Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Tries Something New; Audience Responds!
We've had only a few major redesigns since 1997; we think it's time for another. But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look. So let's all slow down. Right now, we're directing 25 percent of non-logged-in users to the beta; it's a significant number, but it's the best way for us to test drive this new design, to have you show us what pieces need to be fixed, and how. If you want to move back to Classic Slashdot, that path is available: from the Slashdot Beta page, you just need to select the "Slashdot Classic" link from the footer (or this link). We're committed to keep you informed of the plans as changes are implemented; we can't
promise that every user will like every change, but we don't want anything to come as a surprise. Most
importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that
the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready. We have work to do on four big areas:
feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and
headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about
the How and the Why of this process. Some of you have suggested we're not listening; on the contrary,
some of us are 'listening' pretty much full-time. We're keeping you informed of this process, because
we're a community and we want to take everyone with us. But, yes, we're trying something new. Why?
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on
a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time,
more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. We want to give our current audience the space
where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views
of both comments and stories. It's not an either/or. It's going to be both. If we haven't communicated
that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that. And in the meantime, we're not sorry
to have received a flood of feedback, most of it specific, constructive and substantive. Please keep it coming. We will be adding more specific info here in the days to come.
Why say anything it isn't like you are going to listen or act on our concerns.
Slashdot BETA Sucks.
Your post here is a steaming pile because you know "Timothy" that You folks have absolutely NO intention of backing away from the new un-needed and useless "design" for the sake of "design" design. "Web Designers" and marketers have a lot in common, they want to foist "pretty" shit that serves no real benefit.
Hopfully Bruce Perens will reserect his Slashdot alternative that failed when Slashdot didn't SUCK as much as it does now.
Join the boycott 10-17 February!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Thank you for acknowledging us. I'd like to see a new SlashDot that's even better than the old. Please let us help you define it.
And you can all thank me for sending my feedback in as this appeared shortly thereafter. And I am kidding of course, just a coincidence. Hopefully this isn't just lip service as so often the case in these situations. Sorry for the skepticism. But this is a good response finally by the people behind the current slashdot.
I don't think you have understood. We don't want you to slow down. We want you to stop; reverse; appologise for being so out of touch with your user base; and promise to never do anything so stupid again.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
How do I check it out? Anyone got a link, or care to comment on if its any good or not?
you give us a classic page for good option and you can do what you want.
It seems to me that the one unifying opinion of those critical of the changes is that *no changes are necessary*. So, clearly this is NOT something that is meant to benefit the users - it's more likely part of some monetization plan.
Just admit it and move on - stop blowing smoke up our asses like our opinion actually matters. Maybe it did once, but that hasn't been the case for quite a while now.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Please detail what you think you are changing other than UI. We're technical people and we don't like change for the sake of change, or, even worse, aesthetics only.
Every site that has gone beta (read YAHOO) has become worse (not better). Eventually, we are forced to upgrade to a slower, crappy, bloated site with evermore javascript!!! THANKS -- BUT NOT THANKS!
... If classic slashdot goes away then I will stop visiting slashdot. Partly out of the way this has been handled, but partly because "beta" slashdot doesn't work properly without javascript.
If you don't support people who don't wish to have needless code execution on their machine - then I am not visiting. Simple.
No need to fix that which is not broken - new is not necessarily better. Remember "New" Coke?
It's been interesting and fun since 1999, but now it's not even amusing.
Last post.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable.
This is the fundamental problem between how the corporate overlords think and how the community thinks. Until this difference is resolved you will get the continual complaints and the eventual mass exodus. We are a community. We are not an audience.
I submit stories. I read stories. I add comments. I moderate comments. I am the reason that there is ad revenue.
I am Slashdot.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Well I guess on the bright side when Digg did that, their infrastructure costs could have gone way down as they lost most of their users and layed off 37% of their staff.
Ah well it wouldn't be the internet without people bitching about what appears, to me at least, be a relatively minor website redesign (uh a bigger font and more white space basically?) of a site that's pretty much just a sequential listing of stories with links and comments anyway.
Okay, they've said they're applying the brakes so don't attack then for doing what you want.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I don't get it. Why change it at all? Sure it could be better, but change for change sake doesn't make a lot of sense.
Subject is rule #1.
Don't put anything in the way of that.
"Shareable by a wider audience" is too vague. What is difficult with the current design?
I want the classic to be the _default_. A lot of the time I read from computers that are not my own and don't trust, so don't login. I don't want to search for a link hidden in the footer to make the site readable.
FUCK BETA! and FUCK TIMOTHY for not having any line breaks, guess the white space was all used up on the FUCK BETA site.
Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready.
Why are you so inflexible on the idea of keeping classic slashdot *forever*. Think of it as a protected historical landmark in the internet space. To help future generations understand where this 'blogging' thing really came from? Computers are good like that, keep classic.slashdot.org FOREVER and your audience^H^H^H CONTRIBUTORS might stop rallying against you.
I got redirected once. Was once too often. For some reason the current process seems to think that content comes last, and fancy headers, deasign and pages mean more. They don't. The beta page wasted a ton of space, showed me less content, was less clear and more invasive. I did not like it, did not enjoy it.
