit intimidating.
As an occasional writer for LWN, thank you for supporting them and helping make it possible for LWN to pay for articles. (I don't write about the kernel, though.)
I felt the same way and subscribed for years, but lately most of the content seems to be links out to external sites, and many of those seem to be reposts from HN or proggit....just not worth it anymore to me
I don't see the behavior you describe. A lot of the content references external sites, to provide additional information and context, but that's a good thing: it means more people in more places are having knowledgeable discussions that are worth referring to. I don't think it has turned LWN into a content-free link farm.
Don't be afraid of hyperlinking; it's the reason the Web was created, after all.
So I see a lot of confusion about what LWN is on here.
While it provides a detailed write up of recent kernel development for sure, it is far from the only thing they do. LWN is first and foremost a great way to stay on top of the most important developments in the free/open-source community, without having to browse tens of mailing list discussions on a weekly basis.
I see it as giving me a way to keep a tap on the pulse of the community and thus be ready when changes come.
They have reports from every FOSS conference or hackaton and condense the main points into a very readable summary that saves me time, while still keeping me informed.
Apart from kernel development, it did excellent technical reporting on systemd, prior to it being widely adopted and it does a great job of keeping you in the know of how things like wayland are actually progressing.
As for the parts that are genuinely over my head, I've been surprised how many times I've read about something on LWN and not really understanding what I was reading about at the time, but connecting the dots later.
You know when you read something and have no use for it, so you delete it from your front-end memory, but it resurfaces just when you actually need it?
Just to give an example, I remember reading a series on LWN some time ago about how virtual memory is managed in the kernel and now that I am writing a toy OS in Rust, I regularly have flashbacks to that series and it makes the concepts that I am learning about now genuinely easier to grasp, because I can make an instant, be it clouded connection that I did in fact hear about this and this already, even if it didn't make a lot of sense at the time.
There's also been times when the kernel has been misbehaving on me and I remembered that there was an article on LWN talking about this very issue and how adding a certain kernel boot parameter may resolve it, and it usually does.
For me, LWN is well worth the $7 a month they ask for it just on these points alone, it is one of a very few internet publications that in fact I am willing to pay for and consider it money well spent.
That may have been true once, but imho these days LWN is as likely to have uninformed or trollish comments as anywhere else...you don't need to pay to comment
If only it was the nonpaying users which were the bigger problem. There's a small number of loud and obnoxious subscribers who drown out most conversation threads and make reading or contributing not worth the effort. It used to be a place for some keen and insightful commentary. But in recent years I've found the various "factions" which dominate the discussions to make the atmosphere quite unpleasant; it certainly pushed me out.
I also like how they have a variety of price points. I've been subscribed for a few years (paying annually) and vary my payment up and down depending on my budget.
Most people here are commenting about the look and feel of LWN, I really don't have any complaints about the UI/UX so far, I don't expect to read LWN on my mobile phone.
I think the main reason of the drop in readership is firstly kernel development is very involved and detailed, LWN mostly reflects the kernel mailing list and associated events and tech talks.
I guess what I find most difficult as an outsider of the kernel community, is trying to keep up. Jonathan Corbet is doing and extraordinary job summarizing the activities of the kernel community in LWN. But the kernel doesn't maintain any main "Epics" that we have in software traditional development, so take for example fair scheduling. AFAIK, the kernel community does not decide to tackle fair scheduling on the next release of kernel, ie 4.7. Then say power management in 4.8 etc...
LWN ends up with a smattering of various articles under common themes like "Kernel", "Security" etc...
LWN has in the past explained long running topics like scheduling when key updates are happening and I commend them for that.
None of the above is a negative reflection on the kernel community or LWN in how they operate but it feels kinda hard to keep up and stay vested.
Anyways just a few thoughts, will renew membership now.
Not all software uses epics. I've actually found epics personally to be a bit of an antipattern, but that's a conversation for another time.
If the kernel has anything like an epic, there is multiple concurrent epics because the Linux is not a monolithic project. Nor are epics related to any kernel version.
For example, each major GPU driver (radeon, novaeu, intel) manages their own development, and push things upstream. DRM (the kernel part of DRI) interacts with those guys, and DRM pushes things upstream.
