Slashdot Mirror
Dice Buys Geeknet's Media Business, Including Slashdot, In $20M Deal
wiredmikey writes with the press-release version of news that we'll probably be updating as more details trickle down to the editors: "Dice Holdings (Owner of job sites including Dice.com) reported this morning that it has acquired Geeknet's online media business, including Slashdot and SourceForge. 'We are very pleased to find a new home for our media business, providing a platform for the sites and our media teams to thrive," said Ken Langone, Chairman of Geeknet. 'With this transaction completed, we will now focus our full attention on growing ThinkGeek.' Dice Holdings acquired the business for $20 million in cash. In 2011, the online media properties generated $20 million in Revenues." The AP has a small piece with the news, too. Update: 09/18 16:16 GMT by T : Ars Technica has a story up as well.
*looks at Dice's News Page*
*looks at Slashdot*
*begins nervously wringing his hands*
My work here is dung.
As in the retail sales? That doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling for Slashdot...
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Are you telling me that Slashdot is worth less than a cheapy mp3 player full of songs? Sheesh! To Dice: if it ain't broken, don't "fix it".
I for one welcome our new Dice overlords.
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
Had to be said.
Dice Holdings is the greatest company in the universe. Be prepared for exciting articles about how Godly Dice Holdings is.
Did someone have a casino loss to pay off?
Would you explain us what'd be the future of /.?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Dice,
Please preserve the old stories and comments at their current URLs instead of running over the place with a bulldozer like the acquirers of Digg did. Many of us have hundreds of bookmarks that we don't want to see broken.
Thanks,
Everyone
I hope Dice proves to be better corporate overlords than the ones that sent CmdrTaco packing.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Og goody, now there'll be more of a drive to monetize Slashdot. That can only be good for the quality of stories posted... Right?...
Save us CmdrTaco, you're our only hope!
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
Already some discussion on this over at Hacker News.
Anyone know if Rob would want to take back control of Slashdot if we ran a Kickstarter to get it back in the hands of someone who gives a shit?
Not that I'm saying Dice will treat /. badly... but I don't have high hopes for innovation.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Dear Dice,
Take a look at the history of Digg to see what happens when you mess with a community site. You have a choice to make. If you screw it up, people will leave.
Dice Holdings has acquired the online media business of Geeknet. This includes such notable tech sites as Slashdot, SourceForge and Freecode.
The acquisition price is $20 million, which the companies say is the same amount the properties generated in revenue in 2011.
In case you're unfamiliar with the sites, Slashdot is a user-generated tech news site. You used to hear the term "slashdotted" a lot, when as site got so much traffic from the site that its servers crashed. There's actually a sizable Wikipedia entry about the "Slashdot Effect".
SourceForge is an open sources software site for developers, and Freecode is a large index of Linux, Unix and cross-platform software and mobile apps.
Slashdot gets over 5,300 comments a day and 3.7 million unique visitors per month. SourceForge gets 40 million unique monthly visitors, and about 80% of them are from outside of the United States, according to Geeknet. Freecode gets about 500,000 unique visitors per month.
"The acquisition of these premier technology sites fits squarely into our strategy of providing content and services that are important to tech professionals in their everyday work lives," said Dice Holdings Chairman, President and CEO Scot Melland. âoeThe SourceForge and Slashdot communities will enable our customers to reach millions of engaged tech professionals on a regular basis and significantly extends our company's reach into the global tech community.â
"We are very pleased to find a new home for our media business, providing a platform for the sites and our media teams to thrive," said Geeknet Chairman Ken Langone. "With this transaction completed, we will now focus our full attention on growing ThinkGeek."
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I, for one, welcome our new Dice Holdings overlords.
Is it time for a fork of Slashdot?
I for one welcome our new polyhedral overlords. May they smite our enemies with the pointyness of a d4 and bathe us in the glory of a d100
Is Dice a real company or a shell? If Dice is some sort of holding company, who controls holding interest?
Not ready to jump on any conspiracy theories just yet, but if you witness a core values shift in geeknet or geeknet properties in the coming months it might be time to make some noise.
