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

And I was worried

[Anrego]

I feel silly for getting concerned when that pulse stuff started showing up in the sidebar. Clearly things are heading in a good direction :)

For the first question I’d like to know how my organization can best leverage Oracle’s EJB technology to obtain the rapid and simplified development of distributed, transactional, secure and portable applications that we are looking for in our growing business.

Re:And I was worried

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Jesus; I got Bingo just reading the question.

Re:And I was worried

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd best start synergizing as soon as possible or your cloud initiative will fail to leverage your business intelligence paradigm and we all know what happens then,

But, whatever you do, don't panic. Oracle professional services, in conjunction with the talent acquired in the Sun buyout, is standing by and ready to address your every business need.

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[Anonymous Coward]

So this is slashdot bowing to its corporate overlords, then? How long have you been working to slip that one through, eh?

My question....

[buanzo]

.... Will it blend?

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[Anrego]

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.

StackOverflow competior?

[bigsexyjoe]

Slashdot, are you saying that you are trying to emulate the functions of StackOverflow?
What's the deal with the sponsors? Are you saying Oracle (for example) is going to have some expert answer common Java questions in a slashvertisement/tech support type thing?

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.

Re:StackOverflow competior?

[claytongulick]

Sorry to reply to myself, but I'm a big believer in not bitching about a problem without offering a solution.

Slashdot corporate overlords, if you're browsing these posts for reactions to the change, here's a suggestion: consider the metafilter business model.

Put a slashdot poll up and ask the users if they'd be willing to pay $5 per year to get rid of all the ads, and eliminate 90% of the trolls (most trolls aren't willing to pay to troll).

Make karma mean something - those with excellent or above karma get a discounted (or free) rate. Same way we can turn off Ads now.

I know that I, for one, would jump at the chance to help fund slashdot, and to help make it great again.

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:Interesting

[olau]

You drive the tech sector? The same idiots who said the iPhone and iPad would fail?

They will. We have just not gotten to that point yet. :-P

Re:December 7, 1941

[Nick Fel]

And 70 years later we have sponsors on Slashdot. Did we really win the war? Did we?

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[Kjella]

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.

Serious Questions

[Troke]

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.

Re:Serious Questions

[PerlJedi]

The sponsor will not be given any special treatment with regards to comment score and moderation. The "expert" the sponsor will be providing to take part in the conversation will have an account which is "badged", meaning that it will be visually apparent when the a comment was posted by the sponsor. Beyond the visual treatment that will make clear which comments are made by a representative of the sponsor, they will have no special power. They will not be able to hide comments they don't like, or highlight those they do.

We want to offer a sponsor the chance to have a serious conversation with our audience, but we are not going to be giving them a soap box to stand on. If they want to engage with our audience, they will need to understand that means taking the good with the bad.

Re:Serious Questions

[gallondr00nk]

The sponsor will not be given any special treatment with regards to comment score and moderation. The "expert" the sponsor will be providing to take part in the conversation will have an account which is "badged", meaning that it will be visually apparent when the a comment was posted by the sponsor.

So essentially the sponsor's representative can be modded up or down in the same way as anyone else? I can't see that going down well in companies without a sense of humour.

We want to offer a sponsor the chance to have a serious conversation with our audience, but we are not going to be giving them a soap box to stand on. If they want to engage with our audience, they will need to understand that means taking the good with the bad.

Any takers so far? I imagine with the myriad of publicity options available today many companies are not going to want to get involved in a direct, uncensored discussion with a fairly informed audience like /.. I'd be inclined to admire any that do, especially if they can actually talk some sense, but I can't see many relishing a challenge like that.

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[InsightIn140Bytes]

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.

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[masternerdguy]

I want to ask slashdot what kind of clothes I should wear.

Better change the slogan soon then!

[adosch]

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".

R.I.P. CmdrTaco

[Hadlock]

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

Does this mean the Apple turfers will be labeled?

[pecosdave]

They weren't hard to identify anyways, but an official label on those accounts would help.

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[mwvdlee]

"Dear Slashdot readers, Why does Linux suck so much?"
(sponsored by Microsoft).