Why is it somehow we have ended up with people who are making things like Slashdot beta, Microsoft Metro, the new IOS, Gnome. A bunch of people who came out of the worst design schools ever? A bad decade at the schools? We just got unlucky?
I like slashdot, and have been around for a long time. But I'm not your damn plaything. Mess with the site, content and my usage - be warned, I can go away. So can others.
We`re all equal
We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process
Those are exactly the problems I care about. Mainly information density; I want to see the same amount of information on the screen as I did before. Or at least 75%. It's more like 25% right now. Anyway, I'm glad someone is paying attention.
It would have been nice to hear this earlier though. Maybe you do have people *listening* to the complaints, but it would be nice if someone *responded* to them, and in a human manner.
It is nice that you speak about what YOU want. However, in the scheme of things, what you want is diametrically opposed to the community you claim to cherish. The appeal of Slashdot is the pedantry, the technical nature of things, and the overall level of the discussion. If I want to interact with a "wider audience" I can go talk on the Disqus comments that litter CNN, CNBC, etc. Short of having Wiki articles linked to every single in depth commenter's response I don't know how you are going to make things more "accessible" to a "wider" audience.
Also, please stop with calling us your "audience." It is demeaning. If you value our contributions to the functioning of your site so little that you consider us passive players, then I hope you press forward with your train wreck of a beta so that you can see just how much the "audience" actually contributes.
Lastly, tell the MBAs and PR guys/gals to lay off the BS and have a straightforward honest conversation with us. We are far from the drooling idiots you seem to think we are.
You know, exactly like the old interface, but with unicode.
There are lots of things that are annoying about slashdot, but almost none of them are found in the interface. None of them really need changing, except the lack of unicode support. Instead of wasting time trying to change the way slashdot looks when it looks just fine (It's not fancy, but it's clean compared to most of the web and it doesn't waste horrible amounts of space) you should spend the time on unicode. It's not sexy, but it is important.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The real travesty has been the constant hijacking of threads with redesign whine. If I had hit the mod point lottery in the past few days the off-topic button would have broken. As someone who gave testing the new design some effort (in a helpful community member beta-test sort of way) I noticed right-away the ability to switch to classic (which they didn't have to do).
I seem to have had this now misguided impression that there was a healthy professional element of the community here who would give constructive feedback but all I've seen is a mob of angry comment children. I hope you all leave when it switches over so we can build anew without you.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
In the words of Homer Simpson - "Just because I don't care doesn't mean that I don't understand".
I think the recent slashdot poll was directly tied to the redesign. Slashdot audience is getting older, the crowd is now mid-to later in their careers. I can see that - I've been a consistent reader since 1997.
So, Dice decides it is time to rejuvenate the website. I suspect that the objective is to pare down the number of crusty old coots, who block ads and otherwise freeload, and get the "hip, young" crowd that now hangs on Reddit and what not. It sounds like someone with experience in marketing had a hand in this.
The problem as I see it is that Slashdot is more of a Saab of web/news industry. You have a specific image, and a dedicated customer base. Historically, attempts at rebranding and reinventing oneself, in particular for a company with that kind of background, are generally not successful. This is particularly so when a rebranding is done in such an obvious, hamfisted way.
Dice was never a particularly web-savvy company. I've been using them as long as I've been a slashdot reader. Dice (no offense) is a poorly designed concentrator for all the spammy recruiters out there. It's a bit of a cesspool, but it serves its purpose. However, given their history and performance - it is highly unlikely they have sufficient web/social/marketing expertise to turn this site around.
Slashdot hasn't been as exciting as in the past for a while now. What it needed is fresh ideas, better ways to get involved in duscussion, *more* interactivity and possibly ability to connect among its users (I don't suggest it become a facebook, but it's has a long way to go in improving social side). Slashdot will not, in my view, benefit from gaudy pictures, "web 3.0" design and general dumbing down. You will not get the "hip crowd" and you will lose your current user base. Look at Saab for guidance.
The new design adds useless eye candy, makes it harder to skim through the posts to find the ones that interest me. Slashdot works really, really well as-is. Please, please, please, leave well enough alone.
Cheers, Tim -- Tim Janke Part mad scientist, part lion tamer: sr. software engineer, global team leader, project mana
I tried the beta this morning. There was no obvious way to show only the comments rated 4* and above. There are ways of seeing funny or insightful posts, but you don't get to control how many.
The new design seems less space efficient. More clicks are required to read stories (including this one).
No plans to change in the near future.
It's nice to finally hear that they hear us, folks. Although this hasn't been handled very well, it sounds like they're trying to improve. So, let's think positive and give 'em another chance. Further cynicism isn't helpful at this point and can only lead to the demise of something that we've enjoyed for a long time. Please don't do that to yourselves.
Thank you for listening, and for taking our passion for this site and its battle-tested interface to heart. I look forward to seeing how serious you are about providing -- at least as an option -- the kind of lean, dense, static UI that made Slashdot work so well for so long.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I think I've got reasonable karma on here and the very few who recognise my login probably think I don't post total drivel *all* of the time, so I'd like to put in my two bob's worth. I don't like the beta as it is at the minute. The front page looks fine to me: lots of white space, but I can live with white space and it's no different from other websites, although I could very much do without the constant targetted videos from advertiers; but it's the comments pages that are distinctly compromised compared to the present setup. It's far harder to close an entire thread; it's far harder to close sections and leave others open and see quickly which comments have been added since the last refresh; far less content is onscreen at one time; and the comments screen is far too narrow, which compounds the previous issues. I'm sure that with more reflection I could think of other issues with the comments, but those are probably my greatest complaints.