Network drivers and the network core are managed by small teams, push things to each other (such as adding support for major intrusive features like, say, when they added segment offload support, or recently genericfied the interface for that to support more protocols; or alternatively, when they started making more complex DMA patterns like scatter-gather and other zero-copy methodologies happen). The network guys push things to each other, and push things upstream.
The storage guys also do that, storage drivers and storage core push things to each other, and push things upstream.
Every possible major section of the kernel is a project in of itself, and have project leaders, and have parts that are ran by different people.
Generally, you don't push a patch to lkml by itself, and then you're done; this almost never happens. What happens more often is you go to one of the people who manage that part of the kernel, or has significant experience with that part of the kernel, and discuss your patch with them, and then they will try to help you make a patch that can be merged upstream.
More patches are rejected than committed because of how this works. Linus, or any other kernel maintainer, does not want your patch if it hasn't been ok'ed by the people who maintain those other parts of the kernel unless it is a small patch that does something obviously useful.
And what about the companies that just push drivers? Companies employ kernel hackers that know how to write drivers. For example, Intel employs the Intel GPU driver guys, Radeon employs the Radeon GPU guys, and all those guys are already major authors in the X/DRI/Gallium/DRM/whatever community; the infrastructure to make that all work is shaped by the hardware, the hardware is not shaped by the infrastructure.
As a kernel developer, I really, really appreciate the work of Jon Corbet and the rest of the LWN team. LWN serves a vital function for the kernel community and churns out some very useful kernel articles, as well as being a decent source of news for many other open source happenings. I hope they find some extra revenue from somewhere!
The thing is, the Glory Days when kernel development was a scary, exciting wild west are lone gone.
By necessity, the Linux kernel is now a part of the tech firmament and development is necessarily not as sexy as it used to be. So it's gonna be tough to get people to pay to read about it.
I don't think kernel development is any less scary now than it used to be. It's just as scary, people just don't care to know the gory details anymore. Such systems-level knowledge is seen as much less valuable now in the age of javascript frameworks that don't last longer than a month and silver bullets that everyone talks about but few are actually using for "production" scenarios worthy of that name.
It just mirrors internet culture as a whole. Easy to consume information, show off and fashion.
> systems-level knowledge is seen as much less valuable now
Lest aspiring systems programmers get the wrong idea: systems knowledge is still black magic and it's still plenty valuable. Knowing how systems actually work under the hood is a rare skill and can help you code circles around the node-is-close-to-the-metal [1] competition even when writing application code.
There's just as many (if not more) people doing systems programming as ever, there are just a lot more programmers in general and much of that growth has been in web development.
To be fair, LWN is more than just about Linux kernel development. I find it a useful aggregator of information of note from the F/OSS world.
For example, as of right now, most of the articles on the front page aren't about kernel development: distro security updates, LibreOffice, Firefox, GnuPG, ...
This is very true, but I am increasingly wanting something a bit less Linux-centric for all the major categories it covers, which also includes the BSDs and other platforms. There's also an increasingly unhealthy echo chamber regarding "the desktop" if you read the comments, which largely mirrors subscribers' corporate/project affiliations, and that's one of the reasons I no longer subscribe or read it too frequently.
Yeah i keep seeing a small set of names from the same org and corporations pop up again and again, trying to defend where the Linux "desktop" is moving.
To me, LWN only seems Linux-centric to the extent that FOSS itself seems Linux-centric. I've seen articles on LWN about major new developments in the BSD world (for instance, https://lwn.net/Articles/651700/ ), as well as notable developments about FOSS for Windows or OSX.
Right, but most of that aggregation is reposts from other aggregators, many of which are free. This is why I stopped subscribing; I don't need to pay for reposts from proggit.
I think kernel development is a lot slower and more incremental than it used to be, which is probably a good thing. However, back in the "wild west" days we had some very good books that explained in detail how the kernel works. Now, if someone wants to get started in kernel development, I wouldn't even know what book to recommend; all the good ones I know of haven't been updated in a decade.
I think this is perhaps an overlooked aspect of Linux's success; at a critical time, they had LWN and good documentation that made it easy for new developers to understand what's going on and start contributing. I don't know any other open source project that is as accessible to new developers as the kernel was in the early 2000's.
As someone who's only come into the kernel very recently, I have found the lack of up-to-date documentation to be quite frustrating. I'm very glad to see Jon Corbet step up to be the kernel documentation maintainer and make some concrete steps to improve the usability of our docs, but it's annoying to see few new books or similarly consolidated resources for new kernel developers. The main reason I'm surviving in the kernel is that I'm employed on a team with many experienced kernel developers - I don't think I would have gotten into the kernel as a volunteer.
