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.
Otherwise we'll really have to hate you.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Yeah. I presume that you have looked at ars technica's approach to subscriptions so that you can make this work.
You owe your readers early information on subscriptions. Otherwise, add busting software will make nonsense of your switch to ads plus subscriptions.
Last thing.
Those big mid-page ads on CNET are why I don't go there anymore.
You better have a good explanation for why you think that slashdot folks are willing to tolerate them.
D
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
...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));
Last thing.
Those big mid-page ads on CNET are why I don't go there anymore.
You better have a good explanation for why you think that slashdot folks are willing to tolerate them.
You don't have to tolerate them! Taco just said you can buy a subscription and disable them!
And as unpopular as it is to pay for the things, people work on slashdot so we can all have fun reading it. And they have to make money too (god knows their stock ain't worth shit anymore).
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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"
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
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
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 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.
Actually hardware wise we are pretty trivial (and currently we have capacity for twice what we are doing on an average day). So 9 2U 2ways, plus 3 Intel based 4ways.
For a site of our size that is not a lot of Hardware at all. Looks at sites even smaller then us and they will normally run on more hardware then what we do.
You can't grep a dead tree.
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
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
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.
At least they're well targeted. You won't see a full-page ad on CNet talking about "vaginal yeast infections" :)
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
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.
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 difference is that I pay one reasonable (relatively) fee per month for 50 or so channels.
This is more akin to subscribing to a magazine. I used to subscribe to a lot of magazines. Then I discovered that I actually didn't have the time to get $30 or so of value from each one, instead I was simply skimming most of them. The result was that I greatly reduced the number that I subscribe too.
The same will be true of web sites. If they think the competition was bad before, wait until users have to start making choices about what web sites they have time to get real value from.
Note though, my first post didn't say I wasn't willing to pay for a _reasonable_ subscription and in my opinion that is now more then a few dollars a year to make up for my ad viewing.
My choice here is even easier then the magazines however as I can filter the ads from my end if they aren't reasonable in their pricing.
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".
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)
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
--
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
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
It ain't that simple.
You've gotta sell those ads. And that's not so easy, anymore. If you don't sell an ad, serving the page is a cost, not a benefit.
"But wait!" you say. "There's ALWAYS an ad at the top, so they're clearly selling them all!" Nope. You know all those Think Geek ads? And the NewsForge ads? And all the other adds that point to things OSDN owns? Those are all "house" ads that
So, if they're not selling the ads, now, more pageviews just results in more bandwidth costs, not more ad sales.
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
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.
- 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)
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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'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.
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