Thanks for the insightss, all good points.

To be honest, we've been so focused on getting things right for our premium members that we have neglected the free users so far. And we do need to circle back and polish up the free experience, and make sure we get the balance right. We've just got a few more things we want to get right for you guys first (most notably a dedicated page for our meetings).

As it stands right now, free users Straws/Valuations are all private -- they are the only ones that can see it. We may change our thinking on that, but for what it's worth this restriction hasnt had any material impact on free user content creation so far.

The reason we did it like that was because, prior to the switch, it turned out that something like 95% of the content is created by 5% of our users (and we deemed these users to be the most likely to go premium anyway -- which is what has happened). So our users wouldnt suffer any real loss of quality content, and we'd ensure the newsfeed for premium users wasnt diluted with lower quality content.

Looking at our logs, it turns out that there's hardly been any content from free users since we made the switch anyway, so even if we did show it you wouldnt have seen much anyway.

All that being said, i think the best approach is to just give you guys the freedom to choose. I'll add this to our wishlist and we'll revsist once we get some clear air.

Do we want filtering based on free user upvotes? Premium users - use a filter to include free site straws with greater than N free user upvotes. Free users would evaluate posts before premium users see them. For example, you set a filter to include free straws (not premium) that have 10 or more free upvotes.

Just wondering, would be great to be able to look at the index by varied categories.... 'tech' 'medicine' telco' etc.

Would be great way to go about researching companies in a more focused way. 

Thoughts ?