I think in the last few years many open source communities have become a lot better than the kernel in terms of having good starting points for beginners. In the last 5 years I think many projects have started to focus on developing and improving community process, which is good.
I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years.
I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the site's UX at all. If you look at the mobile site, they have some sort of dropdown to show the menu, which is then also way too small to properly click on. Issues like this are allover the site: Tables without any proper spacing / borders, mixing centered and left-aligned content with no reason, etc.
For me it just feels clunky and even though the information they aggregate seems to have some value for others, the presentation is just way off.
> I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font).
Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, lynx, elinks, ewww, emacs-w3m, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge — if that's not professional, then what is?
The HTML is very clean and readable. They do use CSS.
Granted, it doesn't look trendy. Indeed, it looks like something from the 90s/00s. But once one updates to a20`6 style, one then has to spend money in 2017, 2018, spring 2019, summer 2019, fall 2019, winter 2019, January 2020, February 2020 — one will be paying designers and artists until the end of time.
Would I appreciate a somewhat more current look? Sure. Would I trade good HTML and universal readability for a more current look? Hell no.
Also, things that should be rock solid and dirt simple by now have actually gotten more fragile over time. Heck, just look what happened when the parent tried to write the current year, after successfully expressing an older two decade range ;)
2016 was a total mistake. Let's just revert, and then wait for 2020-LTS.
It's actually very problematic from an accessibility standpoint. The entire text of each post is a single pre tag which makes it almost impossible to use with a screen reader. This is exactly why there were complaints about fancy style on websites; it often ruins the structural markup of a page.
I don't like low-contrast sites, but on my monitor that one is stark black-and-white. In fact there are no CSS rules for the color, and the font stack is "Inconsolata, Courier" so I don't know what the issue could be.
As a reader of a website, I usually primarily care about what the page looks like when it's rendered, as opposed to how clean the HTML is.
Granted, the current trend to make everything feel like a shitty JavaScript application would be taking it too far, but lwn.net is definitely not a pleasure to read. Yes, it displays "just fine" in links, lynx, elinks, etc., if your definition of "just fine" is Fefe's Blog.
Oh, I'll bite. It took me 15 minutes and 44 lines of CSS to make it look significantly more 2010s (and dare I say it, more readable): http://i.imgur.com/LAhwht5.png
> I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content
And you're commenting this on Hacker News. A site built up on tables, inline style-definitions, and where it for half a decade refused to add a simple...
I'm not saying it's not a factor, but clearly this seems to be an issue you're able to overcome, given the right circumstances and content.
Also, I'd like to think of LWNs look and feel as a "solid" and clean web-page, the way they used to look and work back in the days when HTML was simple. Nothing excessive, and no overdone CSS/JS madness, which increasingly seems to be the norm.
You just point your browser at the page, the browser retrieves the HTML, the HTML contains the content, and the overall wastefulness of network bandwidth is way below 10%. It's the way I wished the web still worked.
I have never thought much about the design of the site and that's a good thing. It succeeds in delivering information quickly and efficiently, which I imagine is the most important thing for LVN's readers. I would consider almost any new UX feature a regression if there is even a small chance it breaks my browser or slows down page loads.
> this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements
Really? I've always viewed plain HTML sites in the complete opposite way. They tend to have really good, well thought-out content. There's no filler or clickbait with them.
Compare LWN and Hacker News. Both are very simple, but the comment section of Hacker News has an emphasis on content, and metadata is showed in a very simple and toned down way. ("7 minutes ago" vs TIMESTAMP).
On LWN there is unnecessary and redundant metadata accentuated!
Everything on HN is clearly thought out, and almost nothing on LWN is.
> Some of us vastly prefer a time stamp to an utterly useless relative measurement displayed.
Ditto. Maybe I loaded the page yesterday. What does '1 hour ago' mean? Was it updated by JavaScript? Is it an hour from now, or from yesterday, or what?
I find most timestamps useless. It's rare that they include the time zone, so I'm always left wondering if they mean my browser detected time zone (through some JS), the TZ that the server uses, UTC, or whatever.
"N minutes ago" is compact and does not require any client-side JS to provide an unambiguous value.
