Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Updates
The formkey bug that was wreaking havoc all weekend was fixed. It was a mistake in seeding rand that was causing a small percentage of users to have problems posting. It wasn't a conspiracy designed to thwart anyone, just you. Man it was a pain in the ass. But it was squashed on Sunday (thank god).
Anonymous Coward filtering is now in place. It's not exactly finished, but it'll do for now. Essentially there is now a user preference that sets all AC posts to -1. This has been a very common user request for some time, so turn it on if you like. It's currently off by default. It's only a baby step: eventually there will be more fine-tuned controls for anonymous posts, as well as comment types. For Example: I'd personally like to assign a -2 penalty on any comment rated 'funny' because most of them frankly just aren't funny at all. But humor is far too subjective to say that the moderation is unfair. Anyway, now everyone can decide for themselves. That should happen in the next few weeks.
Last up, I'm gonna talk a little about advertisements and subscriptions. Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months, and simply selling the banner ads you see on top of each page isn't going to be enough to keep us afloat if we keep growing. And selling banner ads in 2001 is an awful lot harder then it was in 1999.
The change will be a different ad size on the article page. Currently we have the standard banner size on top of all pages, but soon the article pages will instead have those huge square things that you see on CNet or ZD. I know this will be unpopular with many people, myself included, but when we make the switch, we will also have some sort of subscription system where you can pay a fee to disable them honestly. (No I don't know how much yet!)
Just to shut down the conspiracy theorists, nobody is forcing us to make these changes: The navbar. The new ad formats. The subscription system. I could just say 'No' to changes like these. But Slashdot is now four years old ... and I want it to still be here four years from now. I hope you can understand the expensive reality associated with making this site happen every day for a quarter of a million readers.
Now flame me if you feel it necessary. Get it out of your system.
Any ideas on how much de-advertising will cost?
Otherwise we'll really have to hate you.
You're using her as bait, Master!
I didn't even notice it until i read that it was there.... but thanks for the option to disable.
...is 500,000 slashdotters clicking the "off" radio button for the OSDN bar -d
Most slashdotters are advocates about retaining their privacy and personal information. Yet when it comes to other peoples privacy, ie Anonymous Cowards, it's just unacceptable. Those same people want the Anonymous Cowards modded down. Maybe someone posting as an Anonymous Coward has no choice. If they need to post something negative about the company they work at or an opinion they don't want people to know is theirs, then they have to post anonymously.
Things need to work both ways here. Now go ahead and mod me down for "trolling".
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
But instead I'd like to just point out that Slashdot is an amazing accomplishment, and everyone who keeps it running deserves to get paid for it. The only people that will bitch about the (potential) subscription cost are the same ones whose posts I never read anyway.
--Mid
I am an avid slashdot reader. I get more quality reading material out of slashdot than alot of the magazines I subscribe to (ok, it doesn't beat playboy, but what does...).
I personally have no problem paying a subscription fee.
And to start the flames off, that navbar really really sucks. What a dirty little trick to try to boost revenue at thinkgeek...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
...it's just the implementation of some of them that everyone hates. I personally don't mind ads at all as long as they are embedded into the page and not pop-ups or pop-behinds. You really want to make them effective? Figure out a way to target them a little better. Perhaps a preferences page or something. I have no interest in the latest rack mount system, so if you could figure out a way to hide that when I log in and show a tasty ThinkGeek caffeine ad instead, then your sponsor's ad dollars will be much better spent.
Get an ad-blocking program. I have one that came included with my firewall (Norton Internet Security, think that's the name) and usually it blocks the all the ads. Sometimes it blocks legitimate pictures, but they're easy to call up. Instead of annoying ads I get nice white-space (BTW, ad designers, I'm more likely to glance at an ad if it's not overly cluttered, take a hint).
Also, some specifics about the pay feature would be nice, especially cost...
No sig for you.
The formkey error bit you... /. crew)
(thanks for the fix
You "X"ed that OSDN bar on top...
And I never set it one way or the other. Did some /.ers get a lucky draw of the hat or was this a db column add that defaulted to 'null' instead of 'true'.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Deal with it people. If
I think the people above me are having sex - or they're sleeping restlessly and agreeing with each other a lot.
"de-advertising" blah. Give us who cough up real money endless moderator points... something. "Karma" made it all a game; EQ has shown how profitable that can be. If its not too expensive I'll pony up.
I'll pay more to get rid of the banners at the top. Serious. In fact, I'd pay $10/month for no images at all and some good, clean XHTML/css or XML/XSL. Give me more information, faster, cut all the ads, the lousy HTML formatting, and I'll gladly pay for it.
Give the customer whatever s/he wants, and you'll stay afloat.
This feature could be a problem. If there was a +4 Informative post, I could mod it to +5 Funny and it disappears for everyone who has the -2 Funny feature enabled.
A better solution: find the average of the ratings: If there are 4 Informative's and 1 Funny, Informative is how the post is rated.
Chris
OK, reality has finally hit the last corner of the internet, /.
/. far more then the edotor of any print newspaper.
/. would only get rid of Jon Katz, I'd be really happy. That was not intended as humor. Fortunatly i can just ignore his stories, so I tend to not complain too loudly. I wouldn't complain at all, but I'm sure he's sucking valuable resources from /.
I like slashdot, there I said it. It is like any other news source, and it need to make money. After years of readership, I actually trust the people who run
/. need to get money, and quit frankly I have no problems with putting an ad in a story. hhhm who else does that, let me think, oh yeah every newspaper oin the last 100 years. how many of you flame the newspaper because they dare sell advertising space?
/. has problems, and run stuff I don't like from time to time, but most of the time its interesting.
Pop-up ads I have a problem with. many employers will track that has more surfing.
/. has finally done something I've wanted for years, and I can finally get rid of those darn AC comments.
Now if
Bottom line: Good Job, keep up the good work, can't wait to see how the next four years go!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Every time I click on the X I get logged out... I think they're saying it's the bar or no Slashdot for me. I can take a hint, I'll leave the bar : )
No sig for you.
Give me some nice, tasty preferences in that misc section to tell you what type of ads I'd like to see.
Much like slashboxes, in that none selected will show you the default selection, and some selected will show only those type. Also show the default selection if none of the selected types are showing at that given moment.
I would be very receptive to setting those preferences. I think most other folk around here would too.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Well, I guess it had to happen evetually. With all the problems the economy has been having. I'd be willing to shell out a few $ to keep the adds out of my face.
I'm also in agreement about a word filter. Somtimes the AC's actually have something good to say. But if I could restrict certain messages based on content that would be nice.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
There are other factors: /. could get everyone to click through 2 time a day, they probably wouldn't have to do this.
/. could really operate on 250,000 a year?
Click through % has dropped dramatically. If
Ad reveue is plummeting do to the economy.
Finally, do you think
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Rob, I was wondering why there was no mention of the new ipid IP logging "feature" in Slashcode. I understand that this code was added to Slashcode to help stop lamers and crapflooders, but I, for one, am concerned about possible privacy issues that come into play when you start associating UIDs with IP addresses. Since Slashdot has historically been a major advocate of privacy and on-line rights, don't you think your readers deserve some sort of justification as to why you are tracking them by their IP address and banning IPs of users whom you have deemed to be "trolls". More info can be found here..
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
In the interest of keeping slashdot alive and profitable, I'll be the first to suggest that the user info section should be expanded to all users to include more detailed self profiles (ie: gender, hobbies, job title, income, etc...) purely for the purpose of advertising.
No, I don't really want that info showing up on my public page. Yes, it would suck if slashdot sold that info to spammers -- but Rob & Taco have earned my respect over the years, I don't mind giving that info out to a site I respect if the plus side is that they can make twice as much per Ad impression, and the downside is that the Ads I see are more specific for me.
(It's not like my Topics prefs and slashbox customizations don't allready create a tight profile of my interests)
-- The Hoss Man
A few random questions:
How much does it cost per month to operate Slashdot? How much for the hosting, and how much in salaries? Just Slashdot, not the rest of OSDN.
How much revenue is generated from the current banner ads? What are the rates charged, and what does that total up to per month?
How much revenue is expected to be generated by the new obnoxious banners? What rates will be charged, and what's the projection for monthly revenues?
How many ads does the average Slashdot reader see, and what does that translate to dollar-wise? What would be a fair amount to pay, to compensate for the loss of banner revenue?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
But, rather than feeding this trend and turning to more-obnoxious ads to cover the increased bandwidth, why not turn to conservation-based approaches? In short, reduce the bandwidth consumed for each page.
For example, a quick glance at the typical story's HTML reveals a lot of bloat, most of which could be removed by taking look-and-feel instructions out of the HTML and placing them into stylesheets. More than 10 percent savings seems realistic. And, unlike banner ads that have harmful side effects (such as annoyed readers), reducing HTML bloat has positive side effects like reduced download times and increased accessibility.
So before turning to increasingly evil ads, why not try conservation?
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Now, take a site like Salon, which should have subscriptions. Salon creates its own content - and that's often unique and interesting content, and it requires the investment of a great deal of time and effort from Salon writers, many of whom actually go to work in a building and work all day.
So how much time and effort - or other resources - does Slashdot invest in the daily operations of the site? Very little.
Slashdot's content is entirely community-driven; it's all submitted by the users, for free. What do the editors have to do? Why, the horrible, grueling task of reading through user submissions, choosing a few to post, and relaxing as the site does its thing.
In fact, it seems that the real cost of Slashdot is relatively small: the cost of servers/bandwidth, and a modest salary for the editors and administrators who do this as a full-time job.
IIRC, Slashdot lasted years as Taco and Hemo's only job. This sudden need for money seems to go back to the Andover takeover; it's entirely a business decision. But unlike Salon, this isn't a business venture that requires huge amounts of effort, because the content is provided by users.
So, let me get to my main beef: We already "pay" for the site by submitting content! Should Slashdot be profitting off our article submissions, and our comments? That's why I read the site, not because of the editors. If we keep the Salon analogy, essentially suggesting charging the "writers" rather than paying them. Maybe I should be paid by advertisers for submitting this comment, rather than the site?
Now, if the editors would at least do their jobs well, I might reconsider - but I don't see fact-checking, I don't see anything done to stop all these duplicate stories -- heck, I don't even see spell-checking!
If Slashdot even wants to consider this system, they should have completely open records. Show us all your costs, from servers to salaries, and your profit. Let us know that we're being charged this because of need, and not because of the avarice of a few businessmen over at VA.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
How many sites get a news feed from here to post the headlines on their site? Could /. charge a subscription to those or vice-versa those news feeds that appear in the boxes on /. (Linux Games, Sci-Fi News) could they not charge to have hose available?
Just $0.02 worth
The MyTh - I am a figment of the Imagination - [Im Probably even not here]
I really don't think this is a good idea. While I agree that most ACs are idiots, I have seen some pretty insightful, interesting or funny AC posts. On top of that, adding a -1 to all AC posts will make it very easy for them to be browsed over by moderators (many don't follow anything below their thresholds) and will essentially weed out the good posts along with the bad.
Perhaps a massive amount of censoring is needed. While Slashdot, in my eyes, has a reputation for not censoring much, an AC post can be that exception. How about no cusses, especially nothing with "is gay" in it, nothing with the names of any of the Slashdot guys in it (I hate seeing "CMDRTACO EATS NUTS") and most DEFINATELY not anything with the word goat even in it. Not even anything that rhymes with the word goat.
And if a legtimiate user is angry about the censorship (and would be using the privelage of no censorship to an apprporiate degree), well, he/she can get an account. It's fairly easy.