Over the last few days the comments pages have been increasingly dominated by childish anti-beta messages. I understand these are probably born out of frustration and irritation (even anger on some parts), but they've made the website far less usable than if the beta had been rolled out without argument. This is the flipside of it: no redesign is worth fucking up a website over, and certainly doesn't justify the sheer amount of petulant whining the boards have been filled with.
And that said, over the last couple of days, when I've had mod points I've tended to use them to at least reverse the modding down of people protesting the new beta, since there seem to be no other avenues for people who genuinely care about how the comments sections of slashdot are presented. I have no issue with a redesign, but diminishing the usability of a service is a pretty hamfisted way of increasing its profitability.
I've heard all this shit before - that the guys in charge are listening to your efforts, that your concerns are being taken under advisement and that the end result will something everyone will appreciate. What people here especially hate most of all is fucking corporate speak they've heard a thousand times before and despite from the bottom of their hearts. It's patronizing to the audience who know exactly how things will play out. They always follow the same formula
People complained loudly to Microsoft regarding the all-caps of Visual Studio 2012/13 and Office 2013 during their pre-releases. What happened? They remained there, shouting back at the user in the finals. People complained to Microsoft regarding the lack of contrast between the various elements of the Office 2013 GUI as well as the default eye-melting white theme. What happened? Some very minor tweaks and the same eye-melting theme with minimal contract. They threw in a couple of darker themes which do add more contrast, but also make the software far more drab and miserable looking compared to say Office 2010, which in my mind is a thing of beauty.
Companies don't care. They don't give a shit unless there's a real threat to their bottom line. I'm honestly surprised though that the powers that be aren't scrambling to push out the news that they're throwing away the beta as a failed experiment before more people sign off permanently and move to greener pastures.
Account abandoned. I can't fucking spell for shit and Slashdot doesn't even allow time-limited edits of posts. Plus you'
Publish a log where it is easy for one to see what flaw does a new change amend, that way we can discuss the issues separately and you can better explain your reasoning.
Slashdot Tries Something New; Audience Responds!
We are not the audience. We are the performers!
First, let me state that I created my Slashdot account only days ago. And while did read Slashdot articles before a few times, I am by no means used to the "classic" view, so my opinion is not biased by being used to either version.
Yes, I cannot see anything that is better in the "beta".
And even the official statements on why that "redesign" is pursued do not provide a single compelling reason what the new design would actually better.
If "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience" means: "We want to lure more Facebook-zombies and other technically challenged people on our site" then let me tell it right away: That is the perfect way to get rid of everyone actually interested in science and technology. If you want to become yet another mainstream gossip page, that is the way to go.
The absolute no-go for me with regards to the beta is the JavaScript plague. I do not want my trusted computer to execute arbitrary code downloaded from the Net. And JavaScript adds no valuable information, just wastes CPU cycles and bandwidth - just as additional "pictures" do.
werd.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"The new site is a work in progress so Classic Slashdot will be available from the footer for several more months."
The ONLY reasonable interpretation is that after that it will not be. full stop.
"It's not an either/or. It's going to be both. If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that."
Did anyone anywhere ever think the the former communicates the latter?
"And â" okay, we've got it â" it's not ready."
So stop redirecting 25% of us until you've had a another good run at fixing it. And then, maybe put it out there and invite people to check it out instead of redirecting 1/4 of us while threatening us that its just months away from being the only site. You do realize a lot of us would have checked it out, given you feedback, and probably without having a nuclear meltdown over it.
"We have work to do on four big areas: feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning; plain old bugs; "
So... The new logo design was good then!
" the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process."
If only this site had had a mechanism by which you could communicate with us and get feedback, perhaps in the form of comments! And if that mechanism itself had a mechanism with which to bubble the more interesting comments to the surface... why you'd really have something there!
Are you just trolling us? :p
Thanks for acknowledging that quite a few of us hate beta. For starters, how about making the new site not look like its made for people that can't see 2 inches in front of them. The text is huge. It's also white spaced to hell and back. You can see about 2-3 posts on beta before you have to scroll. However on normal slashdot, you can see 4-5. That's a huge issue. I don't want to scroll. I don't want needless white space. Slashdot.com doesn't have a huge freaking touch screen user following where we need tons of white space taking up room for no reason.
Also if anyone else has a problem reading small text, its a website for nerds, I believe they have the skills to increase the font size on their end.
Reasons I hate beta is because it looks like another f*** blog website. Beta has no style what-so-ever. It all just blends in with itself. Nothing stands out. And you spend a good portion of your time scrolling because of all the white space beta has.
I left netflix when they started pulling their shit years ago. Their member base exploded in outrage and they went back on their plans. I think you should follow suit.
There are other places that serve up other peoples news so a discussion can be had.