At least LWN includes the timezone, which is a step ahead of most of the sites I've used.
I suspect the "traditional" readers of LWN hold similar views and would resist anything less functional than the current site, regardless of its flashiness.
For the person downvoting me: Let's look at the article's comments. It is so hard to actually follow the conversation between the users. The article's title is repeated multiple times and has a red background.
Underneath each comment's title is a full-height line with a font stating the UTC timestamp, and in the next line we can finally read the actual comment.
I can't be the first person to criticise those issues, and from the fact that they haven't changed it already I think they actually don't care about these kind of things.
Hacker News is a partially about deep, "real" tech (i.e. the old school Slashdot crowd)... and more largely about "tech fashion", entrepreneurial topics, and mildly interesting articles from The Atlantic in 2009.
I didn't downvote your post... but I relate to the frustration that when we DO get content in the former category, the top comment is always a critique of website layout or font kerning or something else that tries to pull it into the second category.
The point of an in-depth site like LWN is to communicate information to the readers. If the article and table layout make the information confusing and hard to access, that's not "fashion".
You acknowledge in your parent comment that you are not the target audience for this site. I assure you that the sort of crowd that's into Linux kernel development by and large prefers web design that other audiences would find archaic.
Conversely, were LWN to have switched to Bootstrap five years ago, or some Medium-like look today, or whatever the next transient fad will be five years from now... their audience would by and large viscerally hate it.
Designer types indulge too much in the fantasy of OBJECTIVE standards for "organized", "hard to access", etc. It's all subjective. Hence, fashion. For people who enjoy working on green-screen terminal applications, switching to a web app version is like giving their workflow a lobotomy. For people who prefer mobile-first minimalist web apps, the reverse is true.
LWN, and it's related subculture, happens to not be your scene. That's okay. But it's perfectly fine to just, well, not comment. Because it is so painfully lame how whenever a deep technical topic comes up on HN, half of the comment section deals with website aesthetics. Hey guys, if some topics just aren't for you, then it's... just... not... for... you... and... that's... okay.
That's not my comment, you're arguing with multiple people. But you're the only one to mention Bootstrap or switching to web apps - literally no one has suggested these things. The only tips in this thread are: unbreak the mobile site, use better spacing around elerments, don't mix center-aligned with left-aligned, and don't put the article title in front of every comment.
I like that. It helps me to see where one comment ends and another begins. I can't stand these modern sites which have no borders at all, making it very hard to visually distinguish separate posts.
> design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content
For me, "design elements" tend to make content harder to consume.
> it just feels clunky
Pages that load megabytes of JavaScript to display kilobytes of text feel clunky. The modern trend toward large icons, large fonts, wide margins, and slow response times because everything has to go through JS/XHR makes websites that keep with today's design fads feel like toys, while websites that present information without a ton of JS and CSS baggage feel like tools.
I feel like design fads are partly a clever marketing ploy to keep web designers in business -- "it doesn't look modern" shouldn't be a justification to plop down the big bucks to redesign a perfectly functioning website every 3-5 years, but it is.
You're mixing up design "fads" with solid principles.
> large icons, large fonts, wide margins
I have 20/20 vision but even for me, all these are boons. It's the "design types" that want small fonts because they look cool. But for reading, give me a 14 or 16 font any day of the week, much more relaxing on the eyes.
All those things you're complaining about improve readability and discoverability.
I can't even imagine how people with bad eyesight think about this topic...
> and slow response times because everything has to go through JS/XHR
This does, indeed, look like a (software) design fad.
I feel like I'm not understanding what your saying. Zooming is easy. I have bad eyes and zoom in on websites all the time. Simple sites like LWN work great, but every "magically interactive overly-designed" site breaks immediately. Large icons start overlapping/fighting with each other and the text. Wide-margins end up squishing the site to one or two word columns
If you like gigantic fonts, feel free to press "Ctrl +" in your browser. I'm sure there's also a setting you can change to make the fonts larger by default if you're having problems with your eyesight.
Every time someone says a website should update their look people think they mean it should look like Medium and be brigaded by design school freshmen who'll make the page weigh 900gb.
I don't know what the original commenter meant, but the text could be a bit bigger and the line lengths and spacing controlled.
The comment metadata could be shortened and humanized, though the audience may find it useful.
There's some bugs with the dropdowns on mobile (haven't been able to close one).