I hope the new Slashdot advertisement system is a terrific reminder for everyone the next time Slashdot editors are bitching about subscription services and why MyFavoriteWebsite® is EVIL for making me pay for the free content they serve up.
I feel like many of these sites are providing me with a cool service or interesting reading, and the least I can do is glance at what their advertisings are offering. Often, if I really like what a site has, I will click on the ad out of pity, and sometimes read what they have to offer.
This is how capitalism works. If you like the site, and you are even slightly interested in the ad, click on it. Both the site's owners and the advertiser deserve at least a shot.
This is a bad option, even if we all agree as to what you can laugh at. "Funny" is the one excuse you have for modding up a post that's really offtopic or trollbait.
Here's hoping that you the new ads and/or subscriptions so that they don't fundamentally alter the nature of the site.
Y'all are smart folks. I hope you find a way.
There's a certain honor, I suppose, in falling on your swords.
But only when it's meaningful.
There's also honor in finding ways to survive.
Not only that, it feeds the kids.
Hear, hear. Slashdot, for all its faults, is still a wonderful site that I check virtually every day. Kudos to the /. team for keeping it going all this time, and for (so far) not (really) selling out. Hooray !
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
On the one hand, you have /. which supplies the servers and seeds for discussion, while on the other you have the readers who supply the bulk of the content.
Seems like there's no clear cut line to draw here...
-- Shamus
This space for rent! EZ Terms!
I agree, I wouldn't mind paying a small fee to slashdot. I've been a reader for several years and I would hate to see the site go away. I do think the subscription level should be tiered. Maybe a 'standard' fee to get rid of the advertising bannars, and maybe a 'deluxe' fee to get some cool moderator controls (or some more perks than just removing the ads), and a 'premium' fee for something else, I can't really think of anything, maybe ability to peak into the submission queue and flag some as better than others (kinda like voting on the stories to be posted).
:). Well, I kinda like the thinkgeek adds, since I don't check the site often I just wait for ads on slashdot to see what's new and cool at thinkgeek.
I have no idea what the prices would be maybe $50/yr for standard (or maybe $5/mo=$60/yr), $10/mo=$120/yr deluxe, and $20/mo=$240/yr for premium.
I would definatly pay $50/yr to help slashdot out, and getting rid of the ads would be a bonus
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
A post can be informative or insightful and funny at the same time. It's something I strive for because 1) it's effective for getting a point across and 2) it's best not to take anything too seriously (least of all yourself).
Certainly, there are posts modded as "Funny" that do not deserve the label, not so much that they're unfunny or juvenille, but that the moderator made a bad or wrong choice among the +1 options, or hit "page down" without restoring focus to the page body or scroll bar.
I doubt that meta-mod catches all these mistakes.
Rather than assess a -2 to "Funny", why not just do away with the option altogether?
Ironic that this "feature" (read "bug") should be considered when the second front-page article (Disney) bears the Pythonic Foot of Humor.
Moderation Totals: Informative=2, Funny=3 Total=-2.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
One thing that absolutely pisses me off about the CNet and ZDNet ads is that they make the browser unusable and choppy untill you scroll them away. Don't put those there. Use simple images or light-weight animated GIFs.
Use PayPal. You have a solid, reliable reader base of what, half a million users? Create a yearly "pledge" drive similar to NPR stations. Get 1/10th of people to give you $5-50 bucks and you're all set. If you can't even get that, then the "community" doesn't deserve web sites like this.
Ads will kill readership, period. It's sad, but true. And because of the fact that you've given away the code, there are tons of options out there that will fill the void (for a while at least).
A buck or two max per year should provide enough additional revenue (say, 10% of the 500,000+ users) to keep the lights on, no? Oh wait, there are VA shareholders now too, aren't there. Guess subscription will be higher than a couple bucks.
Damn.
buy userfriendly. Merge both product together. You'll get the revue from both, but you'll be able to cut costs buy combining equipment and losing some staff.
You should at the very least look into it.
A lot of UFies come here already so the bandwidth need wouldn't be a straight add.
Yes I do expect to get paid if you implement this idea. But I will only charge you $10,000USD.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I hate the whole thing, too. I plan to subscribe, and will push for my company to do so as well (We really, really benefit from FM and SF, so I can prolly get them to kick in some change...).
Assigning them -2 isn't much good, just remove them all together if you don't like them -2 is just going to make a 5 post a 3 and most people are still going to see it.
I assume from his tone that he is planning on making it customizable -- if you hate "funny", you could disable all "funny" posts, or you could just penalize them a point or whatever.
I think just knocking off a point would be sufficient -- the only time I'm annoyed by funny posts is when they are the TOP posts on an article, while posts that are actually informative are 3 screens down below all the replies to the "funny" ones.
I'd be perfectly happy to just be able to say that a "funny" post will be listed below other equally-rated posts...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
People might be more willing to pay for Slashdot if they understand why it costs so much to run it.
/. is just a bunch of links to articles on other sites, you don't have to pay for writers. The code that runs the site works and is open-sourced, so you shouldn't need to pay anyone to maintain that anymore. Hopefully your servers are maintained by whoever provides your bandwith. So I can see the need for maybe one full-time employee, a couple people to help out at night or something, plus whatever it costs for all the bandwidth and the server hosting.
(Not me, but I'll happily look at big-ass ads as long as there's no popups or Flash ads.)
Since
So what's the actual cost breakdown?
Funny how things change. About a year or two ago, people would have been up in arms about any changes to Slashdot that would commercialize it to such an extent. The OSDN 'brand building' bar, the upcoming large ads, the mere thought of a paid subscription model, etc.
/. they either have to get the rabid fanboys to subscribe (big fat chance), or accept the new banners. As the fanboys will still read Slashdot (blah blah webwasher blah modified hosts blah), the more business-focused clients will possibly refocus on Newsforge over which OSDN has a lot more control.
Sure, information wants to be free. But it's NOT free as in beer.
As an aside, anyone notice how hard VA is trying to move people towards Newsforge? The banners exclaiming that Newsforge has twice as many news stories per day as Slashdot and LinuxToday combined? Now the brand building banner, etc? To me, this smacks of at least partial desperation; trying to create something that people will recognize and flock back to, even if the parent company should go bankrupt.
Sure, Slashdot is popular. Lots of people read it. But it is also becoming more and more stigmatized as the battlefield of business-ignorant fanatics. People who are worthless to any business, thus advertising to them is less productive than, say, advertising on a big, serious-looking site, with a more professional-looking design. With less hysterical stories about losing our rights to privacy and pirating music, and more stories about, for instance, "Caldera target[ting] developers with latest workstation", which is an actual Newsforge headline.
One of these two sites is somewhat appealing to business, and thus to advertisers. One of them is easier to sell as serious newsmedia. One of them has a heavy editorial hand, columns, and no negative image of being filles with Linux fanboys and other unwashed freaks.
The other one is Slashdot.
Somehow, I feel that OSDN is trying to direct as much traffic towards its more 'serious' site as possible, leaving Slashdot as a more 'hobbyist' site than anything else. Obviously they can't do anything directly about it, or those aforementioned fanboys (yeah, I'm one of them) would screaming bloody murder. But it can 'integrate' Slashdot into its OSDN thingee, adding bars, and big adverts, and subscription programs, and watering it down from its original incarnation.
Sure, it's necessary to survive economically, to some extent. But ultimately, Slashdot doesn't pay. It takes quite a lot of hardware, and SIGNIFICANT bandwidth. How much do you think VA makes on those Thinkgeek banners? To make up for the black hole of cash that is
But then maybe it's just a mad conspiracy theory.
And let me repeat: information may want to be free, but that's NOT free as in beer.
Has anyone thought about setting up some donation system? I'm sure a lot of people would choose to give more money to eliminate large annoying banners for everyone then they would just for themselfs. Or if there already is a donation system in place draw more attention to it (I don't know of one, and if people don't know of it they can't donate). Without of course being annoying about it, IMO sites begging for donations on every page is as annoying as ads. Then again, maybe I'm just overestimating peoples generosity.
Speaking of Funny Posts, I'd like to be able to filter out everything but.
Sometimes, I just want to read the posts modded "funny"... Slashdot can be the best source of humor anywhere.
I wish I could filter out all that "Interesting" and "Informative" crap, and make it my own personal humor site.
Something to brighten my day between issues of TheOnion.
Reality has a liberal bias
You could also do what the register does, and have stories "sponsored" by certain companies with their color scheme and logo incorporated, etc. Or have companies sponsor sections in this way for a day or two, or a week or two.
You could also have half height ads on the main page, in the spaces between the stories.
So there are lots of options before doing the big ass boxes in the stories
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Perhaps slashdot could convince OSDN to do a network wide subscription, such that newsforge, themes.org, slashdot, freshmeat, etc. would all let you see adless version of the pages (with extra features maybe) if you pay a monthly/annual fee. That would rock. I'd pay $20/yr for that. (But no more, I mean, I pay less for magazine subscriptions)
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Slashdot is the only real chance we have for news freedom. Thank you.
An interesting scenario would be for people who contribute to the value of Slashdot to get a reduction on the number and/or size of banner ads they receive, possibly defraying the costs of subscribing to Slashdot.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
...you dont know me from Adam but I've been lurking and posting for over 3 1/2 of those four years.
You are all doing what you need to, given current circumstances. Just do it with class, and taste, and fairness.
:M
I gave Google $50 by advertising my site under several low-traffic keywords for a month. Even though that didn't give me any revenue (my site is free), I'd do it again, because it was fun and it allowed me to support a site I love. Why can't I do something simliar on Slashdot -- for example, advertise my site on Mozilla stories?
I'd also like to see ad moderation. If people like your ad, it gets displayed more often, at no cost to you. This would encourage advertisers to put up ads that don't annoy readers. There could also be a discussion forum (sid) for each ad, allowing readers to give public feedback to the advertisers, and encouraging karma whores to visit advertisers' sites.
The shareholder is always right.
It seems to me kinda pointless -- if you don't want to see AC and troll account posts, you can filter at 1.
The regular accounts that are participating in obvious trolling/flamebait will eventually get modded down to -1 also, so if you want to read those, you'll have to lower your threshold.
The only thing this seems to accomplish is to reduce the editor load of moderating AC posts from 0 to -1 Offtopic -- something I suspect is done more for automagic IP banning purposes than to improve the readers' comment fitering options.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
So here's an idea: mod the ads. Users may voluntarily mod the ads based on how much they think the ads provide any value-add to life.
Miko O'Sullivan
Slashdot used to cache, so that when I hit the back button on my browser the old page was still there. If I wanted to see the new comments all I had to do was hit refresh.
Now /. runs the script when I hit back. This has to be putting an additional dynamic load on your servers. Ummm... are you sure this doesn't account for your increased traffic? :)
Maybe it's just an IE issue. I've gone through all the settings in IE and I don't see how it could be on my end. This is especially bad for me because I'm stuck with a modem and can only get 28.8 because of the crappy phone lines. PLEASE bring back caching if you can.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hey, I understand about all the ads, but how about a look and feel update to /. ? I'd say it's well overdue.
Any plans?
Why not use collaborative filtering in tandem with traditional moderation?
With collaborative filtering, each slashdotter would view posts that were moderated up by other slashdotters who had similar preferences in the past.
There was a great site called moviecritic.com (which unfortunately has since been shut down due to budget limitations) that used collaborative filtering to recommend movies. I found it incredibly useful, and discovered some great movies that I never would have watched otherwise.