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
Yah wonderful, you had a few redesigns over the years. Did you ever test them in lynx? Browsing the site on lynx in the late 90's was easy, now it's a shiftfest.
THIS! A THOUSAND TIMES THIS!
I'm sorry Dice, but you don't make Slashdot great - we do! Piss us off and we'll leave, and you can enjoy the eye-atrocious tumbleweeds and crickets.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
I decided to log in with my slashdot account to share this, something that I haven't done in years, for one single reason: with every new slashdot "redesign", the USABILITY of the site gets far, far worse (despite the site looking more "designy"). It really is clear that you guys have no idea how users actually USE your site. For example:
1. With all this copious whitespace, I can fit like 1 or 2 comments on the screen. Finding valuable or highly rated is like finding a needle in a haystack.
2. Everything is expanded by default, which, again makes it tiresome to skip through pages of low-rated comments.
3. The comment sort order makes no sense.
You don't seem to understand that the main value of Slashdot is (or rather was, from a long time ago) the comment section, and with each successive revision it just gets progressively worse. No one give a fuck about your flat, "techcrunchy", "Androidy" design when you keep making the site so much harder to use.
I've popped over to slashdot every week or so when all my links on reddit turn purple, just to see if you guys have improved, and it's kind of astonishing how absolutely backwards you view the design process.
communicating about the How and the Why of this process
I think this is one of the biggest reasons you are getting such negative pushback. A very large part of the active and vocal Slashdot audience (the "community") probably share a similar viewpoint when it comes to change. Change for change's sake is bad, and if you want to change something that works just fine then you'd better be able to give me a good, objective reason. So far that just isn't something we've seen. What I see is a site that's been redesigned with two goals in mind:
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site [that is] more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
What exactly is it about the current site that makes it inaccessible? Which audience are you trying to reach? I'm quite serious -- knowing this may make it easier for people to accept change (assuming that the audiences you're reaching out to aren't "advertisers" and "market analytics"). Just going based on what you've said it sounds like you want to make Slashdot Yet Another generic news aggregator. Don't you remember Digg? That sad story should have taught you a few lessons about the value of a generic news aggregator and the results of alienating a community.
Will the new site finally support (even a small subset of) Unicode? Just adding support for that would probably make Slashdot accessible to more people than this absurd proposed redesign. No, I'm not kidding.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Here's the link: Slashdot classic. I'll add it to the summary above.
I just tried to cruise the comments section using the beta, and that is where things are the worst. There is no quote parent button, and it made me copy and paste the reply title by hand. There is no link to get a permanent reference to a single comment. Comment text does not show bold or italic. Quoted text is merely italic, but not indented or anything.
The mixture of serifed and sans-serif fonts feels disorganized, and does not seem to serve a clear purpose.
Comments are the heart of Slashdot, and the current beta offering is not complete. It is more of an alpha... functionality is woefully inadequate.
Curated articles are what set Slashdot apart from hive-thought sites like Reddit. Keep the articles unique and on topic, that is why I visit.
If you're listening, there's no evidence of it. You were plainly and clearly told of the flaws in the Beta site back in October and you have completely failed to fix them in the intervening months. It's not like you missed a minor bug or two, or got the color wrong by one hex numeral... it's a complete failure to grasp how badly the new site is broken and how ugly it is or to do anything about it. We gave you months, and you've wasted them.
No, you don't "got" it. Not even close, despite having a thermonuclear weapon detonate in your lap.
And this shows just hopelessly you don't "got" it - we are not your audience, we are a community, we are Slashdot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sort out:
Black text, white background, anything else is absurd.
Ditch the boxes round the comments they are seriously ugly and not helpful.
When I ask for the desktop version, I want the desktop version FFS, my phones screen has the same resolution as some laptop screens.
Get rid of the option to choose all insightful, all interesting etc comments - it's pointless because of the crossover between these things and it would lead to some bizarre meaningless threads being displayed. Not useful.
Bring back the user info, friend foe, userid etc, slashdot looks raped without it.
Things worth keeping:
The ability to mod without scrolling to the bottom of the page and hitting the mod button (I open the post in a new page to mod it so as not to lose my place/it's quicker)
The ability to collapse threads.
But that's it, the rest is a seriously bad downgrade.
Things that should have been improved, why weren't they?
The text box I'm typing in right now is tiny - why?
There is 'allowed html' It would be nice to have some buttons to put those tags around some text when you highlight it.
To any damn fool who's answer is well 'why don't you go and re-write the code yourself', I have the question - why didn't you build your own house and car?
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I think
a) I like the beta, please do it asap
b) It's not there yet but keep working on it, but don't turn it on now.
c) It's an abomination. Do not use it ever.
d) I don't read Slashdot you insensitive clod.
If c) greatly exceeds the sum of a) and b) responses don't do it. All d) votes, for obvious reasons, don't count.
At first I didn't hate it, but then I tried to, and actually did reply to a few comments, and WTF they've broken the discussion system? Also I can't see anyone's userid# damnit, what's the point in having a low six digit userid# if I can't subtly flaunt it? Really... Also hotgrits and natalie portman.
Heres your feedback: The site is AWFUL.
The reason I have thus far not taking your survey is it is HOPELESSLY biased in your favor and useless.
