Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot IRC Forum
The IRC forum with CmdrTaco and Hemos is now complete, and a log has been posted. They answered quite a few questions about Slashdot's subscription system, bigger ads, and other assorted stuff. Don't miss the question about pop-up ads.
I missed the forum thanks to work; there's one idea that had crossed my mind. I acknowledge that /. needs cash flow to keep moving, but there may be a way out of subscriptions.
Set up polls to gather non-personal data for marketroids, such as what compiler you use and why, what http server you use and why, etc. I'm cerrtain that with some small measure of headscratching, it would be possible to gather information about the geek community to be worth money to a marketing research concern while at the same time keeping it within geek sensibilities, i.e. no 'what is your bank account number' type questions.
Perhaaps some form of questionnaire to be filled out upon registration, retroactively applicable?
Study us; we're geeks. We buy stuff. Expensive stuff. Servers. Networking gear. We're the bleeding edge consumers, what the marketing people call 'early adopters'.
Just don't try to sell us beer.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Was slashdot turning a profit before you implemented this annoying advertising/subscription scheme??
If slashdot is in the red then I really can't hate you guys for not paying out of your pockets to keep the site up and running. But I've heard some anecdotal evidence suggesting that slashdot.org is indeed turning a profit. That would mean VA Linux(or whatever they are called now) is taxing the slashdot users to pay for unprofitable ventures elsewhere.
Face it guys: VA has NO CHANCE IN HELL of surviving as a company. Their flagship product, Sourceforge, is a joke. Last I checked, VA's net loss was more than their TOTAL REVENUE. You can't come back from that in a quarter, or even a year. Slashdot will be sold to some other company or spun off or something.
Slashdot should make comments subscription only.
They could even do away with the need for moderation.
I mean, who wants to pay to crapflood?
--Metrollica
You touches on being able to treat subscribers like Friends/Foes (+1 or -1), but how about the ability to simply ignore a friend/foe or non subscriber???
I want to read at -1, but I also want to not have to look at the crap that Klerck puts out.
Looks like Rob and Jeff Hitler are going after AlterSlash. Why? Think about it? They show you Slashdot without the inane ads and other things which make Slashdot suck. Gee, this is one thing jamie and michael won't be touching.
Here's to Slashdot's demise!
Seriously, Slashdot is my homepage and I check it perhaps 10-15 times per day. The stories are sometimes questionable but usually interesting, and the comments are usually blatent stupidity or flamebait, but sometimes though-provoking. I decided I'll just block the BFA's so I don't forget to shoot them $5 on a regular basis, but really the ads don't bother me. This is a part of that whole tip jar using, user community supported, huge media comglomerate free thing that the New Internet was supposed to be all about, whats so terrible about tossing in $5? I guess that seems cheap to me, but then again I tend to use the tip jar for all my favorite sites a couple times a year, never much (because I am a poor college student), but I don't want the sites that I enjoy to disappear. just my quick thoughts-
Read the IRC Forum. Basically, they indicate that they gave all of this very little thought. They still have no idea of the complications of advertising.
It's a kind of intellectual arrogance. Because they know computer things, nothing else can be difficult.
Bush's education improvements were
I just want to say two things:
First, the notion that "posting is payment enough!" is a troll. Posting doesn't pay the bandwidth bills. I think it's sad that Slashdot has become a victim of its own popularity, but I understand their need to search out new sources of revenue. I'm not even against it.
On the other hand: Sorry Hemos, Taco, but it doesn't sound like you put *any* thought into this subscription plan at all. (Proof: grep the IRC log for "i dunno", see how many times Taco says it.) Shouldn't you guys have thought this out before you implemented the thing? Isn't that the first rule of programming?
And, not to be too pointed, but what about asking us what we want? For a site which prides itself on providing community, I'm profoundly disappointed in the way Slashdot rolled this out.
You had a real chance to change the world here. What is Slashdot supposedly about? Open Source. Imagine if you'd practiced what we all preach: You could've let the Slashdot community propose and moderate the features they most wanted in a subscription service. Like Google, you could have shown all the failing dotcoms that, if you give the customer exactly what they want, you'll be successful where everyone else fails.
You had a chance to lead the way, and you blew it. The current plan seems like -- forgive me - a Microsoft patch. Poorly thought out, badly implemented, causing more problems than it fixes.
