Dreamwidth News

Hello, friends! December snuck up on us or else I would have posted this a few days ago, but since it is December, long-term users know what I'm about to say: it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

IMPORTANT: I have some extra news for you about payments and paid time costs, so please read the whole entry even if you're already familiar with the annual promotion.

This bonus is active now: for the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

The fine print: If you buy paid time for a friend or for another one of your own accounts, the bonus points will be sent to you (the account that placed the order), not to the account the gift was sent to. The order must be completed in the month of December. IMPORTANT: when we say "the month of December", we mean by server time (which is in UTC), not by your local time zone. If you plan to take advantage of this bonus, it's a good idea to do it before the last minute.

The important news: back in September's news update, I mentioned in passing that the fact that we haven't raised our prices in 15 years, despite inflation and cost increases, has made it more important to ask people to support us if they can so we can continue to offer the site for everyone. The majority of y'all who commented were extremely supportive about the thought of us raising our prices in order to adjust for inflation, and although we really hate to do it, we think that adjusting our prices for inflation now is a good way to make sure "your support still covers our costs" stays true for longer in the future. (It's true now! But at the current trajectory, we can't guarantee that it will stay true.)

What you need to know:

• We will increase our prices in 2025 to more closely match the inflation-adjusted original launch prices for paid accounts and premium paid accounts. (We're still debating whether or not we will also increase for icon slots and rename tokens, but the cost of paid accounts and premium paid accounts will definitely increase.)
  
• We have not finalized the exact date prices will increase. We'll let you know at least a month ahead of time when we settle on the exact date. It will probably be in the first half of 2025.
  
• We have not finalized the exact new prices yet. (There are a lot of factors I have to balance!)
  
• Despite the new prices not being final yet, expect them to fall somewhere between $52.50-$55 for 12 months of regular paid time and $75-$77.50 for 12 months of premium paid time, which means somewhere between $4.40 and $4.60 for 1 month of regular paid time.
  
• The value of points will not change: each new point will still cost $0.10 USD and all existing points will still be redeemable for $0.10 USD worth of services. For instance, if the cost of 1 month of regular paid time goes from its current "$3 USD or 30 points" to $4.50 USD, that will be "$4.50 USD or 45 points".

(This would be a hell of a lot easier and I'd have finalized it already by now if we didn't need to keep points worth $.10 USD and if we didn't care so much about trying to keep the ratio between paid and premium paid as close to the 70% conversion that exists now and trying to keep it so that you aren't penalized for paying month-by-month instead of 12 months at a time. Most places offer a modest-to-significant discount for paying 12 months at a time: we really don't want to do that. These constraints all taken together mean that I've spent a lot of time staring at spreadsheets and calculators these past two months.)

I know any kind of price increase can be a hardship for people, so I'm announcing this well ahead of time so that people have a chance to stock up on points and/or buy paid time in advance during this points bonus month (which we will continue to offer even after prices increase!) You can buy as much paid time as you want in advance: any extra time you buy gets added to your existing paid time and makes your expiration date extend further into the future, so if, for instance, you put 5 "12 months of paid time" items into your cart right now and complete the payment, you'll get 60 months of paid time added to your account. Because of how the payment system works, it's not possible to transfer paid time from one account to another, but you can convert existing paid time back into points in the future and then use those points for a future order.

As always, we remain incredibly grateful to you all for your support. We're one of the only sites out there that has no advertising, has taken no venture capital, and does no intrusive data brokering: our only income comes from you all saying "yes, we value this site enough to keep it running", and the fact enough of you keep saying "yes, we value this site enough to keep it running" to, well, keep it running means so much to us. We are going to keep stubbornly insisting that there is a better, more ethical way to do social media for as long as we possibly can, and it's thanks to you that we can keep proving to doubters that it works.

A reminder to everyone to check out dw_advocacy for updates on our legal efforts to defend your right to privacy and anonymity online! We know that things look (rightfully) bleak to a lot of folks right now and the next few years are likely to be full of a lot of shenanigans I am struggling to find a more professional way to describe than "legal fuckery", but I promise you that we're committed to fighting fuckery whenever it rears its head. On behalf of Mark, Jen, and Robby, I wish you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and I hope that everyone can enter 2025 with the same stubborn dedication to trying to find a better way that we've made one of our core priorities for as long as we've been around.