Scrap the new site, or don't expect me to be here when it's implemented. Social media is fickle, and this site will be a myspace memory if you continue to ignore the userbase. We can always go tolerate reddit for a while until something else takes it's place. I've been coming here for 10 years, but this may end it for me.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
The new Slashdot Beta is so horrible its not just destroying Slashdot its destroying Beta.
Remember when a Beta was cool? When you got to try the invite only gmail beta? When you got to beta test the next game in your favorite franchise? All that beta cool, destroyed in one fell swoop.
I don't even want to teach my kids the alphabet now, just because it kinda has Beta in it. Hell, even Alpha is less cool now just because its fucking associated with Beta. Even Omega is a bit less glamorous.
Shit, I'm going to have to switch to some sort of Early Testing, Testing, Final Testing sort of nomenclature for software releases now. Beta is that bad that just releasing other software labeled as a Beta is going to make me cringe.
And Beta Carotene, well, right the fuck out of my diet, health consequences be damned.
Fuck Beta,
-Greg
TFS says:
> okay, we've got it — it's not ready. We have work to do on four big areas:
> feature parity (especially for commenting); the overall UI, especially in terms of information density and headline scanning;
> plain old bugs; and, lastly, the need for a better framework for communicating about the How and the Why of this process.
Let's pretend for a moment that the folks making the decisions aren't so dense that they can't hear what everyone is telling them
Let's pretend they don't want to pull a "new Coke". They DID put up the beta as an option for a long time and actively solicit feedback,
after all, so maybe they are trying to get it right. What, specifically, are the problems that bother YOU? Any idiot on Twitter can squeal
"omg it sucks!", but I think we have some people on Slashdot who are more capable and articulate than that. We can come up with
better, more specific feedback than "omg it sucks!", can't we?
For me, the biggest thing is I want to be able to see the subject lines of comments like I can on the classic site. If I down-modded
comment has "hosts file" in the subject line, I know why it's down-modded and hidden - it's not something anyone wants to read,
and I'm not going to read it. Conversely, a down-modded comment with "MPAA is right about ONE thing" in the subject line is probably
down-modded because it challenges the groupthink of the Slashdot herd. That's something I'll click to read.
OzPeter makes a great point in http://meta-beta.slashdot.org/... /.ers submit the stories, vote for the stories in the firehouse, comment, moderate the comments, and meta-moderate the moderation. We pretty well run the site, leaving Dice to just run the _server_. We are not the "current audience", we are a _community_, not an _audience_. An audience is passive. There are a ten thousand news aggregators trying to get an audience. If Dice wants yet another site chasing the audience, you can sure go build one. Don't throw away the Slashdot community first though. Just go build DiceNews.com and advertise it on Slashdot. You want to leverage the Slashdot brand for a site that's supposed to appeal to a broad audience? Sorry, if you turn Slashdot into yet another a broad audience site the Slashdot brand will immediately have the same value as the Enron brand. That brand value just won't transfer if you mess up the community that is loyal to that brand.
Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.
Well, that's a pretty weaselly statement, since you guys were confident enough in your new site to start redirecting a significant portion of your users there.
How about this instead -- "We will not remove Classic Slashdot." Make it an option if you really, truly believe that your beta site is actually better. You can set the new interface as the default, just make it easy to switch to the standard interface. Then everybody goes home satisfied.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
You're right. Always some post catches my eye, I read most of the comments. And the comments are always better than the post itself (which, by the way, is usually submitted by someone from the community). The discussion at slashdot is (most of the time) high quality. Actually, I don't know any other site with such high quality discussion (yes, it could be better, but if you feel down about the quality here, go check the discussion on youtube).
Slashdot is all about it's contributors. Without you, people, this site would be a empty shithole.
Time to move on guys and gals.
I haven't heard that much managementspeak in years, and rookie managementspeak at that. I especially like the "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience" comment. Let me paraphrase that for you, [We are going to bind our logins with FB, twitter, intrusive ads, and everything else we can get our hands on to make sure no one is anonymous. We have implemented part of this already with googleapis and bootstrapcdn. We will sell that information to the highest bidder. Everything you write will be used against you in the future. This includes any resume you have every posted with us. That way employers get a full picture of the people they are hiring, or at least the picture we want to give them. We are committed to treating everyone like simple minded sheep and keeping them informed of the upcoming reaming. We can't promise every sheep will like it. But rest assured our velcro gloves are there to reassure you of this process.]
Bye bye.
Why did you remove the Slashdot Green Title Bars from the comment threads? (the green title bars create an easy to see delineation between the comments and are easy to see even when scrolling fast. (they are also part of that Slashdot Brand I was talking about)
Over the past decade the Slashdot logo, the Slashdot green, the title bars and icons, unique details and config options have become part and parcel of the "Slashdot Brand". It's what makes Slashdot unique. By ignoring this you weaken your brand and your reader's loyalty. You are basically stripping away all that is Slashdot without adding anything useful or new!!!!
I already told you what was wrong with it and how to fix it.
You didn't listen.
Here it is again: http://i.imgur.com/rNPke5p.jpg
_THIS_
Without the community, why would anyone bother with slashdot? There are better & faster sites for tech news, but the commenting is linear & low SNR.