It's important to know that open source projects are inherently "social" in that 100% of their value is their use and developer base. OSS licenses free the code from potential bad actors (OSS software cannot be bought out, purchased, or shelved). If a social site (Like Slashdot) or a project site (Like sourceforge) become tainted, the users and developers can pick up and move elsewhere.
If one day you wake up to find Slashdot's staff has been replaced and there is a new flood of posts extolling the virtues of DRM, the evils of net net neutrality, and the joys of Microsoft's easy and simple enterprise licensing - You know it's time to go elsewhere. And that's ok, because you know everyone else will be coming with you.
Its like I am a very ambivalent about this because, you know, the sun also rises to whatever crap is going to happen will happen. If /. et al is not profitable, and the owners want to take the money and run, then that is life. If /. has been taken over by radicals and corporate interests who care more about protecting revenue than having a discussion, then these are the consequences. I am pretty sure Google has a legion of employees here to protect their interests, as well as everywhere else. Have you seen the android wiki page? Total market speak, and unlike other pages, there is no one calling them on it. Can't have a discussion here on Google without getting moded down immediately. But enough of the conspiracy theories. It is just wait and see.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I honestly don't have a problem with Dice, they seem like a fine company. It's just that slashdot is the last place on the internet I still go for nerd news that isn't mostly crap. I wish it still had real humans behind it instead of a faceless corporation. *sigh*
This is still pretty new to us, but we've been looking at this as a positive thing
Hey, I mean, you'll have to forgive me if I can't discern whether you're saying that under duress or while you're busily shredding documents or while you're issuing cyanide capsules or if you're genuinely optimistic about the move. So if you have the time, I'd like to know what aspects of this make your statements genuine. As you noted with the Gawker thing, I get a little uptight about my small little things being bought up and consumed by bigger fish. The bigger the fish that eats you up, the more layers of direction come down upon you. People complain about comments being un-editable and static but I love that. It makes this feel permanent, it allows me to verbally pin people down, etc. But if Executive A five layers removed from you decides it needs to be his way, what are you gonna do? On top of that, how would you have handled the Microsoft source code and Scientology spats if there was someone with money looming over you reminding you of the stakes and telling you to back down?
-- we were worried earlier that if we were rolled into a business that focused entirely on news, we'd be expected to conform to company standards -- see the Gawker sites, for example.
Okay, fair enough. However, I know very little about Dice. And to counter your argument, an advertising company bought MySpace which used to be a social networking site. And now, surprise surprise, it's more ads than user created spaces. You can argue that MySpace was dead already. You can argue that some change had to be made. But I want to know why you feel safe to pick this out to be a plus and not a minus for my overall Slashdot addiction. How do I know Slashdot isn't going to become a vector tool to get eyeballs over to Dice's bread and butter jobs site?
If you have doubts or genuine concern, I'm not asking you to be the turkey with the long neck when farmer Dice comes around looking for his first meal so feel free to reply as Anonymous Coward. I mean, I'm not talking about my employer on web forums so I understand but your arguments should stand on their own -- sans Slashdot icon.
My work here is dung.
10 ) Consolidates Slashdot and Thinkgeek into ThinkSlash, you can moderate items but you also get promoted product placements under every +5 post.
9 ) Last answer on polls now always "Man I could use a new job".
8 ) All posts with word "Monster" auto-modded to -1.
7 ) User profile now includes mandatory job history and expertise fields.
6 ) Tired of too many Apple stories? Too bad.
5 ) Freed of need to bring in ad revenue because of Dicean sugar daddy, Slashdot now works full time on original goal - Cowboy Neal as first man on Mars.
4 ) Anyone with a five digit UID or lower gets to be a bit player in the next Dice.com SuperBowl commercial.
3 ) Troll posts now forwarded to employer to free up jobs for more highly moderated users.
2 ) Big plans for edgier SlashDot after future additional purchase of SuicideGirls.com
1) JOBS FOR EVERYONE!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The recent takeover of Digg killed what what was left of it stone dead. On the other hand, Reddit's corporate parents leave it well alone and it has prospered. There is a lesson to be learned there.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
SlashDot, ThinkGeek, AND SourceForge? Man, that's about 1/2 my normal browsing. I agree trying to change stuff will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But I've seen a lot of dead geese in my time.
