> Since the 2022 price change, according to the undoubtedly reliable numbers from the US government, consumer-price inflation has added up to almost exactly 20%.

Enjoyed the sarcasm, but does anyone actually believe these numbers? Is there a more reliable metric that isn't affected by Goodhart's law and can be trusted?

The title has changed to A note on subscription prices from LWN. It may be worth editing this title to match.

I've been a long term subscriber. I don't read it every day, but more like a few times a week and there is always good stuff.

I highly recommend subscribing if you can. It's really one of the great ones and it's still oldshool style, not a lot of fluff, just nerds presenting nerdy news.

Although I seldom use Linux as main desktop, LWN is one of the services I keep subscribing to.

til: lwn offers their content in `epub`.

I been self hosting many tools, one them an ebook manager called `kavita`, and downloading the epub format and consuming it via kavita would be interesting.

Wow $6 a month is really a lot for a tech site at least for someone from a lower income country in Europe. And that's only the cheapest tier

I think the issue there is that they're based in the US so they have expenses in that economy too, but it will lead to less foreign subscribers I think. There seems to be a lot of pricing disconnect between the US and Europe. Like when a vision pro is $3500... I've never even spent more than 2400 euro on a car in my life.

But I wish them luck. I don't know the site very well, I've only seen a few links from there here. I'm a big Linux user but I don't really follow specific sites except aggregators like this one.

This is literally the first I've ever heard of LWN (in over 20 years of being a professional engineer) so clearly they could be doing better marketing.

I would totally subscribe to a print edition.

> There are few things we like less than raising prices, which is why we have done it so rarely. It would be far better to keep LWN as inexpensive as possible and make it up in volume. Subscriber growth has stalled, though, in recent years, making that strategy unworkable for now. We are working on schemes to bring in more subscribers again, but that is a long-term process; getting there requires some short-term help.

I can see why they’d want to keep bumping prices occasionally (to keep up with inflation). Why do they need plans to increase subscriber growth, though, are they not currently profitable? It seems like they must have hit a steady-state by now.

Good. Increase the subscription prices against what the users think. There are no ads at all. But of course not everyone will agree and want it for free.

Many know they want it for free. If you don't pay at all then it will force LWN to begin to place ads on their newsletter to cover the costs.

There is no realistic in-between other than actually paying for your services.

What subscription level will finally make them increase their article CSS's line-height from "affront to eyes" to "actually legible"?

Sorry guys, for my inequity, but whats LWN

Subscribed.

Anyone still opening distrowatch.com? Another classic

tl;dr - LWN is raising their prices 20%.

I have no opinion since I'm not a subscriber, just adding for clarity since the title is ambiguous.

They could also consider paying their employees less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38106227

I guess most people are about to unsubscribe from LWN.

I don't think there news articles are even worthy enough to be paywalled at all this days.

> A note on subscription prices from LWN

Not enough of a spine to say "We're increasing LWN subscription prices"?

Also, nice editorializing in the submission: "A Note from LWN". Yeah, a "note".

I did not use LWN ago, and am worried the future of it.

It outputs content and the users read the articles. I think the value of the model is not big.

The most important knowledge and experience is from your own practice, thinking, experiment, and reality.

If the price is too high, many users maybe think it is not worthy of the price, especially because there are many free and useful knowledge on Internet.

LWN, probably about to discover people are paying high prices for all manner of things and will find that LWN is, sadly, a disposable entity to pay for.

They lock down new articles for about a week I think, so subscribers get the first one, though if you're a subscriber I think they let you SHARE the article with others, so here on HN sometimes a brand new article will be shared by a subscriber with a code so anyone without a subscription can see it.

Just curious: what was the original title?

Not a PDF, the ePub --- each Amazon Kindle has associated with it an e-mail address, which when a file is e-mailed to it, will be automatically converted and loaded (once the sender is white-listed) --- that way, each new issue would just automagically appear.

> “Phoronix, but high quality” would also be great.

Pretty sure there are many Oktoberfest travel bloggers, at least some of them must be "high quality".

Yeah, I'm aware a lot of stuff is catered towards traders. I'm someone who's more interested in the technology itself.

They archive A LOT of mailing lists… it's not only about the articles they write themselves.

Times New Roman (and STIX Two Text, Libertinus Serif clones) has been designed with increased x-height while keeping the same line height, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman#/media/File:Ti...

It's normal for it to appear denser vertically. Your example of increased line height looks suitable for subheadings, but in no way represents the typographic tradition of its use.

If you read LWN, surely you are not scared to use a few "advanced" options in your browser...?

I think you're reinforcing my point. Both $5 and $6 a month are a lot of money to many people. LWN isn't "about to discover" this, they've likely already discovered this in their release + 1 week traffic over the years since they set the price at $5/month.

Yes, $5 recurring payments really add up quickly to something you feel.

Rationally-speaking, maybe not. I’ve been a long-time subscriber. When I first subscribed, my day-to-day involved embedded Linux and getting the “breaking news” was pretty valuable. These days I still do that somewhat but I’m stuck on a crusty vendor kernel and anything I read about a kernel newer than 5.15 is going to land on my desk in approximately 2028… but I still subscribe, mostly with a patronage mindset: I don’t acutely get value from the subscription every week, but I think it’s a community service and I’m happy to pitch in a few bucks to keep it alive.

Wouldn’t rationally speaking you’d want to support them to keep them around? Or did you mean selfishly speaking?

I think the generosity and straightforwardness are a big part of the attraction for many subscribers.

They've always respected their readers and I hope that continues to pay off.

Rationally speaking, if you're getting value from it, you should be interested in its continued existence and therefore subscribe.

Selfishly speaking is the word you were looking for.

Easy to say until they have to eventually make the hard decision to shut down.

This is pretty close to "I shall stand under this tree during the storm to stay dry, and if this tree starts to drip on me I'll just run over to that other tree and stay dry there" thinking. If LWN goes away, that value leaves HN too. Rationally speaking.

Well for me, at least, it's those features that make me a subscriber. If not for those I wouldn't do it

This is why nobody likes economists.

Rational thinking includes thinking about the long term.

(FYIGM = F* You, I Got Mine)

based on other replies to the parent, at least some folks feel differently :) but generally i'm not very optimistic about it.

They literally fearmonger for a permanent underclass, it’s definitely not decreasing