The beta is like watching a "turnaround" CEO trying to save a company by firing the "high cost workforce" (experience & knowledgeable talent); posting a few good quarters and then getting dumbstruck when the company starts to tank.
If the community quality drops, slashdot WILL die.
Beta must be abandoned as a failed experiment. It is awful - not due to bugs, but due to the intention behind the redesign. Your existing 'audience' is what makes slashdot. If you want a larger audience I suggest you create a celebrity gossip website. Awful.
I've seen so many products and sites go in this direction over the years, it makes me sick. Something reaches near perfection and then someone decides to rewrite it in Java or .Net or XML or something, and totally ruins it.
Slashdot doesn't need some redesign. It just needs a few bugs fixed.
Where did they even get the idea that anyone wants any of that stuff on the beta site? Large fonts, huge pictures, HTML 9000 or whatever it is at today. What does Dice think this site is, I Can Has Cheezeburger? Actually, even THAT site went downhill after a bogged down redesign.
A real geek site would work great running on an Amiga using HTML 3. Oh, right, we had that:
http://toastytech.com/guis/ami...
we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.
Nobody gives a flying fuck about if it is 5%, 50%, 95% or 100% ready when they kill off the classic interface.
WE WANT THE CLASSIC SLASHDOT TO REMAIN AS AN OPTION!!!
They can go and fuck themselves with their beta thing. 3+ million accounts were opened on the classic interface.
We like it. It's fine. Leave it THE FUCK ALONE!
Some of you have suggested we're not listening; on the contrary, some of us are 'listening' pretty much full-time.
Nobody gives a fuck if any of you are " listening " timothy (emphasis on quotation marks there), as it is obvious that you are NOT HEARING US!
There, in that quote above. Clear as day.
Or you would not talk about Classic Slashdot going away.
So... in conclusion... Fuck Beta!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
First, thank you for to Timothy and the rest of Slashdot's management for taking the time to reply. Maintaining communications between the site owner and the community it serves is important to creating trust between the two groups.
Nonetheless, a large part of me is screaming "about damn time", because this uproar could have been headed off twenty four hours ago if you had said exactly what you did with the above statement. That's not to say people would have believed you any more than do do now, but by remaining silent for a whole day you gave the impression that not only do you not care about what we think, but that it was corporate needs (legal, marketing, whatever) that kept you from issuing a statement. Smaller, individually owned websites tend to be quicker and more forthcoming with their responses because they don't have to go through various levels of approval first, and the Slashdot community - many of whom work in companies and are saddled with layers of middle-management pointlessly micromanaging their workflow - have little trust or love for corporate shenanigans. We tend to respect people more who speak bluntly and from their gut.
Still, at long last we did get a response, so I am grateful for that. Even better, you claim to be taking our feedback into consideration. I'm wary as to the truthfulness of this statement, but - for the time being - I'm willing to offer an olive branch.
Nonetheless, I think there is an onus upon Dice to be more forthright with their intentions with the redesign if they hope to regain some of the community's trust. Simple platitudes that you are "listening" are not sufficient. The biggest question we all have is to the overall goal of the redesign, especially since so many of the community feel it sacrifices what they consider the strength and draw of Slashdot: the community and the comments. We all understand that Dice is a business and needs to make money. We comprehend that increasing the audience is one method of achieving this goal. None of us, I think, are opposed to helping Slashdot become a more popular website. A redesign could draw in a new and larger readership. We get that. We just feel that your redesign is aimed solely at attracting new eyeballs while sacrificing your current user base.
Community websites like Slashdot are not like CNet or NYTimes or Apple. Those websites are unidirectional; the information is pumped down to the readership by the owners and the community involvement is minimal. But Slashdot - and other similar sites - are bi-directional; as much (if not more) of the website's value comes from the readership; is it any wonder the readers feel a sense of ownership and pride of "their" website? Is it no wonder that they feel betrayed when one side unilaterally forces their vision onto the community?
So I recommend that one of the web-designers at Slashdot take the time to walk us through the changes, both those we have already seen in beta and those you intend to work on moving forward. Let us know your reasoning for the different bits, how you came to these decisions, what your goals are. Have the designers write it up and - as much as possible - keep legal's and marketing's hands out of it. Be explicit, be detailed, be technical; we are, after all, the sort of audience who appreciates that sort of thing. Talk about your inspirations, and some of the feedback you have gotten. LET US KNOW WHY YOU ARE DOING WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
You also need to take the community's feedback into real consideration. Offer them different examples that they can vote on. Fark.com showed off preliminary Photoshop mock-ups of its redesigns long before the first line of HTML was written to its paying customers; you could try the same thing here. Let the audience pick which one they think is the best and then work from that one. Engage your audience and make them feel they have a voice.
Follow-up with slow changes. One of the biggest problems with beta.slashdot is it is a complete redesign, and un-necessarily so. Don't change everythin
But this doesn't actually concede anything, does it?
Main points in this statement:
1: One in four users are still being redirected to the new beta.
2: The current Slashdot layout is still disappearing, to be replaced by the beta.
3: The beta needs development.
So what's so groundbreaking about this announcement? Where's the concession? I'm supposed to be happy about this, I suppose?