Why is it only AC's that bother to post that they are leaving?
No one knew you were here before, and they don't give a shit that you aren't here now.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
coming soon (except for those reserved by editors, of course)
woof.
According to http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=697536. Group Revenue for 2012-Q2 is $23.1M.
Is the summary about your own company wrong?
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Is going to hit 1000 comments no problem.
sudo make me a sandwich
This post was removed due to Dice content standards violations.
This site jumped the shark when it was renamed Slashdot from Dips and Chips :P
I for one welcome our new corporate overlords.
Now can I get a job?
Tired of too many Apple stories? Too bad.
At least some things never change.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
After checking out news.dice.com, my guess is that they'll keep /. more or less the same, but add a list of related jobs to each news thread.
Seeing this story makes me think about SourceForge. That used to be a thing. Today it is no longer hip. It seems like GitHub is now the go-to location that SourceForge used to be.
It strikes me that GitHub is to SourceForge as Google is to Yahoo. SourceForge deserves some respect for coming first, but the experience is "heavy", less modern. Pages are full of images and ads and visual distraction. Page loads are generally slow from all that content. GitHub did to source code hosting what Google did to search interfaces in the 90s: they trimmed the fat. It has a very light feel and footprint. It doesn't get between you and the code. It has different ideas and goals about how to make money, which do not compromise the experience.
I guess GitHub had the benefit of coming later, thus not having all the baggage of what is now 2 decades of hosting projects. Still, seems like a missed opportunity for SourceForge.
My first thought was "What does Digital Illusions CE ( http://www.dice.se/ of Battlefield 3 fame) want with slashdot?".
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
Oh I'm sure: the days of Slashdot are still numbered. (FTFY).
This site died the first time it was sold. I go back to the year 1998 and I can tell you that Slashdot lost its "mojo" (or "jumped the shark" to use one of slashdot's old memes), a LONG time ago. Just the addition of the face***k link was proof of that.
Like everything on the Interwebs, /. is here today, gone yesterday.
I mean, remember when Oracle acquired Java from Sun? That was awesome, right? I mean, I'm sure that Dice is buying Slashdot and SourceForge out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than trying to turn them into profit-making machines. Right?
...right guys?
God doesn't play with Dice.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
but the remote sites still aren't showing April 1
WTH?
dreaded scurrilous bit-twiddler from Oklahoma
I'm not totally sure what it means to sell them for 1 year's revenue
Buyouts and mergers are typically done as a multiple of some portion of the earnings or revenue of the company. It's a quick and dirty way to estimate the value of a company without doing a lot of math. Typical multiples for companies are between 0.8-1.2X annual revenue or 3-5X annual EBITDA (earnings before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortization). The multiple is usually adjusted up or down depending on the prospects of the company, the industry it is in as well as the economic climate. Software companies might command a higher multiple than a bricks & mortar retailer. Comparing buyout multiples to historic trends is a good way to identify bubbles as well as gauge the economic climate.
A multiple of 1X annual revenue is a fairly typical price to pay for a company. Doesn't necessarily mean it is a good price but it is about what I would expect someone to pay. In short, I wouldn't read too much into the price paid.
Patty cake, patty cake
Baker's man
If your chick's on her period
Fuck her in the can
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I use adblockPlusPlus.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Are we missing something? I'd love to buy an entrenched business for one year's worth of revenue...even if revenues were slowly declining.
Actually that's a fairly typical price for a buyout. Most buyouts are done as a percentage of revenue or EBITDA. Revenue multiples of around 1X annual earnings is a pretty typical price for a firm though it varies by industry, prospects and economic climate. Typical revenue multiples for any buyout is 0.8X-1.2X annual revenue or 3-5X EBITDA.
Remember that if you buy a company for its annual revenue, eventually you have to make that money back. If the profit of the company is say 10% of revenue it will take 10 years to recoup the investment.
I would presume that they would have had to pay more to get the geeknet holdings without slashdot.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
the folks from Dice were very clear about not wanting to interfere with the community.
This is exactly the thing I would expect a new owner who sincerely believed in leaving a good thing alone to say.
This is also exactly the thing I would expect a new owner who had other plans to say.