On the heels of our announcement the other day that we're joining Netchoice as members to fight the wave of terrible and unconstitutional social media laws being passed across the country, I bring you: the first of those lawsuits we're participating in as Netchoice members! Filed on Friday, Netchoice, LLC v Yost is the lawsuit challenging Ohio's Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act. This law (despite its name) applies to a wide range of websites other than social media sites, and it says that beginning January 15, 2024, people in Ohio under the age of 16 can't have an account on those websites without the website notifying their parent and confirming that their parent allows them to have an account.

This is obviously a problem for a lot of people under 16 in general -- there's any number of websites where a parent knowing that their child has an account there could endanger someone's safety -- but over and above all of those issues, this law has the same problem every single one of these "child protection" laws has: a website can't know which of our users are under 16 (and thus covered by this law) without knowing who all of our users are. This law, like many of the ones Netchoice is fighting, will require websites to identify and deanonymize all of their users in Ohio in order to know which of their users are subject to this law. More than that, it opens up a number of exploits and griefing tactics: if this law is allowed to go into effect, anyone would be able to have a site close the account of someone they dislike just by claiming that the person is under the age of 16, they're the user's parent, and they don't consent to the person having an account. This will work because there's no way for anyone to confirm whether Person A is Person B's parent, and the fines for failing to close an account when a parent tells you to are high enough that websites will err on the side of caution and just remove the account of anyone that someone claims is under 16.

There's a dozen other logistical issues with the law, many of which we got into in our declaration in support of the motion for an injunction saying that the law shouldn't go into effect. But ultimately, the biggest problem with the law is the same as every other law like it: we have a rich body of first amendment caselaw in this country saying that it's unconstitutional to place an undue burden on adult speech (or on access to others' speech) in the name of child protection, that anonymous speech is protected and it's unconstitutional to require identification or deanonymization in order to speak or to access speech, and that your constitutional right to access and engage in protected speech doesn't only begin when you turn 18. We're sympathetic to parents who are looking for tools to help guide their children into making good decisions for their online safety and privacy, but these laws aren't those tools, and the degree to which these laws interfere with the constitutional rights of adults make them something we absolutely will fight wherever they rear their ugly heads.

We're grateful to Netchoice for giving us the opportunity to stand up and explain to the court why this law is unconstitutional, and we're incredibly excited to continue to fight for your right to access the internet without scanning your ID or proving your identity and age. New with this news post: all future announcements of legal challenges we've contributed to will include a list of all the cases we've contributed to and a link to the docket for each of them, if you want to follow along. (Am I considering getting a scratch-off map of the US for my office wall so I can mark which states I've helped to sue over bullshit unconstitutional laws? Yes, yes I am.)

[EDIT 9 January 2024: The judge has issued the temporary restraining order and the law will not go into effect while Netchoice fights it in court! This is fabulous news! The hearing for the more permanent injunction will be February 7.]

Legal challenges we've contributed to:

* Netchoice, LLC v Bonta (5:22-cv-08861) N.D. California
* Netchoice, LLC v Yost (2:24-cv-00047) S.D. Ohio

Hello, friends! It's almost December, and long-term dwenizens know what that means: it's about to be time for our annual December end-of-year points bonus. This bonus is not active yet -- it will begin at midnight UTC on December 1 -- but I had some time today so I'm announcing it a bit early!

Our annual holiday gift tradition to y'all is simple: for the entire month of December, all orders in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

The fine print: this bonus only applies to orders of paid time and points: rename tokens and bonus icon slots don't receive bonuses. If you buy paid time for a friend or for another one of your own accounts, the bonus points will be sent to you (the account that placed the order), not to the account the gift was sent to.

The order must be completed in the month of December. IMPORTANT: when we say "the month of December", we mean by server time (which is in UTC), not by your local time zone. Every year, a few people think they have more time to make an order than they actually do, so if you want to take advantage of the promo, it's a good idea to do it before the last day. (I always like to include this warning because I, too, leave things to the absolute last minute and have it bite me in the ass frequently.)