DIGG exodus: Now in Slasdot Flavour

[denis-The-menace]

What I worry about is how much manipulation these sponsors will demand.
About a year ago, Digg.com did the same and re worked the site.
The sponsors started to control content and people noticed.
Within 4 months, most users left for another site.

Now, Digg is a shadow of its former self and is spammed regularly.
Comments are few and hollow a-la "I agree" or "me too".
Content is still controlled to this day.

IOW: Digg is now a Web 2.0 billboard.

I don't want a repeat.

Re:DIGG exodus: Now in Slasdot Flavour

[NeutronCowboy]

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.

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[GameboyRMH]

Yes, and does anyone know where I can get cheap replica handbags?

Uh-oh

[T Murphy]

Meta posts worry me. I'm always afraid we might manage to slashdot slashdot.

Re:Here's my major question:

[nitehawk214]

When are you guys going to fix the extremely broken, gamed, and unworking moderation system?

You got modded down. Looks like the moderation system works to me!

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[mcgrew]

I have a Nike T-shirt (St Louis Cardinals logo on it). Paid seventy five cents for it at a garage sale five years ago.

Anyone who pays full price for fashion is no nerd. In fact, if you care about fashion at all you probably aren't a nerd. If you just want to meet women, ask women what to wear.

This advice comes from personal experience. After my divorce I couldn't get as much as a dinner date for 3 years, until one night in a bar a woman suggested I cut my beard into a goatee. So I did an informal survey of women 18 to eighty seven, and seventeen of eighteen respondants said "goatee" (the eighteenth was standing next to her boyfriend, who was wearing a full beard).

The dry spell ended almost immediately. I guess women don't like the RMS look.

I'm Skeptical Of The Usefulness

[assertation]

I've been reading slashdot for over a decade. I haven't once gotten a post published. I've posted good and relevant stories only to see them reject without an explanation ( hint to admins: this really pisses people off and makes it harder to get volunteers ).

I'm skeptical of how useful "ask slashdot" is for that reason. I never bothered to try it out. Why should I take the time to type out a worthy technical question if I don't even know if it will be published?

The interface takes some getting used to, but I have found the current best place for technical questions is stackoverlow.com.

It is like Usenet, but without the cranky people with no lives looking to slam people.

I've learned a lot there.

Re:I'm Skeptical Of The Usefulness

[assertation]

BTW http://meta.superuser.com/ has a similar interface to stackoverflow and is very helpful too.

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[dotancohen]

The questions is if we'll see more experts or more sales staff.

Most experts in IT fields already know to hang around StackOverflow for helping others, and getting help as well. The sales staff have been poking at everything from Slashdot to Faceschmuck to Digg for years, never getting quite as well established. So, which group is on the lookout for new fora? Which company recently bought /. and what is their goal?

Not that I see this necessarily as a bad thing. For precedent, see the vendor forums on Geekhack.org. Very productive for both the consumer and the vendor, so long as it is properly labeled.

Re: Distinguishing difference here

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, time to cash in some of my karma.

1. Who are you "PerlJedi (2406408) who works for Slashdot" and what is your expertise since you are a brand new hire?

2. I am noticing the quotes on "Expert". Either the people really will be experts, or else they'll be Astroturfing "Experts" in quotes. That is, unless your grammar just sux and you put gratuitous quotes which then accidentally totally flipped your meaning.

3. I bet no one cross-referenced which of these ... "Experts" are currently also Slashdot users - I bet new ones in that ominous 2400000 range. As users they get Mod points? Who will be watching what they do with those?

4. Companies don't care about "being made a fool of" with the top 25% if the Astroturfing raises sales with the newer 75% userbase. Sure, some companies will provide a legit expert, but we're watching like a hawk. Slashdot has seen our comments on editorial quality. We've made fools of you for years. Not like it really helped. (Probably some, far from enough.)

Bonus: Since y'all want to make changes, get a grip and allow editing of posts. Do like other forums do and tag it "this post was modified ...". Then we won't get 7 bad entries harping on spelling that totally derails the conversation. Put a time limit on it like 72 hours.

Re:I for one welcome this change with open hands

[NeutronCowboy]

I'm glad you at least copped to the fact that you're a PR monkey who takes orders from MS. Makes your posts on Google and MS topics no more valuable, but at least it now comes with the equivalent of a "Sponsored by MS" tag.

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.