2+2 Poker Readers Getting Too Smart? WTF

Graham

The "Grand Poobah" himself, Mason Malmuth sent out a letter to the moderators at 2+2. Apparently by having stickies of good poker strategy they are hurting the sales of their books. So, Mason has asked for his mods to remove stickies that contain too much good information. I know 2+2 has always been pretty big on censoring posts, but I think doing stuff like this is taking it way too far. Isn't the point of a forum for players to work together to get better at the game? What do you think about them doing this?

You can see his post here:

Mason Malmuth Losing Sleep Over Book Sales at 2+2 Publishing

JimmyHo

lot of the 2+2 books are widely available in adobe format for nothing;

Kristy

that's sickening!

BBC Z

I think that he needs to re-look at his forum and how to make money off them.

Hint: Steal the content and make new books from them.

Hint #2: Make them ebooks and charge monthly fees.

blackmagicz

That is obsurd..most of the stickies are relevant posts by forum members. Last time I checked I haven't seen a sticky by Dan Harrington talking about HOH strategies. What they should be doing is maybe removing the book section forcing people to buy the book instead of having people comment on what they think is relevent and not relevant.

A lot of people are probably turned away from purchasing their books after they hear "well there isn't any really new information or something you couldn't find on 2+2 if you looked har enough"

It's like saying you can have DIY tips on an automotive forum because you will take away possible jobs from mechanics. At the end of the day the most resourceful people will always find the information and the average public will just have to pay for it.

Same ole story. Instead of people giving back to the community they try to make some money off of it and complain when they are not getting enough.

BBC Z

Same ole story. Instead of people giving back to the community they try to make some money off of it and complain when they are not getting enough.

The problem is that it's an issue thats very important to the very survival of the internet, and theres no solution. If content providers can't get paid for their works, then they'll stop producing.

People can create websites that generate millions of page views and they can't turn it into cash, except in the very rare instances. That's scary.

Graham

2+2 makes a killing off their forum. It costs like $5k+ to sponsor one of their forums, and they have tons of sponsors. I think when I inquired about 2 years ago they told me it would be something like $20k to sponsor a section for just one month. In this case 2+2 isn't producing this content and it is not the reason for the decline in their book sales. The reasons their book sales are probably dropping is there is way more competition now then there was years ago, video training sites are rapidly growing in popularity which takes away from book sales, and there are probably many more reasons.

Intentionally trying to sabotage the forum to make it harder for people to find what they are looking for is a pretty low way to increase book sales, especially considering they wouldn't be pulling in the numbers from their forum if it wasn't for their members.

DrTyore

This is not unlike the OLGA debacle from a few years back...

For those that don't know OLGA stood for the "Online Guitar Archive", and was a collection of text files (tablature) that was submitted by amateur players around the world. It was their interpretations as to how to play various songs.

Of course, this was at the height of the Napster / RIAA going crazy thing, so they shut it down claiming it was stealing intellectual property or whatnot....

Mark

BBC Z

Actually, take one look at Mason..

and then try to convince me that he understands the internet. lol

Milo

He ran a similar play with Ed Miller's site, NPA, several months back. He was basically using the cow/milk argument with Ed, apparently to get him to make his site a pay site, rather than free. And you're right, BBC, I do not think he gets the intertubes one bit.

MickeyHoldem

One of the things that stunned me, was when they started their online magazine. The first thing that I thought was... their gonna kill their books sales. Great poker articles* available every month for free. Who the f**k didn't think that would hurt book sales... I figured they'd eventually start charging for the magazine or something, but no... it's still free.

Now Mason wants to try and "hide" the "great" advice that he has no authority over... written by forum members and deemed relevant and useful enough to be link via stickies, by that same community.

No chance that will backfire... DUCY?

* the preceding message is not a blanket endorsement of all articles appearing in the 2+2 magazine, and is not intended to bias the reader into believing that I can in fact read!

ReefAquarium

Graham wrote: »

The "Grand Poobah" himself, Mason Malmuth sent out a letter to the moderators at 2+2. Apparently by having stickies of good poker strategy they are hurting the sales of their books. So, Mason has asked for his mods to remove stickies that contain too much good information. I know 2+2 has always been pretty big on censoring posts, but I think doing stuff like this is taking it way too far. Isn't the point of a forum for players to work together to get better at the game? What do you think about them doing this?

You can see his post here:

Mason Malmuth Losing Sleep Over Book Sales at 2+2 Publishing

Huge opportunity for this site to post the links to the contents of the stickies here...

Imagine the huge traffic boost!

Bumbaclat

ReefAquarium wrote: »

Huge opportunity for this site to post the links to the contents of the stickies here...

Here is a link to a great collection of 2+2 stickies posted by on one of their members before this happened. It is worth bookmarking and reading.

enjoy!

http://www.pr0crast.com/2+2.NL.Anthology.v1.htm