Only time, not words of reassurance, will reveal Slashdot's future.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
To Dice: if it ain't broken, don't "fix it".
That has never been the motto here. Why would it take hold now?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Digg v4.0 was a disaster. But the new Digg is better than the old site, which was being utterly overrun by sock-puppets and people gaming front page runs.
When they dropped comments NOTHING of value was lost.
I actually read digg.com more often than I used to because the new system works better at ferreting out interesting stories.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
just remember Dice: if it ain't broken, don't try to fix it
If a media center made 20 million over the last year, (and presumably similar figures the previous 2 years) then it should have sold for no less then 60 million. Someone needed the cash!
welcome our tumbly, six-sided overlords.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
So now we can expect the top stories posted on Slashdot to be recruiter spam?
On the flip side, perhaps this'll be the death knell for SlashBI.
I use Adblock#
Honestly, if the real core of Slashdot still existed, they could fork and probably retain 50% of the membership. I'm betting they all have "non compete" clauses that were attached to a hefty payout though....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Thank god. I thought for sure this list would have a goatse joke.
Anyone with a five digit UID or lower gets to be a bit player in the next Dice.com SuperBowl commercial.
... And there it is
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Now when we look for a job they can link our Sourceforge contributions to our resumes! That should be good.
They won't link our Slashdot IDs to our Dice account... Here come 10 years of batshit crazy comments back to bite you!
Back in my day, sonny, ads came in two flavors, the tall kind that looked like this: 1
and the round kind that looked like this: 0
If we wanted to block our ads we had to do it manually, with tall ad-blockers to block the tall ads and round ad-blockers to block the round ads.
Oh, and we had to keep track of our ad-blockers too. We didn't have any of this newfangled ad-collection that you have with your newfangled "managed" ad-blockers.
From the news piece on TechCrunch:
"Dice has been talking about building content and user engagement to be top of mind and more integral to professionals doing work, and if you think about SourceForge and Slashdot, it’s about user engagement to help you do your job... We don’t want to change the experience today. What will happen over time is that the Dice.com site is will operate more seamlessly connected to these sites. But the sites themselves will keep their look and feel and will run on their own... That absolutely includes editorial independence. We think that’s really key. We don’t profess to add much from an editorial standpoint. We will give the user bases on our sites and those the ability to interact with each other. Our goal here is to make them part of the overall tech and engineering experience at the company."
Translation: 'We are Borg. You will be assimilated.'
Damn. I'm gonna miss this place.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
1) Buy Geeknet
2) ? ? ?
3) Profit!
Now I am curious to learn about phase two...
Something sounds very wrong with those numbers. The ratio I usually hear of company sale price to earnings is on the order of 5 or 6 to 1. If said properties had $20m in revenue, the sale price for them should be over $100m
Earnings and Revenue are not the same. Revenue is basically just the gross income (with some adjustments). Earnings are net, meaning revenue minus expenses. In services (rather than products) industries, a sales price equal to the annual revenue is quite typical.
Wait ... I thought Dice was a C compiler for DragonFly BSD. No?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
In the world of the internet I keep hearing of deals that go in to the bazillions for companies that I have never heard of. So 20M for a collection of products that are pretty central to the whole online thing is just odd. Any explanation as to the low price?
I don't see any kind of integration beneficial to Slashdot readers. Warts and all, we are a community and any "integration" is an attempt to turn us into a commodity.
Wait.. WHAT??? NO!!! I can't live without my slashdot! WTF?!?!? Does this mean slashdot is on death row??
...that God will no longer play with us?
OK, lots of suggestions about what could go wrong. How about making some suggestions about how the /. community could benefit from what Dice has to offer?
I don't know much about Dice other than it's a jobs site a la Monster. So maybe Dice wants to pursue the LinkedIn model from the other side? In other words, if you look at what LinkedIn has been doing, they started with a social platform and now they're making hard ties to job search sites and even promoting their own job boards.
What if Dice is starting with the job boards and bolting on the community? In that case, the community is where the real value is. /. should be able to get something out of this deal... What do we want from a job board?
Personally, I want options. My job doesn't suck hard at the moment, but I've been burned in the past and have learned to adopt a mercenary perspective. What have you done for me lately, Dice?