You could still do this right, you know. And I'll probably pay a few bucks because I know how much I've enjoyed reading Slashdot. But I can't help feeling like this is the beginning of the end. Here's hoping you pull this together, and thanks for the memories if it turns out you can't.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Some observations/questions which I found interesting (TI = Time Index):
TI 15:12 - Someone asks about the costs of running Slashdot. Lots of "it's hard to tell", "hard to calculate", etc from the Slashdot crew. CmdrTaco says they have 12 servers + test boxes and stuff.
TI 15:43 - Again someone asks how much is costs to keep
TI 16:14 - Someone asks if the money from subscriptions will go to help improve infrastructure, bandwidth, costs, etc. Hemos says the money will go into the OSDN bank account. He then says "But the money for Slashdot is tracked". Taco says "The thing is we don't need *more* we just need to keep what we have".
TI 16:15 - A question is asked about how long
TI 17:16 - Someone asks how much bandwidth
Is it just me, or does it seem profoundly odd to anyone that the people who run Slashdot have no idea how much money it costs? Maybe this is the reason they're in financial trouble? They say that
Slashdot of course has absolutely no obligation to reveal their costs to their users, whether they're subscription based or not. But answering as they did above really makes them look unprofessional IMO. If they don't want to answer, or are prohibited from answering, they should simply state that.
Personally, I won't pay for a subscription. I'll likely install JunkBuster or something similar. As someone posted on another thread, it's *my* right to choose what's displayed on *my* computer, and if I don't want to see ads, I won't. Just like it's the choice of Slashdot to remove itself as a freely accessible site and become completely closed and subscription only based if they want. If that happens, then I have a choice to pay, or not pay and get my news on the multitude of other tech news sites. It's all about choices, as it should be.
So exactly how much DOES it cost to run Slashdot per year?
Frog
Maybe subscribers should be able to see a list of advertisers, with a checkbox allowing them to change the policy from default to explicit allow or deny. The frequency with which allowed ads show up could be based on the relative chances of an ad from that advertiser showing up on an unsubscribed user's page (so if ThinkGeek appears on 10% of the pages of a non-subscribed user, then every tenth page-view where an ad would have been supressed has a ThinkGeek ad). Slashdot then gets the best of both worlds, and it's almost a moderation system for ads.
A Score:5 comment, perhaps a few thousand.
The value of comments is questionable.
Considering the percentage of readers who care.
Amazing... Slashdot is composed of two things, the front page, with all the spelling errors and factual mistakes, and the comments pages, with all the user submitted corrections. Now, if you take away the comments pages, you are left with the front page alone, and to me, slashdot becomes almost worthless. With the current levels of fact checking, I could never believe anything posted.
The value of comments is questionable. If the value of comments is less than the cost of transmitting pages to people, then slashdot will ultimately fail, because it will throw money away with every page served. This is true whether the cost is paid by advertising or by paypal. However, the value of the frontpage alone, is a lot less than it is allied with the comments. The value of the frontpage is almost certainly less than the cost of transmitting it.
Taco comments clearly indicate that he does not see this value. That he sees comments.pl, not as an integral and important part of slashdot, but as a burden on bandwidth and processing power. Wake up, Taco: you are not the only person with valuable content contributions to make to slashdot.
As to hemos, he comes across as a guy seriously unable to do his job. If you've ever worked with one, you know what he mean. He does not seem to be contributing at all to helping slashdot stay afloat. He doesn't have any idea of what to do, or what direction to take. Taco seems to be carrying him.
Good luck keeping slashdot going guys, but I doubt you are the people to keep it afloat. It will probably die when the .com cash runs out, maybe before if VA kills it first.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Alterslash is actualy a pretty cool site, now that I've seen it. I don't really see how you guys can go after them for the comments when you said yourself you don't have any rights to them, perhaps you should leave it up to the individual posters to take it up with that site if they have a problem with being reposted.
/.
Of course, the site does give everything the "82%" take from
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Good forum, it made me nostalgic thinking about how the 'net has grown up.
Rather than having the suits go after alterslash, wouldn't a much better outcome be to incorporate the value that is added into the site? I think its damn cool and useful, like kernel traffic and its obviously a fan site. He's not making any money.
If the suits are so uptight then just rip off what's he's doing into slashdot or have him and a few people be editors for stuff.
The logic you used is scarily like what GM and Walmart say when going after fan sites that have their trademark's in the domain name.
I don't mean to insult, but this will probably come across that way. I'm a loyal surfer and certainly appreciate Slashdot as an information source. However ...
...
:)
:)
You say that 10-12 people work on Slashdot as their job, plus support from NetOps (which I'm guessing is third party? Exodus?)