This is our annual way of saying "thank you" to everyone who supports us. 2023 has been a wild year for us, full of meltdowns from other social media services from Twitter (excuse me, "X") to Reddit to Tumblr, each one proving yet again the fundamental theory we founded Dreamwidth on: that modern ad-supported, VC-funded, all-things-to-all-people social media services are incapable of putting the needs of their communities and their users first. I will always love social media for what it is and what it can do for people, but the last fifteen years have made it painfully clear that it's really, really hard to do social media in an ethical fashion, and that gets even harder when you have to choose between the good of your users and the desires of the people who are funding your platform. The fact we're 100% user-funded means that unlike most other social media platforms out there, you can be positive that for us, those two groups of people are the same people: you. We don't have to chase ad dollars or engage in creepy unethical privacy-violating behavior: our only goal is to do the best we can at providing you a service you think is worth paying to keep it going.

Those stubborn, ad-free, privacy-focused, user-centric practices resulted in the thing we're most proud of this year: our contribution to the lawsuit seeking to invalidate California's "Age-Appropriate Design Act". Despite the name and the way people talk about it, the law is not a data privacy or child protection law: it's a backdoor censorship law that will hand the state of California wide powers of prior restraint on the protected speech of adults and require websites to forcibly deanonymize their users and require proof of both identity and age. Both the oral argument before the court and the judge's ruling granting the preliminary injunction cited to us as an example of a service the law would require to collect more user data than we want to, and to use it in ways we find horrifying, in order to demonstrate all the (many) ways the law is pretextual and show that its actual goal is controlling your speech and ending anonymity online.

It will take several years for the final resolution of the lawsuit, but the injunction means it won't go into effect in the meanwhile, and the judge has made it incredibly clear that nearly every aspect of the law is unconstitutional. (Because it is!) We're thrilled to have been able to contribute to this particular effort, and stay tuned: there's a good chance we may have some additional "fighting for your right to stay anonymous and read/write porn on the internets" news coming in 2024.

If you're in the US, meanwhile: please take a moment to contact your representatives to oppose KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which looks to make a very similar set of requirements a nationwide law and which is just as harmful and just as unconstitutional. Even if you've already contacted them to oppose it, and I hope you have, it's very worth doing again and again. (My representatives are probably at the level of "oh god, not her again" with me by now over this issue, but it really is that important.)

We don't need to raise money to finance these legal efforts to protect you -- there's a broad coalition of advocacy groups spearheading the fight, from industry trade groups to privacy advocates to free speech defenders, and our participation so far has been at no cost to us -- but throwing us a few bucks will definitely help us keep the place running while we do. We haven't raised any of our prices since we first opened the doors in 2009, because we've worked hard to keep our costs as low as possible and because so many of y'all choose to support us with your payments: we're one of the only sites out there that can consistently, year-over-year, finance its cost of operations through user payments alone, and we're incredibly thankful for the trust you put in us. I always hate asking people to pay us, because I know times are tough for everyone and so many of us are all passing the same $20 around and around. But if you have the cash to spare, tossing some of it our way will help us continue our mission of providing an online home that will always have the door open and a pot of tea waiting for you, no matter what else is going on outside.

I say every year that we couldn't do this without you, and it sounds cheesy and sentimental, but every year it's true. When we started Dreamwidth, it was a wild gamble: I wrote every one of our early news posts hoping that I'd still be here fifteen years later, trying to tame my parentheticals and cut off my digressions before I get lost in them, but we were painfully aware of how much of a risk we were taking and that all our experience, preparation, and planning could only take us so far. It's y'all and your willingness to trust us that's kept us going for these almost-fifteen-years since then.

So thank you, yet again, to each and every one of you who's made this place your online home. We're grateful to every one of you who's helped us prove that years-ago thesis about how there is a better, more ethical way to do social media, and we're going to keep repeating the message of "we need more smaller, community-focused platforms that provide a service their users find valuable enough to pay for" for as long as we have to until it sinks in. Mark and Jen and Robby and I wish you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and we hope that 2024 brings us all good things.