(Time to dig out this classic)
A long, long time ago \ I can still remember \ How the trollers used to make me smile \ And I knew if I had to boast \ That I could try to get first post \ And maybe I'd be happy for a while
But moderators made me shiver \ With every minus they'd deliver \ DoS scripts couldn't stop it \ They scored them all "Offtopic" \ I know that it's cheap crack they smoke \ And meta-moderation's broke \ At first I thought it was a joke \ The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy
Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh*
Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie
Wonder what became of girls petrified?
What became of girls petrified?
--
Did you write a bunch of Perl? \ And did it make you want to hurl \ Feces at the Wall? \ Can you believe these lame-ass polls? \ Do you post big stretched-out assholes? \ Can you make the goatse.cx link not show? \ Well I know you think that Siggy sucked \ Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?
The bots don't have a clue. \ Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe! \ I was a rabid Free Speech advocate \ With a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut \ Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut \ The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
It's been two years since the IPO \ And LNUX sinks to all-time lows \ But that's not how it used to be \ When Spiral showed how it was done \ Trolling as Jon Erikson \ Who worked for NPO Technologies \ Oh and while they tried to filter posts \ Somebody rooted Slashdot's host
"Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!" \ Better go change your password \ While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book \ By using posts he simply took \ And we flamed him till he was cooked \ The day that trolltalk died \ And we were singin....
-- Chorus --
10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out. Goddamn \ The mods will find the sid real soon, man \ You can't hide if you aren't AC \ Your bud (George here) tried BSD \ A dead Streetlawyer's tips were free \ And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi \ 70 made his percents up \ While 80md warned "liberals suck"
The moon does not exist \ It's just a liberal myth \ Oh and as Taco tried to take a nap \ We forced him to invoke bitchslaps \ Do you recall the flood of crap \ The day that trolltalk died? \ We started singin....
-- Chorus --
Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base" \ And started posting monospace \ The better for our penis birds \ So come on, be a zealot, be a dick \ You don't think Anne Marie's a chick? \ Because lying's all we do about HURD
So go and push for BSD \ And say GPL isn't free \ Slow down, cowboy! The limit \ Is one post every minute \ Now tell the right wing facist slime \ Infringing on Your Rights Online \ That they can't censor all the time \ The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
I met a troll they called The Rev \ And asked him if CD BREAK HEAD \ He said, "That's old. Get over it." \ And with all the courage I could muster \ "Imagine what a Beowulf cluster...." \ But it wasn't worth the trouble to submit \ The karma caps are just plain jive \ And everyone's moved to K5
The steelcage has grown rusted \ And Geekizoid is busted \ The three sites I don't see for weeks \ Segfault, kernel, Comp-u-geek \ Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat \ The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20351&cid=2172299
of the new boss. His first name is Andrew. Be afraid; be very, very afraid.
I'm too lazy to sign in man. That's why. I have better things to do such as eating tacos on my lunch break.
hopefully they'll bring back the good ol' days when ACs could post as much as they want (with a 2 minute limit between posts). the current limit of ten posts a day does not make me want to make an account it just makes me visit the site much much less. i used to waste hours on here back in the day but now that there's all these post limits and the wacky way the comments work with that dhtml or javascript or whatever the fuck that bullshit is that is constantly busted ... uggh. make slashdot not frustrating again and it might be worth something.
Why is it only AC's that bother to post that they are leaving?
No one knew you were here before, and they don't give a shit that you aren't here now.
He didn't even leave, he posted again, two posts down. In fact, he is the most prolific poster on this thread.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. -- Maek Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
I was wondering this too. Either $20 million was somehow a loss for the company in yearly revenue, or something is rather fishy with this sale.
That said, this is the wrong place to make an adboard, Everyone here knows far too much about ad blocking techniques for Dice to make any revenue from it unless they start serving from the slashdot domains....and even then we'll just kill scripts and ignore the huge white spaces.
Great timing! You couldn't have picked a better month to introduce a technical niche community to a wider audience.
I am rather impressed by the valuation of such a sale. Once upon a time in a different decade, even a different millennium, Slashdot was useful and informative. These days I only come here for the Jokes....err I mean, the "articles". Slashdot died (sometime around 2004) and went to some weird purgatory where it has existed in limbo and hoovering just about /b/ ever since.