With collaborative filtering, stories could also be 'recommended' without forcing the user to rule out entire categories of stories. The beauty of collaborative filtering is that it does not assume anything a priori other than the fact that if two individuals have shared common preferences in the past, they are likely to agree again in the future.
Traditional moderation could be accomplished simply by tallying the votes that each post received.
mmm
p.s. I'd be glad to help build this functionality into slashcode if there is sufficient interest.
Amazing magic tricks
There are these old rules:
- Never throw mud at a man with a gun
- Never stand next to a man throwing mud at a man with a gun
Of course, it wasn't originally mud, but you get the idea. and it is practical advice."It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Slashdot doesn't need banner ads or subscriptions. If Taco wants cash all he has to do is start selling karma.. Just think: Karma-whoring with a credit card.
Who here wouldn't pay a few extra bucks for a little more karma?
After that, he could introduce credit-card moderating.. $10 and you can take that pro MSFT comment from +5 all the way down to -2!
Apathy -- The state of numbness of the mind. When you are apathic, you can think.
I do not currently filter slashdot's ads (as i do for just about every other site's ads...where would i be without mozilla?) because they are at the top of the screen, are relatively unobtrusive, and are actually sometimes relevant to my interestes. I will not, however, stand for those disgutsting CNET/ZDNET-stle ads. They are just eyesores, and no amount of cool ThinkGeek merchandise can make them worth looking at. So, if you [slashdot management types] think you'll be making more money with bigger ads, think again. You will just be offending lots of customers and making people like myself (who don't mind your current advertisement scheme) start not looking at ads at all. That said, I hope other readers are stupid enough not to care.
I also like the idea of a subscription system for OSDN, so that I can avoid ads in all OSDN sites. Of course, the economics and technology consideration may outweigh this possibility.
As has been iterated before (but never enough), I really like
--Outta' Sync
I always get the shakes before a drop.
[METOO]I second that idea[/METOO]
(posted at +1 in parody of all the crap which gets posted with the bonus.)
Besides with the karma system having been around for so long, getting a 'trusted user' bonus doesn't mean that much any more.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Hey, Rob!
If you're looking for features, how about adding either a page for Poll Suggestions, or adding "Poll" to the topics in submit.pl?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
First, thanks for the notification of new features.
Second, thanks for the tips on how to disable them. 8^)
Third, "Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months, and simply selling the banner ads you see on top of each page isn't going to be enough to keep us afloat if we keep growing."
Doesn't the fact that increased traffic causes you to lose money faster tell you something?
Maybe your objective shouldn't be to keep growing. Maybe it should be to have a quality website. Remember back when you were in college and you wanted a cool site? You had one. Now you've got a semi-clueful corporate site--that's still rare, but nearly as fun as before.
And don't give me a bunch of guff about "who's going to pay for it". If you have no money, you run a smaller site. The quality is still the same.
324006
Currently we have the standard banner size on top of all pages, but soon the article pages will instead have those huge square things that you see on CNet or ZD.
Slashdot is a geek site. We know how to block ads if it becomes necessary. Instead of making the ads more annoying, make them more interesting. Allow readers to support Slashdot -- and get other readers to keep their eyes on the ad space -- by creating a mechanism through which readers can post joke ads and ads for their personal sites. Create discussion forums for the ads, where readers can comment on the ad, the company, or the product. Allow readers to vote for their favorite ads.
The shareholder is always right.
Slash had/has a great opportunity to take advantage of all the geeks consistently coming here.
With a captive audience, why didn't you guys write an auction service, like ebay, or a classifed ad section, for a fee. You have a community of people, you are well known, take advantage of it. You have scalability experience. Over the last 3 years you could have really built something. And ebay has proven this to be the best way to make $$ over the internet.
I doubt ads anymore will help you - good luck. you remind me of netscape. they had millions of people going to their home page daily, and only belatedly realized they could create a portal service like Yahoo. They blew it, and finally died. They would still be huge today if they had woken up.
alex
I would actually like to see subscription.
But: I'd want to get more value out of it, and I don't just mean not seeing banner ads. I want to see:
The idea being that I could set it to not moderate AC posts down at all but moderate non-subscription posts down. Every post I see either would have a real person's identity behind it (which I can't necessarily see, but the idea is they are accountable) or have been moderated up significantly.
In other words, if the subscription feature is done well, it could be a way for us to improve the signal-to-noise ratio as well as support the site and avoid banner ads.
Subscriptions that eliminate banner ads do not add much value for the purchaser especially in a technically savvy crowd like Slashdot where users that know how to install and configure JunkBuster to get rid of ads abound. For subscriptions to be valuable source of revenue then the people who subscribe must get a considerable amount more than the people who don't to make it worth it. Suggestions I can think of right of the bat
A lot of the ideas are probably unworkable but they are put there to give an idea as to the kind of things that people are more likely to pay for than not.
All of these may seem distasteful but considering that VA Linux probably doesn't have much longer to go I think the Slashdot folks need to take a long hard look at how they're going to keep financing the site if they still want it to exist in four or five years.
Flame Away.
BTW, if your currious what I think a portal is, stocks/news/weather/tv listing/cartoons. Maybe not in that order.
Seriously tough, portals failed big time. You know, dot com crash etc?
However, I've seen a number of sigs on /. (such as the one linked here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22890&cid=2463 195) that do NOT show the brackets. Why not?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I agree with your comments regarding how a "community content" site shouldn't run on subscriptions. What it SHOULD run on is donations.
/. important to the /. community?
/. every day, though this is the first time I've posted. I'll send in a donation a lot quicker than I'd buy a subscription.
/. I'm willing to pay to have it. /. should ask for donations. I bet you'll be surprised at how much $$$ comes in.
I had a hand in running a site that cost about US$700/month in bandwidth charges. All content was provided by the site's community, and the whole thing was paid for by that same community (no ads!). The site was IMPORTANT to that community, so important that the money was always there.
Is
It's important to me. I read
I don't need to know the costs, and I don't think I'll be buying 'accountability' (I know what a miserable job running a site like this can be).
I just need my
Since you don't have to pay to view the site, the site will be the source of many trolls. Most of the reasonable people will move on to somewhere else, while only trolls will remain since they don't really care what's on the page they'll be the only ones here. Site strength should have nothing to do with the number of adds sold, but the content and the community built around the site. When Slashdot sold out to Andover.net, it was to keep the site running because a bigger company would have the cash and resources to carry the site in the "bad" times. For the adds it all depends on where they are. I find the big ads even less interesting that the normal ones. Internet ads were over priced and based on some fictious statistic called clickthrough. I mean does TV have anything like clickthrough? Radio? Newspapers? I know billboards? No, none of those things had anything like clickthroughs. They're all about getting the name out there not how many people walked into the store on a certain date. Take my word, in a few months the AC's will be about all that's left.
I would like to caution you and the Slashdot crew against allowing too much self-selection by your readers, as this will break the uniformity of experience that Slashdot currently offers (same scores for the same posts, for everyone) and thus be detrimental to the community at large.
As it is now, your readers can change their browsing threshold, but they cannot reorder the ratings of posts - that is left exclusively to each story's moderators. Now, that may be annoying at some times and for some readers - I recall a "funny" Dmitry Sklyarov post (deliberately not linked to here) that nearly made me sick - but it is part of what makes Slashdot a community, more than just a News source.
When I first started reading Slashdot, I had no idea what was going on. Acronyms flew, the jokes were obscure, and people made repeated reference to issues and articles I had no knowledge of. Reading the posts and seeing what posts were rated highly allowed me to gain a sense of the community over time. What I found wasn't always to my liking or even, necessarily, pleasant, but it was an honest reflection of your readership/postership - and there's something to be said for that.
To anticipate the first round of responses, what I'm talking about here is not groupthink (although some of that undoubtedly goes on). On the contrary, I have found that well-reasoned dissenting opinions are reliably among the top few posts on a story, with the system as it is.
So I urge you to think carefully before allowing your readers too much power of self-selection of posts (even against AC's).
Sincerely,
Renard
I'm confused by this one. How does making ads more annoying and in your face map onto more money for /.? Do advertisers pay for more screen real estate or is there some magic formula that says that an ad is worth more if it is more in the way of the reader. When are advertisers going to learn that associating their products and corporate image with a feeling of annoyance in the consumer does not sell more product.
/., say in the range of $50/year.
I for one would be willing to pay a reasonable amount to support
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
But if a site gets 250,000+ hits a day and can't find a way to partner with someone who has a product (or line of products) that people want to buy.....then whose falt is it??? This place would move high tech hardware toys (cutting edge MP3/home audio/tivo type stuff) at a more succesful rate than chocolate commercials on a richard simmons cruise.....I am talking stuff that even the Japanese would be in awe over....They always get the new shit....
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Learn to use less bandwidth. The easy trick here to reduce bandwidth is to reduce your pipeline to the Internet to a smaller, less expensive pipeline. Yes, it will lag during peak hours, however, people would rather wait for the content to show up than to see it disappear completely.
Another thing is to modify the comments list to work in a frame or subject basis by limiting to the first 100-200 words of a comment. Soem comments go on for miles on end and therefore are useless. Should a comment have a rating of 0, only post title, +1 = 50 words, +2 = 100 words, +3 = 200 words, +4 would be whole comment.
This would help reduce your bandwidth use, allow you to get a smaller pipe, and live longer in this hellish economy.
It is called content management... And if you can't learn to manage your content delivery system properly, then yes, you can not survive in the future.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
..something similar to napster, where subscribers give a little of their bandwidth/diskspace in exchange for keeping /. relatively free of the capitalists? I would much rather give space on my box instead of money, it just "feels" better.
Cutting edge is sharp, avoid contact.
I'm looking at it on a small monitor right now, and the gray bar looks so dark it might as well be black. i'd have to squint to reqd 'ODSN', etc. much less even notice the X. Guess it's fittingly somber for a site that wants to penalize humor.
What would Rain-in-the-Face do?
Bitching about bandwidth costs? Then please look into stylesheets; you could easily save 35% in bandwidth costs. As the above poster noted, stylesheets are the way to go.
I love Slashdot, and I'm willing to pay for it because I know it costs money to run a website and ads aren't cutting it these days. However, they're basically throwing away the bandwidth they would like us to pay for. The HTML produced by Slash is crap, frankly.
I used HTML Tidy to automatically convert the page to stylesheets as opposed to old-fasioned obsolete HTML formatting tags. The old version of the page was ~230K. The new version of the page, using stylesheets, was ~160K. That's a ~43% bandwith savings, right there, with little effort. If you include images, there's still a 35% reduction in bandwidth.
Also, have the Slash crew explored Apache's on-the-fly zip compression abilities (it's a separate module, I don't know the name)? It eats CPU power, obviously, but HTML can be compressed by 90% or more when zipped. The cost of more web boxen would be more than paid for by the bandwidth savings, I'd wager... especially if Slashdot is getting free hosting from it's parent company.
Bottom line: I'll pay for Slashdot's content, but not for lazy Slashdot coding. If you want us to pay for bandwidth, show us you're using it as efficiently as possible. Because you're not right now. You're like a guy begging for food with a sandwich sticking out of his pocket... I just DON'T wanna hear it. And yes, I know there's other costs associated with running the website besides bandwidth, and the ad market is shit right now.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Ironic that here in the middile of tech obsession nobody has thought about trying to get software to solve these financial issues.