Honestly - I don't get it. What do all these people do? It seems to me that Slashdot isn't run as a business, but instead is still run by a couple of geeky types that had a Fun Idea (TM) that they rode the Dot-Com boom on and don't want to give it up.
The content is submitted by the readers, the moderation is done by the readers...
The application is worked on by the community
Stories are posted by 4 "story type people", but the posts are so frequently duplicates, have misspellings, poor grammar, broken URLs, etc - I can't really believe that anyone puts any serious time into it!
$100-$200k per year of bandwidth at 10mbps? You're getting ** raped **.
12 machines and some test boxes? C'mon. Most readers have that much in their home. Is the setup that poor that it requires that much hands on maintenance?
I'm also guessing that the geeks that founded it aren't able to admin machines, configure routers, etc... since we've all read the stories about all the people that get jerked out of bed when the site goes down.
It seems to me that Slash could run with about 3 employees, provided they had breadth of skill.
Yes, I've done all this before - including the part where you re-evaluate and realize you can do it a LOT cheaper.
Yes, I could be VERY mistaken in my observations and I welcome corrections.
I also have no beef with subscriptions. I'll even consider paying. This is just a tangent.
I'd hate to see Slashdot go away, and it seems a great way to do that would be for VA/Andover to take some serious looks at cost cutting... a lot larger companies have run with less.
Strikes me as a good way for the slash editors to keep in touch with the slash community, and vice versa. I know I'd really appreciate it.
Obviously, it would take up some of the editors' valuable time, but surely something's feasible, like a 2-hour session every week, or a 3-hour session monthly?
You block ads.
You cost us money.
Ultimately, I mean
The irony here is almost unbearable. The same crowd that swears that pirating software somehow doesn't cost record companies any lost sales ("I wouldn't have bought it anyway") is now being asked to believe that somehow blocking ads instead of paying for the non-ad version directly costs /. money.
As many others have said already, this plan is not even half-baked, let alone fully thought out. And none of the other suggestions I've seen so far will work, frankly, since they all rely on either 1) the willingness of the /. crowd to pay money voluntarily (and this is largely the crowd that killed off the Linux book market by not buying books, remember), or 2) advertisers to pay for banner and other ads, which everyone in the business knows just don't work.
I like /., really, and I would hate to see it go away, but unless someone has a major epiphany about 'net site business models, and soon, /. and a lot of other sites will either disappear completely or devolve into someone's underfunded and largely neglected hobby. That would be sad, bP>Bt's life in a capitalistic environment.
Check out this copyright myths page for the straight dope.
I've just been reading the IRC log, and I noticed a type of phrase which I have been taught to avoid uttering myself... "I think what users will want more personalized stuff. E.g. gold star based on what people ahve said me"
Some people out there might think.. what is wrong with that? Well, the answer is that this isn't reader research, or really asking the slashdot population in general what they really think. It's the same as someone without and UI design training saying.. "I know what users want, I don't need to get a UI expert in"...
I really think that slashdot ought to put together a proper web survey, not just a silly little poll and some stories where people post comments, a properly survey. Present the options, ask for peoples opinions, find out their views on ad's.. store and analyse the results. Then let make those results public so you have some facts to back up your arguments.
I like slashdot, and given the right subscription package I probably would subscribe, but please survey the readers, find out what would work the best, and present some real figures and reasons rather than the handwaving we've all had so far
If I'm going to pay to become part of a user forum, I want some say / influence over the way I pay / what I can pay for. A properly constructed survey will give you the information you need to make a decent informed choice about subscriptions, I think assuming you know what the readership want / like is a dangerous assumption to make, and if you get it wrong a large number of users will either not subscribe, or just walk away.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
4) why would i ADVERTISE on a site that allows its biggest fans to block the ads?
It doesn't make sense to me either. In fact, traditionally, the more subscribers pay to read the publication, the *more* advertisers are willing to pay for ads - because it demonstrates that the readers have purchasing power; it's the reason why newspapers charge for subscriptions, even though the revenue from subscriptions are miniscule compared to advertising revenue - because it demonstrates that the paper is being read by the "right" demographic.
Allowing subscribers to block ads is going to be counter-productive, some other way should be found to reward subscribers. Maybe like only subscribers get to read jon katz articles or something...
do people really disable the ads on slashdot? The ads on this site are so unobtrusive, the idea never even occured to me.
And furthermore, the banners on slashdot are some of the only ones that I've actually clicked through on purpose!