Jobs for some, tinny Anonymous flags for others.
– Limited revisions, with history. Correcting grammar or spelling mistakes would be nice, but posters can't be allowed to game the conversation. Do something novel like enforcing a maximum hamming distance.
– Mobile site; slashdot has not adapted to portable screens and touch.
– Do Not Remove Anonymous Posting. Auto-mod it into the basement, whatever, but there is an element of mod-point armed group-think around here that needs to be countered.
– Faster accept/reject of story submissions... it takes days sometimes.
– Moderation fix: only early replies are likely to get moderated. Mixing in new replies with the early replies might help, particularly if they are from those with worthy karma.
– Interviews and Q&A with significant people in OSS.
– Fix the paid subscribers feature. Either remove it or give it a reason to exist.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Anyone know if Rob would want to take back control of Slashdot...
So what you're saying is, you haven't seen enough Bitcoin articles lately?
This is just Dice's response to it's quickly eroding market share in the online job listing market. LinkedIn [http://www.linkedin.com] has hammered them lately. There was a time in the past when Dice dominated everything. It eclipsed the previous job site, Monster.com [http://www.monster.com], and quickly grew to an industry leader. I landed many jobs from Dice.com between the years 2000 and 2007. I've noticed lately, however, that there has been a dramatic swing. Ask anyone who hasn't been working before 2005 about what job board they use and they will most likely answer LinkedIn. It's all about the social media aspect now and LinkedIn does that well.
Dice is probably looking at ways to integrate the different platforms into a job search and work sharing platform. The fact that they acquired SourceForge hints at their desire for some kind of collaboration and sharing/publishing of artifacts. That's what is so scary about the Slashdot acquisition. Are they planning on folding it into a new business model? If that's the case then you can say goodbye to Slashdot in it's current incarnation. I don't have figures, but I would be willing to bet that Slashdot is not that great of a money maker. Why it's still around, who knows, but don't expect Dice.com to shell money out for something and then not turn around and try to monetize it.
11. Each /. post has a video of Cat Miller reading TFA verbatim
... yeah, what ever.
a more important question:
will dice provide slashdot with an ipv6 address or not?
Buy all your Geek and Sundry Items here at Slashdot where our Mascot "Dot" Slashes prices on all online prices!
tons of ads that will never get seen cause people use adblock plugin
owners will beg users not to run adblock so they can make money
sales will drop
slashdot store dies and is redirected to thinkgeek or dice.com
that's probably how it will go.
I've seen dozen sites shut down over adblock, heck there is a stupid online critic review site that is slowly shutting down cause they beg users not to run adblock so they can get paid and people still use adblock me included.
Any one of those properties was worth more than $20M alone. Somebody just gave them away.
Consider the Conde Nast experiment with Reddit which appears to be working out so far, five years later.
Now THAT was funny!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On the flip side, perhaps this'll be the death knell for SlashBI.
"...ding dong the witch is dead the witch is dead the witch is dead ding dong the wicked witch is dead.."
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Like all social media slashdot.ORG should be a property of the community not a some corp looking to gain profit.
I would imagine user data and post histories could be mined in the process of targeting job posts?
Wow! The Dice news people are VERY poor at choosing news and formatting it and writing about it.
It may be the end of Slashdot. It's amazing that such ignorant people have $20 million.
Nothing here is more broken than that.
Although... the inability of registered users to post more than a few anon comments in a row could really use a fix, too.
And we need the ability to undo bad mods -- that whole "destroy all your mods to fix one mistake" is crap.
It's not looking good for sourceforge right now. They have monumentally failed with moving projects from the old style interface to the new one. On the surface, everything looks ok and shiny, but once you begin the process of moving a project over, you find you hit a total dork wall of fatal errors, leaving your project in limbo. It's undocumented chaos. See here:
> Forking/cloning repo code in project rosegarden from
> file:///nfs/classic/sf-svn/r/ro/rosegarden failed. The SourceForge
> engineering team has been notified.
