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.

Comments

Interesting

[lazarus]

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!

Re:Interesting

[pecosdave]

My experience tells me /. IS the community.

The consensus on /. is what the tech industry is going to do, like it or not. We are the ones who are driving out DRM, slowly. We are the ones who made sure SCO failed. We predicted Microsoft 's decline in dominance unless they stop acting like assholes.

We predict and drive the tech sector, /. is the helm and our excellent but not completely flawless mod system keeps the GNAA from driving.

Just like everything else in the tech sector /. will be subject to the judgment of /. It will either work well or the consensus will stop it. I hope it works well, I want the folks who run the joint to make a few bucks, but if it doesn't there will be no choice but to stop or fail.

Yes, I think /. has a lot in common with Anonymous only less coordinated, a mass of individuals working separately toward the same goals motivated by the rational consensus reached here.

Re:StackOverflow competior?

[claytongulick]

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.

R.I.P. CmdrTaco

[Hadlock]

He saw the writing on the wall and got out while the getting was good

Re:What?

[NeutronCowboy]

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.