The reason the Slashdot guys don't know what they'd charge for a subscription is because they don't know. They can't know. Any value that they choose is going to be based on several factors over which they have no control:
1. The number of people who will actually subscribe
2. The number of people who will leave
3. The number of people who will continue reading slashdot with ads
4. The number of people who will continue reading slashdot with ad blockers
5. Price of bandwidth and hosting
6. Banner ad cpm value
In addition to that, there are factors over which they have limited control:
6. Amount of bandwidth used
Put that all together and in the human world you have what is called a hunch, or a guess, or any other term which indicates that you really have no idea and everything could go to shit inside of 5 minutes.
The natural human solution to this is to look at near-worst-case scenarios and attempt to budget for that happening. The best people at this are in the insurance industry. These are called Damn Good Guesses, but they're still guesses.
The major problem with the future is that the further into the future you look, the less accurate your guess is likely to be. Guessing banner ad prices 20 seconds from now, armed with current prices, isn't a big risk, and you're not likely to be off by much even if you get it wrong. Guessing 2 years from now is near impossible.
So what we need is a way of taking all the unknown variables and guessing rapidly, in short increments, using good solid math principles, in order to determine the value of those variables we do control (cost of subscription, bandwidth to release).
In essence, a floating, self-insuring market run by a well written software agent that would take account of the various costs, the insurance probabilities involved in failed predictions, and how well it can limit the release of bandwidth, and set subscription prices based on that.
Effective tools placed in the hands of users would then let them take advantage of this by limiting the value range within which they are willing to subscribe, and see transparently the decisions being made by the software and the basis for these.
Essentially creating a resubscription process in which users automatically resubscribe every day or maybe even hour or less, and in which the code is open and its behaviour displayed for those who wish to look, it can act in the best interests of both the site, the owners and the users, keeping prices at their lowest practical point while still making a set amount of money for the owners, covering the bandwidth costs and insuring the site against price shocks in the future.
There is the technical expertise around to achieve something like this, and I think Slashdot is a perfect testing ground for this kind of software. The combination of a couple of hot-shot financial guys and a bunch of good programmers could provide software that could keep any number of valuable internet sites afloat in a world so volatile that any number of valuable sites are falling down due to bad guesses on the part of their management.
You can't win a fight.
Actually, you can change your prefs now to include more news... just choose the 'Collapse Sections' checkbox on your homepage prefs.
UserAdvocate: The voice of the user
The reality is that a different revenue system is needed. Of course, if I knew what that was, I'd be rich.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't believe that even enact is properly used.
But hey, a spell check WOULD be useful, and would it really be that difficult to pipe it through something? OK, yeah, extra computing power and extra expense. But hey, that'd be one of these k3wl extras!
Seriously though, I have no problem with subscription, as long as it's done right. Being able to turn off ads if I pay for it sounds like a decent idea. Actually, if I could target ads to myself through the preferences, that may not be a bad plan either, and I'm sure the marketing folks would eat it up.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
You know, I never really minded banner ads. And I still don't, since they get scrolled easily off the top of the page as I start reading.
But when they started being animated gifs, and then later flash. UGH. I disabled animation, and because of that had to miss some instructional stuff done with animated gifs. Distracting me from the stuff I am actually here to read really isn't the way to get me to buy your product. I've actually discovered some neat stuff through the ads here (thinkgeek, etc). But they could really do without the damned animation.
Not that slashdot will not allow animated ads in the future because of my post or anything, but I just needed to get that off my chest.
For any user thats logged in, add up teh size of the data sent and keep a running total for each user.
Or here's an idea: forget karma and moderation. Give the people who pay the most the highest scoring posts. How about $1 per point per post. If you really have something to say, it would be worth $5 to get a (Score:5, Platinum Plus) tag on it. With this business model, /. wouldn't need ad revenue at all!
I think slashdot should require subscriptions in order to post comments. All the trolls and crapflooders would go away, and then the traffic would be back to reasonable levels...which could probably be supported without any additional revenue, but hey. I like the idea if for no other reason than that it keeps out the losers. 5, maybe 10 bucks a year. Let's not get crazy here. No ads, and you get to post. Simple as that. Read-only static content with normal banner ads, free.
I love text ads. I click on ads on Google more than any other website because they are targeted and easy on my eyes. Banners with cycling images make you wait to see what the ad is for.
I'm not sure what the costs of slashdot are that are increasing, but I'm sure that there are effective ways to reduce them. Is it the server load? If you use technologies that are more efficent or pass the processing onto the client ( like XML, XSLT, and CSS ) then it would be less cost to you. Also using text ads would decrease load.
On another note: I think that a better, more streamlined, ad free slashdot would be worth a few cents a day. I suggest if you move to a pay system (which I would love) then use a micropay system. Something like $0.03 per page load. It is the fairest way to go, and would encourage people to start reading slashdot because there wouldn't be a commitment.
The only thing this seems to accomplish is to reduce the editor load of moderating AC posts
Doubtful. Editors dont moderate posts, People do.
something I suspect is done more for automagic IP banning purposes than to improve the readers' comment fitering options
Also highly doubtful. IP banning is tracked and implemented by site. Anyone from banned site X cannot post. User IDs dont even come into the picture.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
If, however, Slashdot is to become nothing more than a ZDNet/CNet/TechTV style site, then I'm afraid I won't have much use for it anymore. I enjoy a site where I can see a nice mixture of "latest news" and interesting articles/opinion pieces that wouldn't be considered "newsworthy" of other newsy sites. I understand you don't intend to change the content, but, call me cynical, I don't see how it can't if the only blood that keeps the site alive is revenue.
I hope this new child manages to keep the Slashdot marriage together, but in my experience such choices rarely achieve their intended effect.
RFC2119
Portals didnt fail, the idea of people of getting something for free failed. Even /. is going to charge (For non-ad viewing)...
.net anyone?) Fileplanet knows this, they are now charging you for quick and fast download. If not wait in line. Whats your time worth? After a full day of work and RL, only a couple hours to tinker/read quite allot.
:)
A couple years down the road, expect to see more portals charge, and the content go up. With your monthly charge includes download of mp3s, viewing divx movies, reading full length ebooks, jump start on buying tickets from ticketmaster, stocks and inside info..
The Internet needs to grow up a little, and subscription based services need to flourish. (humm,
ATTWS gives away free unlimited walled garden Internet access, you can upgrade and get email and the ability to surf anywhere. Do people upgrade for the full services? Yes. Expect to see this type of free/extra services everywhere.
*side note, Stocks and Stock news, I guess im just getting old, kids college funds, bitch about points and interest. But I still kick ass in CounterStrike.
-
Nectarine 100% DemoScene Radio 24/7 - tune in/get down
But I'd be willing to pay more if I could pay one bill (as much as maybe $50/year) if that gave me a list of 5-10 different sites with no ads.
The last-best hope for content sites (in my opinion) is to band together and sell "all you can eat" group subscriptions. One payment, lotsa sites for one year. Hey, you want the Geek Package for $50 or the Porn Package for $200?
Personally I wouldn't go for micropayments. Too much thought involved to decide if I want to click a link. Give me one reasonable yearly rate, just like a print magazine.
As for the one comment I read about not wanting to pay for community sites, just remember the golden age of BBSs. People DID pay for community content, BUT very few people got rich! It was definitely something they did because they loved it.
To me the big lie of the dot-com era was that anyone who could sling some HTML/Javascript/Perl could expect to get rich, rich, rich. Fine. That is simply not true. A FEW people with really good business ideas will get rich, but that doesn't mean that lots of people can't earn some money. Not bloody much, mind you, but some. Sure the readership of /. would plummet if they required a subscription, but they might still make more than they can make from ads in the current economy...
One last comment. For all those Human Torches out there in /. land who cried "Flame On!" at the merest suggestion of subscription fees, do try to keep in mind that no matter how much Taco and co. love running the site, at the end of the day they have to eat.
Simple math: 0 revenue - x expenses = 0 /.
I'm suprised nobody has brought this up. I would be willing to pay something like $5-10/month for an nntp slashdot gateway without ads. I want to make sure I am clear about this: no ads attached to messages. TACO: for this service you will get my money.
/. backend, but last I tried it, it didn't work and I don't feel like messing with CVS gnus. I want a clean, reliable nntp gateway that doesn't depend on parsing html. Don't bother putting more ads up on the main site, because people will block them (including myself).
I know gnus has a makeshift
Just my 0.01999999999999.
This sig is false.
I sympathize with your plight, but I have to wonder about a business model contingent on squeezing more ad revenue from the internet demographic most likely to employ advertising filtering.
Best of luck.
Comment out the lameless filter code until your server passes the Turing Test.
Thank you.
As much as I hated reading through that rant, I find it hard to punch holes in it. Whatever happened to "information was meant to be free...", hell I would gladly live without Katz if it meant not having to stare at flashing banner ads....Have some dignity and take a hint from google....(people can appreciate text based/hyperlinked ads...) Hell if I could only count how many times a /. story has lead me to purchase something....If it's money that makes the world go round then so be it, I have spent my fair share on real life products that I heard about, read about on the internet -- hell my family has done 100% of our Christmas shopping online for three years.....And I can gladly say that no stupid add has suckered me in --- if I am shopping I know where to go or at least google can lead me in the right direction....if I want news well that is getting a little harder to find..
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I used to enjoy occasionally reading Salon. Then they started doing this "Salon Premium" crap - some of the stories would be avaliable only if you subscribed.
This seemed all fine and good, cause for a couple days about 20% of stories were flagged "Premium" and I was considering a subscription. All of a sudden, every article worth reading became "premium". And I wasn't supposed to notice? Result: potential subscriber got horribly pissed off. Now you don't get my $30 or even the ad revenue I'd generate.
Slashdot is going about this the right way: be aboveboard, keep content free, and hopefully make the price for a subscription reasonable given the previous price - $0 to $30 is a big jump, $0 to $5 isn't so much.
Perhaps "features" could be created by taking the base story and any posts that add significant information and those features could be sold. Sort of a "Premium Slashback".
*shrug* Works just like Taco said under a decent browser, like Opera. It's your fault for using something slow and buggy.
>Yeah, we all hate the ads, but can we give Slashdot a viable alternative?
How about forking a commercial version of Slashcode?
I'm dead serious; surely there are people who would be willing to register an enhanced or optimized version at a reasonable price. I've paid to license both WWWThreads and vBulletin, and those are just message boards. A full featured content management system like Slashcode ought to fetch a decent registration fee. Throw a professional installation into the package and I guarantee there will be buyers.
I love open source as much as the next guy, and I've written my share of giveaways. But "free as in beer" doesn't put food on the table. Beer either, for that matter. And it sure doesn't pay for the bandwidth and colo overhead incurred by a site with this much traffic. Being generous with your code is nice, and it gets your name out there in a positive light, but the Slashdot crew don't need the publicity anymore. They need to keep the bills paid.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Funny posts -2? You said half the time they aren't funny (yes subjective..) yet more than 3/4 of the time they are funny. Assigning them -2 isn't much good, just remove them all together if you don't like them -2 is just going to make a 5 post a 3 and most people are still going to see it.
Taco didn't make this too clear, but this was a hypothetical situation. You'll be able to score Funny posts +5 if you wanted to.
Yep. And I want to say it was DoubleClick that began to push this (though I don't have links to back that up). It was a really stupid thing to do.
On the second note, I'm actually not referring to the cost of a ticket. I meant the box office takes reported weekly on those movies. They're not all blow-out winners. But there's often a good return on the investment.
I don't see a Preferences:Misc - I've only got the old category options. Am I missing something here?
Hey, those cameras are great for recording myself, my wife, and our various partners engaged in lustful orgies. A camera for every angle, straight to the computer to be recorded and cut for later viewing pleasure. Woohoo!
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
So where's my cut?
Breakfast served all day!