I don't know if that will get them subscriptions, but it'd make the site easier to read.
Ironically, if you look at the HTML classes, they are using a CSS library typically used to make "modern" sites many here revile: http://purecss.io/
You created a strawman argument (y'all want it to be 900gb!) and then counter it yourself with some reasonable suggestions that others here have made as well.
I don't think it's fair to accuse them of strawmanning. They did make it clear that they might be unfairly attributing the argument to the original commenter.
The article's title is repeated throughout the comments list and emphasized. The other comment metadata has the same visual emphasis as the actual comments (except the link and author jump out more than the comment itself). The articles themselves expand to the full width of the window.
No, objectively. Unless you're saying it's intended to emphasize the metadata over the content. I'm talking about factors that are measurably detrimental to readability -- not fashion. Visual emphasis isn't new, it's been around for centuries -- it's not just a fad.
I agree that line length according to more recent studies seems to be less consistent (some recent studies say speed actually increases with longer lines but there doesn't seem to be any data on comprehension/retention and preference seems to be biased towards shorter lines -- again all of these factors may be cultural). But visual emphasis is a thing -- it's hard-wired into how human visual perception works.
It doesn't emphasize the metadata over the content - they are equal peers.
Most techniques for making metadata less emphasized make the metadata objectively less readable. I like having the metadata there. I like being able to read it. I have no trouble reading the text (because it's a decent size and the layout handles zooming without issue.)
It puts the metadata first with no visual distinction from the content itself. The distance between paragraphs in the comment and between the metadata and the comment is identical.
Also, the title of the article is repeated throughout and drastically emphasised (considering nothing else is that visually distinct and it even has a solid background color).
The typical LWN reader is a heavy mailing list consumer. Emails have subject lines so having subject lines for comments is very familiar. Many people take the default subject heading because they are making an on-topic comment. I think outsiders aren't used to seeing so many on-topic comments so it throws them off.
Using a line break between meta data and content is also a familiar paradigm. Spend 20 years reading your email with mutt or mailx and you'll catch on. ;)
Forgive me, as I truly mean no offense, but this is silly.
Good design makes the content more evident and less tiring to read. The two go hand-in-hand.
Do you favor poorly written articles simply because you're interested in the "content"? I expect not, so why the latent notion that "function = good" and "form = useless"? It's intellectually lazy.
"unprofessional"? really? I have been reading lwn since 2000 and it is the single most important site when it comes to general Free Software news and in depth information. Jon is a kernel developer and not a web programmer, still the site works on every browser I have tried in a consistent way. While the look and feel can "improve", the current or past forms have never been anywhere close to unprofessional.
LWN gets me what I want. It is the most important resource for a linux kernel or in general Free Software enthusiast. Average HN crowd perhaps does not fit into that stereotype.
[X] site loads instantly
[X] doesn't download dozens of frameworks or ads
[X] puts focus on content rather than appearance
You're right the LWN site is utter trash. It's 2016, why aren't they embarrassed of their own incompetence? What comes next? Are they going to tell me to read a book?
In fairness, I see your point, and it's not a bad one. I do appreciate the fact that LWN works in any browser, and doesn't require JavaScript to function.
I wouldn't say that it comes across as unprofessional, though — rather the opposite. To me, LWN appears to be professional: no-frills, focused on substance over form.
LWN's primary audience is also people who communicate professionally via mailing lists. They just don't go for flashy sites, and prefer stability and consistency to whizz-bang prettiness - which is why there's an article warning folks to expect some changes and describing the reason why.
But the kicker is, whether or not someone thinks the site looks professional, it's a subscriber-based service that's been running for nearly two decades, that has hardcore professionals subscribing to it. It's not FOTM.
Interesting backlash on this comment considering the issue in the post of subscriber drops. Not saying this is the case but younger readers who may be extremely interested in the sites content visit or are linked to the page and quickly leave because it looks like it hasn't been touched since 2000 (outside the content). I don't personally view any annoying layout issues but I believe this is a valid (if small) point.
>I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font)
> Nathan Willis, who has been an LWN contributor for many years and an employee since 2012, will be stepping down at the end of September to pursue an unmissable opportunity to study one of his non-journalistic passions: fonts and type design.
"Nate will continue to contribute articles... [but] the intricacies of Béziers, brush strokes, and kerning are going to take a lot of time and attention"
Nate is not going to be working on the fluffy parts of typography.
