Slashdot Mirror
Upcoming Changes To 'Ask Slashdot'
We're pleased to announce that changes are coming to the Ask Slashdot section. Ask Slashdot is a place to get your technical questions answered, show off your big brain by helping others, debate products and practices, and occasionally talk directly to companies about their offerings. Over the years, we've posted more than 7700 questions, on everything from workplace relations to home networking to evading censorship from unfriendly regimes. Starting tomorrow, you'll see that some Ask Slashdot questions have their own sponsors; the sponsors don't pick the questions, but experts from each sponsor will stick around for the discussion. Next up: we're making it easier for you to submit questions. Our goal is to make Ask Slashdot your "go-to" place for answers to your pressing nerd questions. So please post your questions, put on your answering hats, and come along for the ride.
My upcoming sarcastic comments aside, I actually kinda agree. Most (not all but most) ask slashdot questions have been along the lines of "I can't use google or afford a consultant, please do my job for me". This might bring some interesting discussion... as long as the "sponsors" are labeled and the questions don't become obvious marketting.
I've been here for a long time. It used to be that I would very rarely if ever read comments submitted by other Slashdotters as I was far more interested in TFA. But as time has gone on I find I am more interested in what others here have to say. Everybody has the same news stories now and it is the insights and comments from the people in this community that are the real value.
Not certain how you're planning to define "sponsors", but if you're planning to accept money from people who would like to mine this community for information I would caution you to tread carefully. You may be trying this on the wrong group of people...
Hope it boots!
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
I work for a public relations company that deals with large clients (can't say who) and I welcome this change. It should bring more interesting discussions to Slashdot. Those "omg astroturfer" guys heads are going to implode. :)
The questions is if we'll see more experts or more sales staff. I've seen some attempts at this before and the results have sounded more like a sales pitch than anything resembling a real discussion of pros and cons. Then again, many of the questions have been utterly lame in the past so I don't expect it to get much worse than it is. It's been on my "maybe" list of categories to block before, if it does then it's a checkbox away from being gone anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Right now any company can make an account and answer questions, how will the new change be different besides the financial support to slashdot. Will they be allowed moderation points? Say in which comments float to the top? Actually get to pose the questions (how awesome is adobe reader on a scale from 9-10) I would love to have specifics on this agreement as Slashdot has become a wonderful place for me to come and see unbiased information from the technical community and I would hate to see bias creep into the discussion because of this.
On the other hand, when the tech guys from those companies do come on slashdot (admitting it, i'm sure lots of them browser anyway), the bitching they get is something unbelievable.
For good example, see this story about MS open source programmers asking Slashdot's opinions on how to improve their Python IDE. It's full of hate, stupid comments and crap.
I mostly visit slashdot as an avenue for tech/science/nerd news, and an occasional giggle at flame wars. The growing trend of 'Ask Slashdot' posts I've never had a problem with; what is a problem is the growing rate of redundancy/frequency in question posts versus actual news, no one moderating the train wreck of flame wars and the shear lack of aptitude from the question poser in terms of topic worth.
'Ask Slashdot' used to be an infrequent-but-jolt-of-freshness into daily reading, now it's just being used WAY to often with poor content abandonment IMHO. I see more posts saying "Didn't we just discuss this last week?" followed by a link to a slashdot URL showing the evidence.
All cynicism aside, I'm not for it and I'm sure as hell hoping the next administrative post to slashdot isn't "We're changing our slogan to 'Slashdot: Regurgitated Tech Commentary and Questions. No News. Stuff that doesn't matter".
No, this appears (on the surface) to be another gasp at squeezing revenue from "the slashdot".
While I don't blame them for wanting to be profitable, I can just site here and think of the high level exec meetings that had subjects like "We need to find creative ways to monetize our user base" and someone said "I know! lets take 'ask slashdot' and make it a revenue opportunity...".
I suspect there was internal resistance to it, but most of that probably faded with CdrTaco leaving.
Slashdot polls have been replaced with Splunk marketing surveys, Ask Slashdot is now a vendor sponsored forum...
I give it two years before slashdot is indistinguishable from the Yahoo! main page.
Typical corporate acquisition stuff. I suspect, based on some other clues, that Geeknet is suffering from decreased revenue pressures. I suspect that ThinkGeek sales have tanked, and no one knows why (and apparently no one realized that pushing cheap, low quality crap with clever marketing at twice the sane price is not a good long term sales strategy). Sourceforge has got to be operating at a loss, and has been hemorrhaging projects as mass defections over to github and others occur.
So I think there's probably a lot of corporate pressure to make slashdot start earning more to make up for shortfalls.
We'll see more of this, it was predictable. The user base will continue to fall off, and soon we'll be getting emails ala Facebook - "We haven't seen you in a while! Do you know what you've been missing!?! Come back and be an awesome geek! Derf derf..."
Sorry if I'm coming across as too cynical here, I'm not against companies earning money. What frustrates my is the overall cluelessness of executives that think the proper path to profitability it to turn this (once great) site into McSlashdot.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
He saw the writing on the wall and got out while the getting was good
moox. for a new generation.
When are you guys going to fix the extremely broken, gamed, and unworking moderation system?
Let's face it, Slashdot moderation has severe holes in it, as analyzed over here. There are exploits with a desperate need for fixes - people with multiple accounts made solely to harvest mod points via the random lottery, the ability to go back weeks into a commenter's history to stage assault raids on their karma, and of course a moderation system that encourages people who play by the rules NOT to moderate because they're then forbidden to comment anywhere in the thread.
We know one of those clients is Microsoft; no need to be coy. We've been having interesting discussions for a while now; this appears to be "slashvertisement" which few here who are not being paid to direct the discussion would support. This is supposed to be an intelligent community-driven news site.
Slashdot editors: if you need to do a funding drive a la Wikipedia, you will find strong community support. You should be doing everything you can to promote that sense of shared community, and find ways to reward us for showing up. Nothing will kill this site faster than inviting corporate interests to the discussion; the anti-corporate bias on this site extends to you, too.
People reveal their shallow understand of history when they condemn the bombing of Hiroshima.
This is what I'm worried about as well. Slashdot is indeed the community. If the community decides as a whole that there's more marketing than it cares for, the people who make up the community will leave. Who is left? The marketers. And there's no recovering from that.
Now, here are two ways that I can see it work: clearly identify the "experts (and make no mistake, those experts will be PR-monkeys), and let us set our preferences whether we want to see the responses from the "experts". I strongly suspect that part of the deal with the sponsors is that we can't specifically downrate those experts, and they might not even be marked as a special account. Be warned that this might be the downfall of Slashdot - Digg is indeed a very good warning that people don't take kindly to have marketers try to spam genuine conversations.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The point is not the censoring, the point is the signal-to-noise ratio. And the ratio WILL drop once marketers and PR people join the conversation.
I find the evolution of the latest PR-flak kinda interesting: first he completely side-stepped the fact that he was being paid for his posts. He was the definition of an astroturfer. Now he's coming out officially, and contributing to discussions outside his PR mandate. I'm curious to see how he will continue to evolve. I have a strong suspicion that he might be a good indicator of the future of discussions:
* PR always posts first, because they're paid to do so
* PR is always on message, and posts more than any other single user (again, because they get paid for it)
* PR will drive the discussion because of the two previous points.
Whether that's good or bad is still to be seen. But I definitely think that the experts need to be uniquely identified, and we need to have the ability to ignore them.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.