If I pay, can I be assured the editors will (god forbid) edit their work. Like, for example, spell checking, or grammar checking, or even both? Why would I pay for editors who can't edit properly?
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
And here I was being paranoid, or thinking I was getting there at least, but this explains it:
/. spin villifying Microsoft.
/. moderators can silence a few people that are not trolling, is that any better than Apple/ms/disney lawyers silencing "the little guy")
From CmdrTaco:
I'd personally like to assign a -2 penalty on any comment rated 'funny' because most of them frankly just aren't funny at all. But humor is far too subjective to say that the moderation is unfair. Anyway, now everyone can decide for themselves. That should happen in the next few weeks.
Well, you got your wish CT, any funny comment that I've seen and made, reguardless of content has been modded down (probably including this one, too).
Don't believe me...browse at -1 on occasion.
Too many "Why was this modded down" posts are cropping up... or rants on the subject.
You are correct that "humor is entirely to subjective", so, we'll be objective about it and hunt down people by name and mod them down no matter what. Seems to be the case.
Ever since my (only) accepted submission of "MS extensions" being another piece of the monopoly they have...things have gone to hell and a handbasked.
Ironically, what I had written on the subject was being an "interesting notion and plausable" and my words were ignored but the slashdot spin put on it was all that was needed to bring about being modded down reguardless
Aw, gawd, I hate it when I answer my own question, but it took this subject to make it clear.
I post a story.
Story Accepted.
Story posted +
Moose gets villified.
Moose gets modded down at every turn reguardless of content/intent.
Let me be the first to say, that I have never, ever trolled.
Yes, I have strayed offtopic during a post (who hasn't on occasion), I've had rants that are/were/could be flamebait (when you are pissed, you really don't care).
I've apologized (and gotten modded down in the process...my, how nice).
Personally I find the quote from CmdrTaco disturbing, almost as bad as trying to "legislate morality"...we all know how well that works.
Think about it: a -2 for being/trying to be funny?
Dang, but why not just say "try to crack a joke and we will censor you".
The ultimate irony here is in "trying to avoid becoming the things/people we "hate/dislike" only to look and see we have turned into just that. (i.e. if
I think my sig says the above in the fewest words possible and more to the point.
(even more ironic is it was one of the funniest lines in the monty python film it came from)
Moose.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
* Stories can be rated higher then +5
* Users can gain more then 50 karma
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
I understand as a website why ads are necessary especially for one the size of slashdot, I am happy to pay a fee to keep from seeing them and still supporting your great site.
I think the net has a anti-payment mentality which unfortunately breeds the kind of annoying business model which we all detest. A few bucks isn't going to kill anyone and still allow this site to be a nice place to read.
You guys are doing a great job and it is appreciated.
Thanks
Happy Person
I think that myself and many slashdotters are up on "a good cause" enough to be willing to pay for a subscription. Heck, I know that TheGIA once made a request for money, not even a subscription system, and got tons of money just from people who readi t and enjoy seeing the content.
If even the 1% of hardcore slashdotters payed for a subscription, it'd be more money than one could ever generate through ad banners.
If there's anything about the open source geek community, it's the adhesive-like properties it shows, especially for people who routinely give so much for so little. So I think if Slashdot did such a thing, its financial troubles would most likely be indefinately alleviated.
Go Slashdot, I support you wholly.
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
In response to all the bitching about ACs, how about setting up two things:
:)) .. slashdot would be a third party. Since they wouldn't have an email address displayed when posting anonymous, this would allow a user to send them a private message.
/. private message system (which is better than nothing, I'd guess.)
1) Make it so you can post anonymously, but must be logged in. Ie, (like on half-empty) your karma is still affected and there is still an internal link to your post with your account, but nobody knows who you are.
2) Make it so there's an interface in slashcode to contact anonymous individuals (perhaps anonymously as well?
This way ACs who are posting crap will eventually bottom out in karma and post at -1 and have the potential to be flamed on the
--
Put them in the list of comments ! Make them the FP if you like, but it should be in the comments ! /.ers read even -1 posts, so having it as a comment would give a lot of visibility ...
I would imagine most
If there was a way to tailor ads to the Story, that would be welcome too! Google-style again..
This step should also hugely decrease the annoyance value.
Some people have found this system already. It is called pron. For some reason geeks can reach their wallets more easily when their other hand is ...
Game... blouses.
I'm tired of all this `hehe, being knowledgable folk we can install junkbuster, adzapper, or whatever other banner blocking ad proxy of the week, so it doesn't matter if Slashdot has ads' talk.
So? There's a bloody great big difference between your being able to do something and that something being ethical. If Slashdot has ads, and you don't want to look at them, then don't look at Slashdot.
The ads are part of the content. Hold up your end of the bargain and look at them. If you don't like animated flash or GIFs, complain to Slashdot. Don't try and seperate them. We know you're wonderful and very clever and deserve a pat on the back for being able to use Squid, but in exchange for the bandwidth, code, forums, and edited and compiled content you're viewing, if Slashdot expects you to look at ads in return, you should, or don't look at anything all all.
If I remember correctly, this is the same site where everyone railed againt MS Smart Tags (and rightly so) for daring to change the content of your web pages. How is this different?
First, it is said:
"I don't like it any more then many of you, so if you log in, there is an option to disable it."
Then:
"nobody is forcing us to make these changes: The navbar. The new ad formats. The subscription system. I could just say 'No' to changes like these"
If you COULD have said no, and you HATED the changes, why did you say YES?
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
If slashdot wants to stay alfoat in the dotbomb world it should understand why it is popular:
1. The only annoying advertising is a thin banner ad, no popups, and if you scroll down it doesn't stay there. i.e. CLEAN INTERFACE
2. Katz can be filtered through the user preferences.
3. CmdrTaco and friends do a decent job of highlighting a wide variety of tech/geek news sources, not just what the parent company shoves down their throat.
Hey, advertising revenues are down. Deal with it. You have a company that turns a profit. Don't get greedy and it will stay that way. If you need to shell out for more hardware and bandwidth for ISP support do so, but don't let that lead to bloat. Slashcode could be always be tweaked to save computing resources, but it is mature and doesn't need more bells and whistles.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
If you are planning on using the exact same ads, that is a very stupid thing to do--most of those ads use flash/shockwave, which is EXTREMELY annoying, and can't be stopped. At least with Gif89a you could stop the f'ing thing! The worst ones have sound too.
Considering how many *nix geeks are on this board, along with how many run Lynx, etc., how effective will those ads be, really? Yes, I will pay to get the hell rid of them, but I think that plan might backfire.
This reminds me of The Well -- anyone know how financially healthy it is?
Yea right.
:)
:/
Ads? Damn annoying, but they have their place, if used within reason. I trust the folks running the show here have a good sense of reason. Right?
Subscription? Also annoying, but to a smaller degree. Provided there is *NEVER* anything 'blocked' to non-subscribers, and that the fees are reasonable, then again I do not see a problem.
As for the OSDN bar, it's ugly, but it's small and not too intrusive at all. So I'm planning on leaving it alone.
As an aside, I tried a smaller subject and got a "Lameness filter encountered." message. My subject was greater then three characters, which is what that filter should be.
Pull a napkin out of the holder and write down some numbers. Let's say the servers and bandwidth are $10K a month. Add four employees at $72K/year including benefits and overhead for another $24K. That's $34K of expenses each month. Revenue? Banners are going for about $2 CPM net--if you're lucky--after commissions and fees. Assuming you can sell 16 MILLION page views you can break even for the month.
The OSDN media kit says Slashdot gets 30MM views, so no there's no problem right? Just sell all your ad inventory and you can CLEAR $30K each month after expenses. Bzzt, wrong. The Internet is swimming in ad inventory, you'll have a hard time selling that many banners at a good price. It's a buyer's market, so you either overdeliver to whatever advertisers you can find to please them or "remainder" your ads to a low-cost ad network. Ad networks like Tribal Fusion are offering sites sub-$1 CPMs, and sites are taking it because there's no better offer.
Advertisers are demanding the big obnoxious billboard ads or popups and they're getting it because sites are desperate for money. You can get a net $10 to $20 CPM on some of them! These new ad formats are all that seem to be selling lately. You either get with the program or do without ad revenue.
Some people are talking about how things will get better once the Internet ad market recovers. What makes them think the current prices are too low? Internet page views continue to increase even if the rate is slowing, so we're faced with more ad inventory instead of less. And how can an advertiser justify the price? If I'm selling a gizmo for $20 and buy banner ads on this site, I can expect best case maybe 0.1% click-throughs or one click for every 1000 impressions. If I pay a $4 gross CPM for the ads then it costs me $4 per click-through. Even if one of every 10 people who click through buy something--unusually high in my experience--it costs $40 to get one person to buy a $20 product. I need something more like a $1 CPM for this deal to make any financial sense.
If you don't like my numbers make up your own, but the bottom line is that nothing short of a bug in Microsoft Excel is going make Slashdot look wildly profitable.
I speak from experience here. The site I work on has been through all the money making schemes in the last 18 months--affiliate programs, Paypal/Amazon donation boxes, banner ads, big Cnet-style ads--and none of them work. We're not even covering our very meager expenses.
Next stop, subscriptions?
I finally got around to creating a hosts file like that when I was working at a company that had IE locked down so hard that you couldn't even turn off animated GIFs. I strongly recommend it as a solution, or at least a start. Here's my little collection (Note, it kills almost all CNET images);127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.0.1 active.macromedia.com 127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ln.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ads-c.focalink.com 127.0.0.1 adfarm.mediaplex.com 127.0.0.1 js-adex3.flycast.com 127.0.0.1 us.a1.yimg.com 127.0.0.1 ad.iwin.com 127.0.0.1 ads.mindsetnetwork.com 127.0.0.1 a1444.g.akamai.net 127.0.0.1 image.linkexchange.com 127.0.0.1 ads.web.aol.com 127.0.0.1 adremote.pathfinder.com 127.0.0.1 a.r.tv.com 127.0.0.1 adsrv.news.com.au 127.0.0.1 images.ads.fairfax.com.au 127.0.0.1 ads.msn.com 127.0.0.1 ads1.sptimes.com 127.0.0.1 ad.au.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 global.msads.net 127.0.0.1 au.a1.yimg.com 127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com 127.0.0.1 eur.a1.yimg.com 127.0.0.1 utils.mediageneral.com 127.0.0.1 ads.ad-flow.com 127.0.0.1 ads.gamespy.com
If they did all that Slashdot would be mighty bloated.
And besides, I don't think the Slashdot folks are in it for the money.
those creepy ad people might come out and hug you ;o)
this is one of THE best ideas I've ever seen posted on Slashdot.
the biggest flaw of most online advertising is that it has a complete lack of targeting to an audience. in the 5 or so years I've been online, I have seen very few sites that do proper advertising, targeted to the audience it attracts.
not only is this a good idea for slashdot, but for online advertising in general. do you think those x10 camera ads would still be around if they could be modded down?
advertisers do need to know when they're being moronic... as an example, most spammers advertise services in the USA, IF for some reason I read my spam and thought it sounded like a great offer, I'd be unable to take it up, as I'm in Australia. most of it is more simple than that though... weight-loss ads on anorexia sites... expensive membership ads on freebie sites...
the web shapes itself, you KNOW the banners to ThinkGeek are popular... and since when has advertising been popular? since it gave you some USEFUL information
when the advertising is useful, I'll actually start noticing it, and maybe some more of the great free websites will survive...
if there isn't, how do you know it won't work?
if there is, it needs better visibility
...Then again, I am not the editor, am I? I expect editors to spell correctly, don't you? The fact I made a mistake may mean I am not a good editor. However, I don't think it is too much to ask that the professionals check their work for spelling and grammar mistakes. That is why they are the editors and not me
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Hopefully this will cure my slashdot addiction and I can get some work done. =)
(PS: Slow connection mode rules! No ugly green, no navbar!)
