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The H Shuts Down

Posted by Soulskill on from the you-folks-did-good-work dept.

TexasDex writes "After years of providing great news reporting to the open source community, including interviews, great Linux kernel update summaries, and even breaking the Skype spying story well before it was leaked, The H Online is closing down due to lack of profitability. I've checked them daily for years, so it's sad to see them go."

16 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Never heard of them. by sproketboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I guess that was part of their problem. Too bad - it's a great resource.

    1. Re:Never heard of them. by TWiTfan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm pretty tech savy, and follow a ton of tech news sites, and I never heard of them either.

      I guess you can't open source marketing.

      --
      The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
    2. Re:Never heard of them. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Even if I'd seen "The H" I would not have known what it was, so a more descriptive name would have helped.

    3. Re:Never heard of them. by TWiTfan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think maybe I could make a larger point here about how many open source projects are prone to picking fucking awful names (GIMP, I'm looking in you're direction). But it would only lead to a bunch of people listing bad names of proprietary products too, I suppose.

      --
      The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
    4. Re:Never heard of them. by interval1066 · · Score: 2

      I know... another site i never heard of... not that I'm all that worldly but I check a number of online pubs and if I've not ever heard of their site perhaps there was a slight visibility problem.

      --
      Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
    5. Re:Never heard of them. by greg1104 · · Score: 2

      Publisher Heise is a popular and well regarded brand name for tech news in German. The English "The H" was trying to leverage their existing brand reputation. It didn't work out, but I can understand why they tried using that name to try. It's not as bad as the dubious reasoning behind some of the poorly chosen open source project names. (LibreOffice, I'm looking at you too)

  2. Until just now I had never heard of them by DigitalReverend · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No wonder profitability is down, you kind of have to get the word out that you exist.

    --
    I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
  3. Such a shame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The H was probably one of the best tech/security sites around.

    The writers and editors were well educated, rational and not prone to sensationalism like many others.
    There was no fanboism; just impartial, well written journalism. A real "News for Nerds" site.

    You'll be sorely missed, lads. Thanks for all the hard work.

  4. Not sure if... by agapeton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...truly shutting down or announcing a shutdown so the news will give free advertising.

  5. You should RTFA more often :) by pavon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Their stories were posted on slashdot pretty regularly, at least weekly if I had to guess. I don't know how to search slashdot just for links in articles, but a general search brings up quite a few of them.

  6. So learn German by kju · · Score: 5, Informative

    I believe that most of the stuff on H Online is also available through the newsticker of Heise (http://www.heise.de/newsticker) in German. Which should not be such a surprise considering that H Online is/was operated by Heise (their UK part in this case) as well.

    Heise is the publisher who publishes for example the well respected computer magazine c't in Germany.

    1. Re:So learn German by Lproven · · Score: 4, Informative

      It is harder than you think.

      I am a former editor of heise-online.co.uk, the site that became the H.

      I *do* speak a little German - enough to read the headlines on the internal CMS and request translations of stuff that I thought would be interesting for English-speaking readers. Then the professionally-translated copy needed to be edited by a native English speaker - such as me or one of my colleagues - and the edited version checked over by another editor (because you cannot spot your own mistakes).

      It's more labour-intensive (and thus, expensive) than you might think.

      As for the site design, it's based off the German one - it's hosted on the same servers and managed through the same CMS. German people like a rather more conservative style of Web design than we are used to on the English-language Web. :-)

      --
      Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
  7. I think I speak for many people when I say by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

    The what shut down, exactly?

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  8. in other news by slashmydots · · Score: 2

    In vaguely related new, unfortunately, the rapper D'ache (pronounced D H but not spelled as such) is still around
    http://www.reverbnation.com/dache

  9. The H was awesome by water-and-sewer · · Score: 2

    I'm seeing a lot of snarky "well, I never heard of them so ..." posts here. The fact is, the H was a source of some pretty great journalism. They're German and they had a lot of German content too. I discovered them through some insightful articles about SUSE Linux, which was (obviously) closely linked to Germany at one point.

    This week I've seen several niche news providers I like shut down, always because they find it's too hard to make money off it. I can relate - I've got a site that struggles too.

    I wonder if we're not headed to a generation of uninformed people and shitty, community-run group-think blogs straddled by a couple of old-school, pandering-to-the-masses traditional media.

    What happened to the Internet? Oh yeah, everyone decided they should be able to have things - especially information - for free.

    --
    If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
    1. Re:The H was awesome by mysticalreaper · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We need to get more creative about funding methods. What ever happened to micropayments? If you pitched in 5 cents for every article with merit that you read, would that make a difference? We must have a better idea than advertising.