TechTV Or is that two words? Yeah, call me jaded, but every time I hear "we bought X and we'll keep X running the same way forever!", I know it means "we'll merge the product and slowly kill it off as we take the few pieces we do like and roll it into our own product." And yes, I choose this to be my first post on Slashdot. Despite being registered for a while, and even lurking since 2000 (not a typo) before that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some old DVD's of the Screensavers I want to re-watch as I archive old Slashdot threads...
In soviet russia. Dice rolls you.
I expect sourceforge to be gone in 6 months.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeah, pretty much.
Yeah, right.
The Gamefly guys did a bang up job when they flipped the switch on Shacknews after the buyout. That had to be one of the most atrocious changes I've seen. I haven't been back to see if they've changed anything back. One comment thread per story? Who thought that was a good idea.
Make Your Time.
I for one welcome our new Job Providing Overlords.
Oh, but if they ever do, one of y'all will catch it, do the necessary screen shots, and it will spread like wildfire.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Good, this far down someone besides me finally noticed that too. "Bought a site for 1 year's worth of revenue, and the rest is free cash"?!
That's either a typical Slashdot factual error, or something dear-gawd scary just showed up.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Agreed .. which is why I said they won't announce it rather than claiming that nobody will ever know about it.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I've largely lurked for the past 15 years but /. is the first site I've visited each day for my entire adult life. This is a sad day for me and for all slashdotters. If they try any unified login bullshit or site enhancements I will die.
Good effort, but I'm gonna trade a month's worth of mod points on this one.
You mean well, but they are absolutely going to interfere. Now, maybe they hope their interference will balance out plus-and-minus to a net of zero, but if everything was crispy, they wouldn't have bought it.
So the question is what do they interfere with and how much. We're burned by now, burned badly. There's been a lot of cheap attempts at "monetizing" going on. An existing company doesn't sell a cash cow, and a new company doesn't buy a cash-sink. So something's gotta give and like always, the "Higher Ups" don't want to tell us.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
good luck to you guys.
I for one welcome our new 6 sided overloads... ... they have 12 sides you insensitive clod.
1) JOBS FOR EVERYONE!
I have sad news for you: Jobs is dead!
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
that while Slashdot has covered 15 years of change in the online and computing world, change here seems... different. eh well, it'll all be Facebook in 3... 2... 1.... /6 digit slashnumber, seen enough changes already
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Bye bye happiness. Hello....what, what is left!!! Hellooooo loneliness.
Have some old Slashdot pages bookmarked? The time to archive and mirror them is NOW! Sure, for years you may have been able to Google ancient Slashdot pages and sift through cool comments preserved so well throughout the years, but like many other sites, you cannot trust archive.org to have mirrored everything - or sometimes anything at all!
Archive & Mirror NOW, before it's gone.
Then he wont mind being divided up...
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
For a start, it'll be a lot easier to post jobs.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's probably some scope for innovation - the codebase could probably do with a security audit or three, and/or a complete rewrite in a more intelligible language (Brainfuck, perhaps) or something respectable and powerful (AspectC++ or D would be the obvious choices there, you can then have it as a SOAP application rather than use the increasingly slow Apache server).
We also need more pink ponies. And cowbells. There is a distinct lack of pink ponies and cowbells.
As far as invention is concerned, there needs to be a complete rethink of the metamoderation idea (nobody uses it any more) and the firehose (which nobody ever used to begin with). Moderation abuse is commonplace, with trolls openly posting how they're abusing moderation to attack views contrary to their own and push agendas, so we need SOME sort of metamoderation, but clearly it needs to be a lot more effective or it's going to sit and rot like the existing system. The firehose, again, is overwhelmingly ignored. Users aren't using it to pre-screen stories for typos (and editors ignore the advice if they do), nor are they using it to encourage the sorts of stories wanted (with the result that those same users then whine about there never being any good stories). We need a replacement that people WANT to use.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why do I think this shirt will suddenly disappear from ThinkGeek's listings: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/9d0b/
Also, this: http://www.dorktower.com/2012/08/14/your-dice-dork-tower-14-08-12/
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"Anyone with a five digit UID or lower gets to be a bit player in the next Dice.com SuperBowl commercial."
At what level of compensation. I suggest we bargain collectively.