...of researching, submitting, getting rejected, and finally commenting on posts by other paying users? That seems a little perverse. Lay the ads on me, baby, cause I ain't paying to post, read, and discuss what I'm contributing in the first place!
I'll subscribe and still watch the ads, moderate the good ones and click through the relevant ones.
Bleh!
There are probably two or three stories a day that don't get posted but are worth reading. The rest, well, there's a reason they don't get to the sections or the front page.
Just take a look at the -1 stuff, I'm sure the submission queue gets a bit of that also.
Bleh!
This is a bad option, even if we all agree as to what you can laugh at.
Dude, he is saying he wants a -2 penalty, not that Slashdot will assign a -2 penalty for everyone. He is talking about an option you can turn on and off. He will turn it on. You will leave it off (the default, I'm sure, will be off). This would be one of many such little preferences.
Fine-grained control over how articles are ranked would be a good thing. For example, suppose you hate the "overrated" moderation; there could be an option to change "overrated" from a -1 to a zero (no change). Or suppose you read Slashdot only for the humor; you could set the "funny" moderation to +2 instead of its usual +1. CmdrTaco will set it to -2 instead of +1. It's a good thing.
We can do even better than tweaking scores from moderators: we can tweak scores based on the articles themselves. Wouldn't you love a filter that can adjust score based on the user name? Anything posted by John Carmack gets an automatic +3, and anything posted by steveha gets an automatic -2. You ought to be able to read a really cool article, and click on a button to assign a bonus or penalty based on the user name who wrote it. And of course you should be able to use a regular expression in the user name; I remember a while back when some idiot kept creating new accounts and posting under them: "PenisBirdGreen", "PenisBirdBlue", "PenisBirdBlack", etc. etc. I would have been grateful for the ability to auto-moderate any post from a user whose name includes "PenisBird", or for that matter any post whose signature included the string "PenisBird".
My only fear is that all these fancy features, running on the server, will drive up the server load even worse for Slashdot. Maybe you should only get these features if you are a paid subscriber.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Keep making changes like this and Slashdot won't be here four years from now.
The middle mind speaks!
I've been reading slashdot for years now through junkbuster to get rid of the annoying ads. I always feel a little guilty for doing so but really can't stand the flashing, cycling, obnoxious ads. If slashdot offers a subscription service to remove the ads, I'll gladly sign up. Finally there will be a way to _not_ see the ads and _not_ free load.
I think that it is a shame that many useful posts get missed just because someone was either too lazy to log in, had forgotten their password, was on another machine, or (like me) lacked enough imagination to come up with a cool nickname.
ACs should post at 0. If a comment gets modded up or down it should be because of it's content, not because someone is anonymous.
(Actually, Slashdot was anoying there for a while because the defaults were ACs post at -1 but read at 0... I couldn't read my own posts.)
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Seeing everything from modding ads to new payments schemes has been discussed today, I will add my tiny suggestion for improving slashdot.
When I am a moderator, I find the pull-down mod system terrible. I like modding, but I don't want to spend all day on it. What sux is this: I view a story, see a good post and change the pull-down to "interesting". However, I don't want to go aaaaall the way down to click "moderate", because it takes 2-3 seconds of my life for the page to reload - and then I can't find where I got in the text. So I keep reading, just in case I spot another mod worthy post. If I see a sub-thread which isn't expanded, I can't go in there, cuz then the uncached page would forget the post I wanted to mod when I go back. Too often I end up going on a mod rampage, and just mod down trolls, but I would really prefer just to immidiatly vote for a post I saw, without getting disrupted.
Any solutions? You bet! If you check out half-empty, the solution chosen there is simply a small button or link for every vote option. Click on any of them and a little window opens in the background, which handles the modding. It's beautifully simple and solves all the problems mentioned here. It even stimulates modding.
-Kraft
Live and let live
Yes, the cat has got my tongue.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
because the internet is a cooperative network. For instance, say a site wants to do business on the web. They want you to visit, but they don't pay for the cables or the routers or for your hardware or connectivity costs. They pay for their own bandwidth and you pay for your bandwidth to visit them. Both sides are already paying money to be able to visit the site. So there's no clear line between between who pays for whose real cost.
Same with viewing a site. Your user agent may or may not display (using your cpu cycles/monitor,etc.) exactly what the publisher wants you to see. It all relies on cooperation. Now this is very different from other business models, and so people get upset when a site changes its formats. Why? because they are not involved. They don't know what is a real operating expense and what is a plan to pay for unwanted expansion. maybe they'd rather have the site load slower and charge less, or maybe they want lighting speed at a premium. We dont see any expense reports or business plans and have no control over the future of the site. It's as if a partner suddenly changed the rules of the game without consulting you. That's fine in a brick and mortar world where you take it or leave it, but on the net it doesn't work, since I can always tell my user agent to not display the crappy iframes. My hope is that there's a chance that those sites which involve viewers and give them some control over site development/business plans/ subscription rates will have an audience of cooperative visitors. Others will get their ads blocked. But the consideration has to be earned in any case, and does not follow just because the webmaster really really wants you to view the ads.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
The -2 for funny moderations won't be site-wide, it'll be user specific. /You/ get to choose whether or not to do it, it's not forced on you.
Go back and reread his post before you start coming up with crap like this.
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Being a webwasher user for several years now, Slashdot already is adfree for me and always has been, as has the rest of the internet. In fact, with icons turned off and Konquerors superfast table rendering, the site is completely text based and fast as hell for me.
Still I like the idea of a subscription system and I certainly will subscribe if the fee is reasonable. Also, I would like to see unobtrusive, nonblinking, nonanimated text ads that are related to the article category and me preferences somehow. Do the Google thing, be nonstupid.
After all, I make and receive phone calls.
It's about time these phone companies stopped charging and started asking for donations I feel.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
- AFAIK it's true that most sites with significant traffic have a hard time selling even 10% of their ad space
- it makes no sense to drown your users in banners that aren't even paid - just show an empty banner code so that they don't need to use WebWasher etc. on your site if they don't mind 5% or 10% of the pages having banners
- click-through rates can be 5% with Google's system - it's important to learn from this: low cost, cost-effective, very targeted - that's the future. Try to offer a system for your customers that can be effective with a very low initial cost (e.g. a simple system to buy ad space only on pages in the Apache section). Offer text-based ads the greedy, short-sighted users who want everything for free and no ads too can't remove easily.
- before you do it secretly, offer it as a service: "advertorials", paid news items for selected customers. Don't accept just anything, but new hardware etc. released by some companies can just as well be announced in a manner that earns slashdot a few dollars. It's not as if users didn't suspect the slashdot staff getting paid for some of the articles anyway.
- subscriptions are what everyone who operates a large web site wants
, but don't do it alone. Get a few other interesting sites for the same audience together and offer a "premium" package with some extra content first (web mail, notification service, no ads, whatever).
- don't laugh: advertisers still have an obscure obsession with paper, so if you can provide content that can be printed without looking too silly, do it. Slashdot could have a monthly issue printed with the submitted articles and a few links and sell it together with a CD containing all the comments for that month and a few goodies (the latest Mozilla, updated Debian packages, security announcements, whatever). It's not a big investment (keep it that way!).
And, do it at your own risk."I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
That hasn't worked and will never work - people will go to a few selected sites where they know they can find good prices and a large number of products when they're interested in purchasing something. ThinkGeek would be the place to go when someone wanted to buy geek T-shirts, Amazon the one for books, price comparison sites for electronics... It's nonsense to offer products for sale to an audience not interested in buying anything at the moment (and I don't want to buy stuff when I read news online - and when I do want to buy something, I want to do it consciously).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo.
You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at http://www.slashdot.org/palm but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin:
First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.
/. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too
many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the
advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the
comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune"
sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be
gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it
fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.
If you're interesting in downloading avantslash or can provide a public URL for others to use, please check out http://www.custard.org/~richard/avantslashAdditionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!
Finally, using
Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.
Thanks for listening.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I work for a company who's primary business is more and more based on providing web content. We have a mixed free/subscription service (20%/80%). Our model is not the same as Slashdot in that we provide a lot of our own content and our target market is rich (i.e. Lawyers). No subscription gets you news and some basic information. Subscription payment gets you full customisation rights, protected content and even specialised linking to our material.
Business websites are VERY expensive to run - ask anyone who has been in the IT business for long enough - and slashdot is part of a company, like it or not, and there is no way on gods earth Slashdot makes any money.
If Slashdot needs larger ads, big deal - its still free so stop complaining. If you REALLY don't like it, then go and start your own Slashdot.
However if you want to start charging for a subscription, you have to then offer some kind of content which is UNIQUE to paying subscribers, and that means authoring your own content. Otherwise, whats the point of paying to see re-hashed material ?
How do you wash your clothes?
Or your body for that matter...
What do you eat?
Absolutes are always dumb!
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
These are very sad news to read in the morning. With very few exceptions, I have been a daily Slashdot user for a very long time, perhaps from almost the beginning. I have recommended it to lots of others. I have regarded Slashdot with a level of respect difficult to describe. I have participated as editor in one of the many slashdot-inspired fora.
Today I wake up and become afraid that soon the cluetrain may not stop here any more.
Yes, I am aware that getting advertisers is not as easy as it once was. Yes, I am aware that bandwidth is far from free. Could other sources of expense here be replaced by voluntary work? Are we talking about supporting Slashdot survival expenses or about OSDN profit levels? Perhaps OSDN is unable to consider those questions separately. Perhaps Slashdot participants and readers can.
In spite of all the differences between participants here, there seems to be something very strong which we can call a "Slashdot community". It seems to me something too precious to scatter, and I suggest a lot of reflexion before Slashdot becomes simply another site adopting obnoxious ephemeral fashionable advertising tactics like huge ad images.
Maybe I am wrong, but my view is that those ads can only be good from the greedy point of view of those interested in short term profit but with no respect for the future of the places where those ads are shown. For those simply buying and selling with no regard for content and communities, huge WWW ads may be the winning strategy of the day. For those with a genuine interest in ensuring the future of a site and its community, I believe the same ad strategy can be suicidal.
Having started to use Mozilla, I now have the habit of disabling banner ad viewing. But I never considered doing that for Slashdot. In fact, contrary to my practice on other sites (where I automatically ignored the ads even before blocking them), I have even followed your banner ads a lot of times; they worked as specialized ads on a specialized magazine. But do not expect this atitude to remain the same if Slashdot starts using the kind of intrusive ad specimens we have seen at online trade rags. I will certainly try to block them.
Considering that we are talking about Slashdot, maybe the above (viewing ads now, blocking them later if they become huge) is a common attitude among many of your readers. Yes, perhaps many others do not know how to block ads with proxies or don't have a browser which makes that easier. But can Slashdot afford to alienate those with the minimal "level of technical expertise" needed to block ads?
Of course I prefer to pay directly for something I consider important than seeing it flooded with ads and (with a false impression of low or zero price) paying through advertisers.But would annoying ads really be the motivating factor for doing this? Maybe yes, maybe no. There is always the risk that what is perceived as the annoying entity is Slashdot itself, not the ads by themselves. And then Slashdot expenses with bandwidth may become lower for a sad reason: less participants. "Participants", not only "readers"; contrary to what a TV ad a few years ago menaced, here in slashdot with some kinds of advertising there will be "a lot less news". And people to read them.