This is the part that bothers me:
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
So Dice wants the best of both worlds; the tech oriented, intelligent userbase contributions, and a wide audience to monetise those contributions to? It isn't going to work.
In honor of you posting recognition of today's complaints, I've posted this using the beta. Even if some consider it pro forma at this point, here are some specific complaints:
1) "Oops! You do not appear to have javascript enabled. We're making progress in getting things working without JavaScript." Glad to hear it. No one should be "migrated" so long as javascript is mandatory.
2) White space and wasted space. Enough have made detailed complaints about this, so I'll just register my chagrin. I will say this: the people who come to this site are used to, indeed prefer, a denser presentation of information. This includes the text editor, which is absurdly restrictive on the x-axis.
3) Font size. Perhaps this falls under wasted space, but it's atrocious enough to deserve its own comment.
4) Incomplete summaries. Waste less space and use as much of the old summary as "Classic". (I recognize the drop-down menu allows one to switch between "Standard", "Classic", and "Headlines", but this, again, requires javascript. What is more, Standard adds nothing. Changes shouldn't be made for the sake of changing something. A change should be an improvement.)
5) Absurd margins on the right.
6) Obnoxious or irrelevant photos. We're literate here. Many of us read books that go on for hundreds of pages without a picture. We don't need pictures added like some security blanked.
7) Load more? The old system gave preference to higher modded comments but did not require that you filter for higher comments to see them. Of course when there are a great many comments, a load more button is useful. But such a button should not be obscuring high ranked comments within moments of an article being posted.
8) I just found another as I went to "Preview Comment." Why does the p tag produce what looks like four lines of white space?
9) Above all, all changes should be subjected to this test: Do they get in the way of the conversation? Do they make it harder to scan through the conversation, looking for interesting comments. If so, they are not improvements. They detract from the reason people come to Slashdot.
The formatting matters are some of the most obvious and often discussed. They should also be the easiest to fix.
Ok slashdot...I love y'all and I am always in favor of improving things...
but look: making something "more accessible" to a "wider audience" to "share" absolutely does NOT mean dumbing down the UI, hiding menus, removing sidebars, and reducing content!
thanks so much for what you do, I genuinely love /.
but you *must* understand...****less complexity does not mean more accessible****
people come to /. because it is not dumbed down and over-marketed to 'the average reader'!!!
Thank you Dave Raggett
the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look.
So this is how it is going to be
we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready
You will have this forced upon you at some point
Some of you have suggested we're not listening; on the contrary, some of us are 'listening' pretty much full-time.
and ignoring any suggestions because we are owned by Dice, and this is how they want it
because we're a community and we want to take everyone with us.
and advertise crap to you
Why? We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
and advertise crap to you
And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories.
and sell your information, and advertise crap to you
It's not an either/or. It's going to be both.
So shut up and take it
If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that.
So Fuck You and thanks for all the Fish
I really do appreciate that you and Soulskill did at least break the silence that up until now has been deafening, but really, the nature of your reply does not fill me with confidence, and with the replies I am reading by other users, it looks as if that feeling is well represented, and that I am not alone.
I just want you to know that I am listening to you as well.
With that in mind, I have some difficult questions for you.
You say that you have been reading and contemplating our feedback. It is clear that you have been at least observing the fallout that has occured over the past few days here in the comments sections of some very promising and nice looking stories, as the quality of the community provided content dropped to levels that would make even /b/ look intelligent. Your colleague Soulskill even made some well received commentary recently, and we've eagerly awaited this public level of ice-breaking on the discussion. For this I, and clearly many others are greatful.
However, since you claim to have been receiving valuable feedback about the beta experiment since at least 5 months ago, why is it that the nature of the beta has not radically changed to accommodate that feedback? Why did you allow this situation to come to a head like this, if you have been observing and seriously considering the feedback provided?
I see in your announcement that you and slashmedia believe it is time for a change in the site's layout. What factors does slashmedia use to make these determinations, and why do you believe that a radical change instead of a refinement and polish of the current system is in order?
Can you please elaborate on some of the design choices that slashmedia has taken in the beta, ans why they felt these were good decisions, and why they have apparently completely ignored 5 months of user feedback about the beta?
I understand that nobody really profits from continuing the public protest, or from relentless, mindless trolling. That's why we need to have a real, and valuable discussion here about this, and why a show of good will about our feedback actually being considered, and how it is considered, in detail, is clearly needed for our community to resolve its differences with slashmedia's choices in performing its services as the community's host.
I am sure it would mean a great deal to all of us if the dialog did not end here. We, as a community need answers to these questions if we are going to stay and continue to contribute to what makes slashdot great.
I hate to say it, but ignoring us and leaving these kinds of questions unanswered is likely to be seen as a worse slap in the face than hearing only silence was. Please continue this dialog.
Slashdot lacks Unicode support due to past vandalism.
Since Slashdot is abandoning the Classic design and code, can Dice release the final version of Slashcode so it is free/libre? It would be entirely in the spirit of the "audience" here.
Why? We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories
A few points.
- What exactly do you mean by 'make content more sharaeble'? I can already link to individual comments; there's even a 'share' link below each comment. I've never used it, but surely that would be the place to start if your goal is to make content more shareable.