If you are a designer, maybe consider making some CSS changes or additions with Stylebot or another similar browser plugin? You could then share more "trendy themes" with others who are looking for a different design.
I really like LWN and I subscribe - although the Kernel Development part is usually way above my head and my interest level.
If you perhaps not enjoy LWN enough to subscribe - at least consider if you have any friends that might be interested or persuade them to subscribe - if they're already readers.
It is important to have good quality and well researched articles. LWN provides this for free software (so not just the kernel). As long as LWN continues their reporting in this way (high quality), I'll continue my subscription (more like a donation; don't need to get anything back for myself).
Well researched information is an important way to avoid incorrect assumptions to spread. Thereby hopefully avoiding bad decisions to be taken, as well as actions on problematic things (e.g. gmane).
Okay, let's fix this, here are some suggestions they could think about:
- Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers.
- Improve the conversion rate. There is a middle ground between newsletter modals and burying the method to subscribe.
- Introduce a few new products. As far as I can see, at the moment it is just "in depth news for OSS, especially kernel hackers". Maybe they could package some parts of this up for different audiences (security notices, content partnerships etc.).
- Some marketing tactics. "Invite a new subscriber to get this badge." SEO could be improved, too.
IMHO, I think they should be really careful regarding your last point - marketing tactics.
Gamification, i.e. badges, I don't think would go over too well with their subscriber demographic. I think something like a free month, a free public share of a link (I don't know LWN very well, but I do remember reading articles there which say that some member sponsored the article to make it public) or a bundle of $RELEVANT_TO_YOUR_INTERESTS white papers may work better.
Otherwise I think you make some very solid points, especially trying to find out how to subscribe was much harder than it should be...
> - Improve the design a bit. Carefully, you do not want to piss of old subscribers.
I simply tried to change the font-family to Segoe UI (or whatever your OS' font) in Developer Tools, and it looks more interesting than Times New Roman
I think they should improve the general information architecture. Make content more discoverable. Categories, tags, overview pages, or just a better layout of the home page, which is not only date-based.
Essentially increasing the visitor time for new visitors, then increasing the recurring visitors, then increasing the sign ups.
I cannot read the kernel source code as easily as the great articles on LWN that lovingly explicate the details. Sometimes even the articles are challenging for me but I learn something new every time I visit it.
If HN and the now nearly defunct Slashdot are popcorn, LWN is fine organically grown fruit and vegetables.
I am off to subscribe to LWN and urge you to do so if you find the kernel interesting
They also cover lots of non kernel topics. There was a fine article on the software modifications usef by VW to cheat the pollution testing, for instance.
I'm somewhat a new reader in the past couple years to LWN and actually was thinking about subscribing just a couple weeks ago. In honesty, I didn't even realize LWN had subscriptions until recently.
Either way, I've gone ahead and paid for the year up front, please keep going, I thoroughly enjoy the articles!
I have been a subscriber for a while now and I consider it some of the best money I have spent ever. Just look at the wealth of information available at
I've never been inclined to subscribe to LWN, even though I read about an article a month when it's posted to HN. Looking through the frontpage, I see:
* 6 x LWN.net Weekly Edition for $DATE
* A few weekly security advisories
* "Some news from LWN"
* Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle
* New software releases
None of these interest me. Here's what does:
* Klitzke: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL
* Python's os.urandom() in the absence of entropy
* One-time passwords and GnuPG with Nitrokey
There are a few articles I like there. But they aren't discoverable and I can't find what I want without working to filter the noise.
Contrast this with hackaday.com, where every article is a really interesting feature, there's no news on bugfix releases or kernel changelogs, and they mix feature news, cool stuff in the store, and community projects.
You didn't click into the Weekly Editions? That's where the real good stuff is. And it is separated into categories so you can skip the kernel news page if you like.
I have been a subscriber for years but stopped the subscription last year, it's just that I'm doing less kernel related development these days.
lwn could do better though, make the website visually better, have a mobile app, do some beginner friendly kernel corner and such, also add a save-my-favorite-articles function under my account(last time I checked there is no such thing), adding tag support,etc. In fact just moving to wordpress will probably solve many of its website "issues" so it can focus on the content as it has been for a long time. You need the landing page stay up to date to attract new and young subscribers.