There is something I once thought of for Slashdot-like fora which could be much more interesting than huge banners, but I do not have a clue about its commercial feasibility: there could be special articles inserted among the normal ones, but clearly marked as beeing payed by advertisers. In these articles a company would say whetever it wanted about its products; they could just contain mindless marketroid speech or (much more appealing to Slashdot participants) interesting technical info about the stuff they are trying to sell. Ideally, one would also be able to comment on these articles as for any others.
At its best, it would not be advertising-as-usual. It would involve more than an art department and some content-free sentences. But is advertising-as-usual the best way to reach this audience?
I also hope Slashdot will be here another four years, and many more. I just hope that the expensive reality associated with making this site happen will not become less expensive because of less readers. And, even more important, because of less participants.
Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars...
This may sound a bit offtopic, but:
'They' really are buying mindshare. I thought I was basically unaffected by advertizing, and that I'd resisted the influence of TV commercials. I moved to Ireland this month, though, and I've discovered that I've been fooling myself the whole time.
Yesterday, I spent 3 minutes looking at various brands of laundry soap, trying to determine which one to buy. Finally, I realized that what I was really doing was looking for a brand name I recognized. I almost bought a brand that had the same color scheme as my old brand. The thing is, I had no info on which one worked best, because I'd never seen commercials for any of them, and that's how I knew which one to buy in the states.
I've discovered that I've developed many more opinions through TV ads than I ever thought I had. It's actually pretty unsettling.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
Slashdot is one of the few web sites I'd actually pay to read. Even if it still had (unobtrusive) ads after pay. Though I'd prefer that there were none if I pay. (Before you have a stroke and capitalize all your letters flaming: you'll note that you pay for Rolling Stone, and you still get ads. You pay for cable TV and you STILL get ads.)
Just like NPR, these people gotta make a living. Putting on the Slashdot show costs money. It's gotta come from somewhere. So we pay for a subscription. Big deal.
A lot of people here spend a lot of energy bitching about what they get for free. They bitch about Linux, They bitch about BSD. They bitch about Slashdot. Frankly, I'm sick of hearing it. I'm grateful for Linux, and being able to get an operating system for free. And I'm grateful for getting as much content (and don't forget slashcode!) and opinion as we get from Slashdot for free.
So basically, when it comes time to pay, I'll pony it up and hope Taco/Hemos/Cowboy Neal/etc. can take a nice vacation.
And if the $20.00 a year is so distasteful to you, you can always read this ad-free page.
My work *isn't* perfect all the time. Then again, my title isn't EDITOR! The editors make mistake after mistake after mistake and I don't believe they are trying. A simple spell check program would go a long way to helping, but the editor's comments often fail to pass even that test. I am sorry you hate people that expect people with the title of editor to actually edit. Call me irrational.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
My urge to visit a site is balanced by the frustration at it's speed (among other things). If /. had less bandwidth, only those people who could stand the slow speed would come. And once those other posers are gone the speed would increase again. Attracting more posers but also decreasing the speed repulusing more posers and increasing the speed.
Self-regulating. If the admins have patience and wish to aim for quality instead of size.
324006
Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months
Did you take the whole WTC disaster (11/9, remember?) into account? I'm betting every news-site has seen this increase (or more!).
This way, Rob and the crew will be able to demonstrate that "ads on Slashdot get clickthroughs" thereby increasing the ads' value and generating revenue for Slashdot.
Amazing magic tricks
You have a community of people, you are well known, take advantage of it
/. all year. You guys have a bunch of relatively wealthy young dudes and dudettes coming on here everyday. Give me something to buy while Im here that I want, and am willing to pay for.
This is the truest thing on
I go to the coffee shop for a natter, while Im there I buy coffee. I come here for a natter, but you don't have any coffee - you must have SOMETHING worth selling.
Do an ASK SLASHDOT about this! What, as well as an eBay or a geek dating service would people pay for??
...isn't there some agency that funds art or journalism? Would it help to go non-profit? Do *all* my tax dollars go to the war against drugs, peer-to-peer computing, and for supporting corrupt regimes overseas?
Goddamnit...we have to solve this damn problem, and it doesn't look like anybody has any ideas. Is there a number of a dollar amount that can be tossed out? What is slashdot's membership size?
$/subscribing members == ???
What about a distributed mirroring technology? I have a T1 at work (I work at a major university) and would be glad to provide what bandwidth I can without being fired (hell, we blow money around here like there's no tomorrow anyway). This has got to end...maybe there needs to be a "United Way" of the net...a big fund that people can contribute to (tax-deductable of course) that keeps decent projects afloat.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
One word : unacceptable. These make me sick. I can understand the need to make enough money to keep the site going, and that's fine, but nothing is gonna make me endure that. Sorry.
Maybe I will buy a subscription to disable the ads, but I wonder. The quality has gone down the toilet since Andover had been taken over by VA. Considering these "reorganisation", we can wonder how low /. is gonna go. Who would pay for another ZDNet ? Not me ...
Now about the replacement :
Unfortunately, none of these can give me EVERYTHING I want to read at the same place (like /. used to do). I will miss that.
:wq
I browse with Junkbuster because I've decided that I can do without Slashdot. I like it, but I don't NEED it. It's been fun over the years, but it has degraded. Like the day AO-13 was launched into orbit, the controllers calculated exactly which *day* it would re-enter the earth's atmosphere. And they were right.
With places like Yahoo! and MSNBC saying "post comments on this article", I think we will all just disperse and find similar functionality elsewhere. The name escapes me right now, but there's a site that specializes in providing free headlines by XML. All you get are clickable URL's to content on other sites. Put the headlines on our own sites, and we'll all get referrer credit with Yahoo.
Intelligent Life on Earth
I tried to post earlier, but waited forever on the "preview"....
There are several things that I think would help Slash and Slashdot, but bottom line: I'm an avid reader and poster. Please keep it going. I'll happily pay up to about 1/3 of what I pay for cable TV. No-brainer. Slashdot is worth it.
>The ads are part of the content.
/. about that.
/. doesn't expect me to view ads. If it did, it would require one of the graphical browsers.
No they're not, just like advertisements in newspapers aren't.
>Hold up your end of the bargain and look at them.
Bargain? What bargain? and what end? I dont remember signing any contracts. And I'll choose what I look at, just like in real life..
> If you don't like animated flash or GIFs, complain to Slashdot.
I don't have flash installed, because I dont like flash. I don't have to complain to
>Don't try and seperate them.
I also use lynx regularly. then I dont see ANY banners. I guess you'd probably call using lynx 'stealing'
>if Slashdot expects you to look at ads in return, you should, or don't look at anything all all.
Good thing
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
...ok, here's a brilliant suggestion I'm sure nobody has thought of - would merely simplifying the HTML of the site save some precious bandwidth costs? I mean, even if you just shave off a few percent of size on the web pages, wouldn't that save a lot of money? Lowercasing tags is rumored to aid compression too - which brings us to .gz - Netscape at least can unzip/read gzipped files: would the trade off in cpu for dynamically gzipping save money?. How about allowing people to disable what they don't want to see...e.g. I have rarely ever used the whole Sections bar on the left, and don't use most of the other links on the left either. I suppose I could switch to the Lite version, but I'd think even a small reduction of Normal-mode size would lead to a little savings. Hell, halve the topic icons.
Anyway, that's my non-helpful naive suggestion. Damn, I'm probably just wasting more bandwidth posting this.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I suggest if the hypocritcial /. staff start getting us to pay for slashdot, we do what they would advise us to do if it were software:
/. ip squats on it.
We fork it!
Someone register www.freeslashdot.org before someone at
graspee
> Anonymous Cowards, it's just unacceptable.
There's absolutely no ontradiction there. Experience (dating to long before slashdot) has shown that someone willing to be identifried generally has far more to say than someone hiding behyind anonymity. There's a *huge* difference between saying that someone shouldn't be able to be anonymous and saying that as a group, they're not worth my time to read. They have no underlying right to *my* time.
> Things need to work both ways here. Now go ahead and mod me down for
> "trolling".
"redundant" would be far more accurate, or "ovverrated." Still, "troll" or "flamebait" would be appropriate for this tired old argument. Best of all, though, would be "karma whore," as the combination of a misstatement of reality, tired old hack, and speculation as to being moderated is another tired old combination . . .
hawk
what do I do with this? Is this in /etc/hosts/deny?
/etc/hosts file. If you use m$ nt4.0, it goes in
c:\winnt40\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
No, it would go in your
(Could they have picked a less intuitive directory?)
Anyways, the way it works is that your system will typically check the hosts file before doing a DNS lookup. So, when the your system trys to load an ad from one of those servers, instead of going to the net to get the ad, it finds a hosts entry and trys to pull the data from the loop back interface (127.0.0.1). Since there is no web server operating at that IP address, it puts whitespace in the place the ad was supposed to go.
Voila!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
hawk
I've submitted about a dozen stories/links over the last year, most have been [IMHO] good quality, and some have been 'Bang On Target', yet I've only had one accepted. e.g.
2000-10-24 09:13:06 UK Employers gain e-snoop powers today (articles,news) (accepted) .NET (developers,news) (rejected)
2001-01-24 11:09:08 Interactive Digital Television casestudy. (articles,tv) (rejected)
2001-02-28 15:22:44 nCube doubles size of worlds largest VOD System. (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-03-08 22:15:04 Amazon Security hole (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-04-09 13:17:24 PS2 & STB Convergence (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-04-09 13:22:41 Update: PS2/STB Convergence (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-05-04 13:02:10 'Tractor beam' technology advances (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-08-24 16:59:15 J2EE vs'
2001-10-11 12:38:02 Microsoft astro-turf EU investigation. (articles,news) (rejected)
In too many cases (all above) I've also seen a similar story posted within days. So it's not the stories themselves, so why are they being rejected? I think if we've gone to the effort of contributing we deserve at least a basic explaination.
ah, I stand corrected. Thanks.
/. crew, or have metamoderation not for just the comments, but for the moderators themselves and the comments they moderate.
Maybe it has been said before, I don't know I'm still reading the feedback (800+ comments at 1+, oye).
It has been pointed out that the moderation system is subject to abuse. True, the same abuse as AC comments at times, but this is the exception, not the rule.
Personally, I think it is becoming the "rule" at times.
Look at the system if an AC posts something that is modded as a troll, their account is subject to suspension, posting limits or some such thing.
Is there any way to point out moderator abuse?
Nope. Think it does not happen? Heh, I offer my self as an example.
But lets face it, moderation (and metamoderation) is a thankless job...a fact some of us forget (even stated in the moderator guideline, IIRC) from time to time.
What I've tried to do is put this in perspective.
Now as hard as it may be to believe, I a far from perfect. I know, I know, but it is true.
With that in mind, follow me on this:
(If there is anything I've omitted or gotten wrong, tell me, I'd love to hear it.)
Moderation is a thankless job, as I stated before, so, to all the moderators, thank you.
I mean it, people who moderate keep us coming to slashdot again and again because most moderation is done in an intelligent fashion.
Like any good manager, I've pointed out what is right, now is time to point out what is wrong.
The Moderation system ain't broke, it just needs a little fixing. How about limiting the number of mod points for negative scores? say, 5 positive, and 2 negative?
Metamoderation, thankless job, thanks to metamoderators, too. (I've metamoderated almost every day for years...yet I've been give mod points..what, once? twice?...It was a 'thrill' and a privelage).
How about before giving mod points you have to metamoderate 5 to 10 times?
And this is rather obvious, it is silly really, if you go to the metamod page, the names are blanked out, yes? However if you click on the context link...you see the name of the 'person' who made the comment. This also leaves it subject to misuse/abuse.
If we can refuse to metamoderate, why can't we refuse to be modded up/down/at all?
Or, at the very least, have the opportunity to say "WOAH" and have the
This makes sense to have moderators doing what they do best, or like to do, but with a "safety net" in metamoderation (anyone can do it, correct?) to look and say, "hey, moderatorX, moderates person Y down all the time reguardless of context"...not cool, unless person Y is an obvious troll.
I don't know really besides "Funny", "over-rated" and perhaps "flamebait"...should be changed to rant, perhaps...all should have a mod total of 0.
Why? For the simple reason, as CmdrTaco stated, funny is subjective...I agree... subjective opinions should have no value in a moderation system. One could also argue the same about insightful/interesting et al, but "positive" things being argued against seem hollow somehow.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go change my sig, it is incorrect.
"If I am right. I am right. But, *if* I am wrong, show me I'm wrong"
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
I agree, even though I tend to post with the bonus myself. I figure I might as well use it, but yeah, if all you need to do to get it is karma whore for a while it lowers the respectibility of it.
What I suggested at one point was that ACs who were modded up to 1 would sort above logged-in users, and anyone modded up to 2 would sort above 'bonus using' users.
I mean, it seems fair. My posts may be above average (hence worthy of a global +1) but an AC who got modded up to 2 probably has something more important to say than my post at default score.
That post wasnt even flamebait....
We already "pay" for the site by submitting content!
Yes, but Slashdot can not exactly use that content to barter with the electric company, the ISP, the hard drive vendor, etc...
I like the +1 for Karma. In fact, I would even go further: there are some posters whose comments I would like to see no matter what the rating. I would like to be able to add posters to a list so stories are flagged where they post and comments are automatically shown. I would pay (a little) for this functionality.
Milo
The cost of hosting a fairly small web site is pretty cheap (approaching free, but not, of course).
The cost of hosting and running something like Slashdot.org is way more than a lot of people are willing to admit to. Banner advertising might work, but from personal experience, I can tell you it ain't always enough. Worse, it can lead to tempatations from what I've seen.
Let's just say that it's time we grew up. Those of us who grew up without the web remember getting two types of magazines -- Free ones (trade rags) and subscription ones (going the route of the dinosaur). The really expensive ones were sometimes the best. The trade rags -- do I need to remind people what kind of dross was found in them?!? Crappy reviews and huge payola were often the norm. A rare voice like Nicholas Petreley could be found from time to time.
Why do a lot of people fail to realize that some things are going to be worth paying for? We like to think that advertising will just do it, but the God's honest truth is that it's just not doing it. It might be different if web advertising were more intrusive (like TV advertising, for example) -- but it's _not_ -- it's one of the things that makes surfing the web a pleasurable experience. If we had to watch (even catchy) flash movies every time we tuned into a web site, we'd freak.
CmdrTaco, Hemos -- I applaud your bravery, and I'll consider the cost of your ad-removal. Oh, and thanks for Slashdot.Org and your hard work.
--Paul Ferris
This story seems like it's asking for opinions, so I hope no one will mind too much if mine happen to be redundant.
I know that someone else has probably said all these things, but I don't have moderator points ans so I can't emphasize the ones that I feel are important.
- One thing I'd really like to see, more than new features and new advertisements, is better stability. It seems that every other day I reload slashdot and get the generic page instead of the one I've customized in my user settings. Eventually if I keep reloading I get my custom page. This started happening two months ago and has been an ongoing problem ever since on ALL the machines I browse slashdot from, regardless of their internet bandwidth. If bandwidth is the issue, then reduce the complexity of the html and find technical ways of speeding up the dynamic code.
- Putting more obnoxious advertisements in front of people is a terrible idea. If you need to raise money do some creative (or even not-so-creative) fundraising. There is still a ".org" in slashdot. Since slashdot has traditionally been a community site instead of the usual corporate media outlet, why not try typical community forms of fundraising such as pledges (with hat and T-shirt prizes), donors, etc. Reward people for their generosity by keeping up a list of donors at various levels like libraries do. I have to admit that if slashdot wants to behave like C-net, I'll probably start looking elsewhere. I know that slashdot is owned by a public company, but that doesn't mean that it can't have a concept of "we're doing good enough". Too many companies kill themselves trying to grow beyond their natural market instead of serving it.
- Sticking more ads in front of people (especially this audience) is simply going to increase ad filtering.
- I don't have anything against subscriptions for no ads at all, but I'm against increasing the amount of ads for non-subscribers.
IMO, the new ads will be no problem as long as:
/. is the probably the only site where I regularly take notice of and even respond to ads.
- the ads remain relevant to the site like they are now. I actually click on these. I'd say
- the ads stay in one place on the screen so eventually they scroll off. I abhor the new flash ads that float around the screen, make noises, follow your cursor, etc. Ads that scroll with a page are bad enough, but when they take over my computer that's pretty damn unacceptable. For examples of what NOT to do, check out scifi.com, especially on their message boards.
As for the new bar at the top, perfectly fine! Doesn't get in the way, not too ugly, and could even be useful.
As for a subscription, I would pay, but not anything more than a few dollars a month. I would be more responsive to a place where I can donate when I have the money. As one other person mentioned, if you had a pledge drive, like NPR or PBS, I think you may find you'd have enough dough to scrap your new ad plan and even take a nice vacation.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Is it just me, or is that a low number? I really suspected a LOT more users than that...and yes, taking into consideration that not everyone creates an account...
/. effect.
But wow, I would expect more esp. knowing the power of the
------
Let me give you the lowdown
You should make it so that ACs are -1, UNLESS the post has been moderated up, in which case it'd be shown as it's true rating.
That option would allow AC posting to do what it is supposed to do (allow people to post information that could get them in trouble) while still allowing us to filter the jackasses.
Now what I would like is a customizable toolbar, a la the slashboxes. That way the trolls could have a link straight to goatse.cx at the top, and I could add some other OSDN and/or news sites I like to read - could be useful.
sulli
RTFJ.
Interesting? Now what would REALLY be interesting would be a link to your FTP repository! ;)
load "linux",8,1
Great.. now we'll have k1dd13z running around saying "|)00|)z!! p4j33rz0r |\/|y 31337 (0113c7i0|\| 0f 57013n 51454|)07 4((0u|\|7z!!!!!!!!"
/. going other than subscriptions. Target advertisements more (user preferences), reduce bandwidth by cleaning up your HTML and dumping unneeded images, let go of some staff (c'mon now.. /. can nearly run itself other than maintenance and posting stories), and put up a /. paypal donation box or something.
But serious, there are better ways to keep
formkey bugs have been pissing me off for longer than just the weekend. It happens at like 1 out of 3 posts for me. It is actually pretty annoying to be told you cannot post b/c you already did.
/.
I submitted this bug over a month ago after having it happen to me several times. It was closed because they said that I had screwed up and hit submit twice or something. I replied back saying that wasn't the case, but I was told that I didn't understand what I had screwed up.
This is the first time I've really felt badly towards
load "linux",8,1
I've actually got an idea for a new ad system - derived from this user's posting. It miraculously triggered a few neurons in my gray matter, and I came up with an idea.
Here we go.
Ad networks set cookies, and use these to track users. However, since the cookie is set, why not allow the user himself to modify his info? Every few ads, put up a striking one that says "personalize this ad!", and allow the user to access his/her cookie, and add/inspect personal information. Let them tell you what they're looking to buy in the future.
Also make sure to tell them that other ad networks don't give them this option, but try to infer the information through spying on them.
Anybody think "honest ads" can fly? Or have this been tried before, and I'm just an unoriginal developer too late for the mating season?
Stop the brainwash
I have always wondered - what if /. went subscription - or what if Andover/VA went under, and /. wasn't there - what would I be willing to do to get my /. fix (and let's face it - it _is_ a drug for a lot of us)?
/.? Do bears shit in the woods? Of course I would pay!
/. going). I think I would be willing to do $10.00/month just to read /.
Yeah, I click the banner ads from time to time - sometimes just to see what the product is, other times because the ad seems interesting - sometimes just to give a penny to the crew.
Would I be willing to pay for
k5 started a pay model, but I don't find them to be worth paying for, not yet, anyhow - but they still rake in about $300/month for new subscriptions so far, which isn't too bad (though I bet it costs more than that to keep
I like the idea of pledge drives, though - and a "sponsor wall" showing high pledges, etc. I also like certain other suggestions bandied about by others.
Think about this - please!!! Don't just go with the bigger banner ads, but be original and creative instead!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Please combine the subscription offer with a t-shirt or hat. That way I can offer some small financial and moral support to slashdot.
Or maybe a coffee mug.
> No they're not, just like advertisements in newspapers aren't.
You haven't provided any justification there at all. Ads aren't part of the editorial content, but they are most definitely part of whatever publication, and an important one, seeing as without them the newspaper wouldn't be brought to you. Republishing newspaper content without ads would be similarly unethtical.
> Bargain? What bargain?
Your eyeballs for their content, in case this wasn't obvious. There are bargains and transaction in mary parts of society where contracts aren't included. You didn't sign a contract which said you had to pay for the newspaper either.
> And I'll choose what I look at, just like in real life.
Again: republishing newspaper content without ads would be similarly unethical.
> I guess you'd probably call using lynx 'stealing'
If you're disabl;ed, which most users of text based browsers are (hardcore CLI geeks aren't as common as you'd expect) then fine, the site has an obligation to make its content available to you. Otherwise, certainly - if you're viewing a site which is brought to you by ads and you are stripping that part of the content, then yes.
I've never thought that humor should be a quality to be looked for when moderating anyway. If something is so gosh-darn funny that it needs to be modded up, someone will mod it up as "underrated" or otherwise. Simply put, I don't think that funny things that contribute in no other ways are useful for discussion.
Besides, funny things are generally "interesting", so why not come up with another adjective for modding up or get rid of "funny" altogether? Just a suggestion.
It's not much, but you just lost me as a reader of Slashdot.
Thanks for all the fish.
-Jared
sorry you sold out. when you start asking
me for money, for something i enjoy, is
when i hit the pavement. never sell out. bye.
information is immaterial
But sales of advertisments are hurting. If it means having slashdot for longer, I wouldn't mind obtrusive ads, as long as I could pay a little bit a month to turn them off. They would probably make more from people paying to not have them, than they would from them clicking them.
--------------------------------------
58.0% slashdot corrupt
Not reading certain parts, like ads, is NOT the same as republishing. The reason why I cite newspapers, and the fact that ads are not content is because, under dutch law, ads need to be labeled to distinguish them from content. Ads are not content by law here. I also dont feel guilty for not reading certain stories that don't interest me, and I would be very surprised if you did.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
How terrified would advertisers be by the possibility of public criticism
The good ones might welcome it.
Miko O'Sullivan
Modding me up as "funny"! Now that's cruel!
I agree. There's nothing wrong with not looking at something. But using Junkbuster I look as as republishing. I mean content as in the items conatined as part of he known distribution - you seem to be talking about content meaning editorial content.
ok.. basically this is how I look at it..
for the example, I will use a magazine that also has ads.
open the magazine on the index page.
What's on the index page? all the content.
What's not on the index page? easy.. ads aren't. They may be in a separate list, usually on just about the last page. This is how I look at content vs ads, and I'm pretty sure this is not a unique view.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I'm thinking that adding a FUD (-1) option to post scoring to help counter the increasing amount of M$ astroturfers disrupting slashdot.