I know that Jonathan Corbet is having cancer but he still keep working on and supporting this site. Not mentioning this is the best place for kernel developers, hackers to keep up with latest kernel news. God bless Jon.
One minor idea. If you're an organization defined by a mystery three letter acronym, do people a favor and define it somewhere. Since it's not in this post or on the lwn.net homepage, here's the LWN faq:
Notice that it's seven printed pages full of questions that somebody familiar with the thing might want to know. But nowhere does it tell you what "LWN" stands for.
If you want people to subscribe to your thing, step one should be to tell us what it is.
"What does LWN stand for, anyway?
LWN, initially, was "Linux Weekly News." That name has been deemphasized over time as we have moved beyond just the weekly coverage, and as we have looked at the free software community as a whole. We have yet to come up with a better meaning for LWN, however."
>The acronym "LWN" originally stood for Linux Weekly News; that name is no longer used because the site no longer covers exclusively Linux-related topics, and it has daily as well as weekly content.
Currently, nothing. But it used to stand for "Linux Weekly News". Of course, that name no longer makes sense since they're far away from producing only weekly news, but they sticked to it, and I think that this is a reason why they don't use their "full name" anymore.
I've been supporting LWN for years, because I love the Kernel page. I've learned so much from reading it over the years. I don't know of anything else like it. Their other articles are often great, but kernel nerdery is what keeps me.
I'm happy to keep supporting them.
(Since others have commented on the design/redesign I'll say one thing: The way the sidebar works now means I can't zoom text in on my iPad because it gets covered by the sidebar. It's a serious functionality dent which I wish would be fixed. That's it.)
This policy of having the strict title on the page is a bit much. The original title provided context as to what this link was about; the current title, the title on the page, is meaningless. It also makes the current top comment, mherdeg's "There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article.." make little sense
LWN produce some of the highest quality articles around - well worth a subscription. Something I think may harm their subscription rate is how quickly they release articles to non-subscribers (1 week after publication?). This makes it easy for non-subscribers to justify not going for the subscription because "some weeks I don't get time to read LWN until a week late anyway". I think it could easily be stretched to a couple of weeks IMHO. Especially as the "subscriber link" mechanism is in place for articles readers would like to share.
The complaints in this thread are mostly things like spacing and broken layouts, not fancy web X.0 fads. Hacker News is stylistically simple, but they still pay attention to making the content readable without strain.
I disagree with the HN comment. I always look at it at 140% zoom on my desktop, I had to add some CSS rules using Stylish to make it look a bit more eye-appealing to me (nothing fancy, I just prefer reading on a dark background), nested comments are a beautiful thing for a discussion, but they're a mess when you're on a smartphone that nobody figured out how to adjust properly...
There recently was a site update that improved functionality on mobile devices. Weirdly though there were a couple of regressions at the same time:
1) The front page for logged in users changed to a less useful one-column layout, so now I always browse the site not logged in.
2) Previously the current and previous weekly editions were nicely visible in the sidebar. That isn't there any more. As a result I read much less of the actual articles, as they just don't catch my eye. I mostly just check the front page news column now.
Anyway, I hope all the best for LWN, as the content is of very high quality indeed.
This is unfortunate as the content is amazing and $7 a month is quite reasonable.
At a couple of places I have worked at we had a group subscription for the department, $45 it not terribly hard to get approved. I think its a great perk to list for prospective candidates too.
I bet LWN could run entirely off some large subscriptions from companies like Google, which employees hundreds of Linux kernel developers. LWN is legitimate business information for many people and their employers. The model could be similar to the legendary newsletters of yore, like "Shannon Knows DEC".
Maybe they don't want to refocus away from the public, but it could work.
LWN does actually have corporate subscriptions. I currently work for one that just requires me to log in to LWN from the company IP range once a month. I'd guess, though, that is not quite enough to run the site.
As many have echoed here, the design and layout is very early 2000's. I understand the minimalist and nostalgic aesthetic but I feel they could really benefit from some small UX tweaks . It doesn't have to look like the latest startup but it could definitely benefit from just some basic UX love and a fresh coat of paint.
LWN is and has been the best in-depth news source about happenings in the Linux world. I particularly love the articles explaining kernel internals, or covering the pros and cons of some approaches.
I'm proud to have been a subscriber for the past 4 or 5 years.
I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a lot of steps to pay them money.