- If your goal was to make content more shareable, then why, at this late stage in the game, is it still impossible to link to single comments in Beta?
- Nothing is stopping you from experimenting with the current layout
Incremental change is how the current slashdot was built. Taco, Hemos, et al slowly added pieces and tweaks together, according to the needs of the day, to create what we now know as the moderation system and the classic comment layout. Over fifteen years of design thought have gone into the current system.
You can accomplish all the goals you have laid out by continuing in the same, incremental-improvement spirit. Throwing out all of that work and starting fresh is unnecessary, wasteful, and pretty much bound to fail.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
But we really do take to heart the comments you've made about the look and functionality of the beta site that houses Slashdot's future look.
No you don't. You get plenty of feedback on the beta site in the initial announcement of it coming online, and for the most part the comments were ignored. Ever since the beta came online, there's been people mocking it.
Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready. And — okay, we've got it — it's not ready.
Saying it's not ready is the understatement of the year so far. The comment section is on fire so far, and this is actually the first time that I've seen people spend their modpoints to promote offtopic discussion of this nature on this scale.
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
What? Is this the website equivalent of "We want the Call of Duty audience" ? This statement right here, goes to show how much you're out of touch with your core audience: News for NERDS... Slashdot will never be reddit, or some fancy ITBiz magazine. Reddit already exists and won't be going anywhere, and the ITBiz audience doesn't give a shit about this place since it's just another site that scrapes headlines from other places.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, ever since the advent of SlashBIcurious and the other nonsense you've been trying to push. Your "core audience" has been telling you this for quite a while now, but you've adamantly refused to listen, stuck your fingers in your ears and gone ahead as if nothing was wrong. And now you're surprised the comments section is ablaze?
We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable. And we want a platform where we can experiment with different views of both comments and stories.
Experimenting with an established platform can come at a high cost. I don't mind the changes to the layout, and I don't give a damn that you want to polish the look, but in all fairness you broke the damn commenting system. It's the only thing that keeps this place worth visiting. Beta just makes we want to look for another home.
If we haven't communicated that well enough, consider this post a first step to fixing that.
Oh fuck off... You know when people start talking about communication? It's the excuse the network engineer makes to the IT Coordinator/Manager when his network melted while users have been making tickets about problems for weeks. It's the pseudo-managers way of saying "I'm not aware of any issues" despite his mailbox being a festering pit of complaints and misery.
You communicated well enough. You communicated when the beta came online, and you get plenty of feedback which you chose to ignore. Now you've got 25% of users getting an iteration of your shitty beta, and boy oh boy is your comment section a cesspool of complaints right now. And the message you send now is obvious: "It's coming, wether you like it or not. Suck it.". Yeah, the art of communicating is not lost on you guys at all.
And in the meantime, we're not sorry to have received a flood of feedback, most of it specific, constructive and substantive.
That's like the time I heard someone from management say "In hindsight, I feel that despite the negative outcome I've made the correct choice. We'll just have to adapt and move on".
Well, guess what... We'll adapt, and move on. Enjoy turning slashdot into ITBizz2.0 or whatever pipe dream you guys at Dice have.
Thanks for taking the time for this, Soulskill (et al).
I really missed the ability to set comment thresholds in the GET of an article (removed in the last major UI upgrade). I have a lot of friends that do not frequent slashdot, and when I link them an article that I want them to read the better comments of, it needs to be at a threshold they'll tolerate (typically, 5/4 for full/abbrev if there are enough comments).
I have other suggestions as well, but getting comments right is by far #1. I can fix the rest with Greasemonkey.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
It would be interesting to compare the user stats (stay length, number signup, number return) for the beta vs the classic.
Seems like a perfect way to figure out when a new design is ready.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
" We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. "
Have you considered that those two points might be in conflict? That the precise reason for Slashdot's success might be that it speaks to the interests and habits of a fairly specific and narrow audience?
You dial 1-510-4PERENS. Email is probably better, though. bruce@perens.com .
Bruce Perens.
Sum it up: changes are coming, a polite fuck you, we are culminating a new audience by sending 25% of unauthed users whi may have never heard of slashdot before, another polite fuck you, classic slashdot is still going away, we the corporate assholes are slashdot and not the community. The whole summary amounts to a colossal polite "fuck you guys."
Im assuming there's a young punk-ass web developer who made a righteous bullshitty pitch to the suits at Dice to make a new slashdot. It sold them, but he didn't add it would likely destroy the entrenched user base. But that isn't his problem. His problem is trying to get these suits to come out of the dark slimey wet putrid hole they all live in to throw cash at him for a shiny new website.
Screw this. I'm gonna go make my own news for nerds aggregator. With black jack. And hookers! In fact, forget the news aggregator...
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I grew up reading text on paper. That's how I can intake and process information most efficiently. And that's why the web sites that I read regularly, and in which I participate, present information in much the same way as a printed page.
Aside from these basic and to my mind blindingly obvious design concerns, I'll add a couple of things. I haven't spent more than five minutes with the beta because it was so immediately not what I need or want, but I have been reading the comments here.
Finally, I'll remind people that there was a time when Byte was THE magazine for anyone involved in computers. It became Byte the web site, but carried over a lot of the same content and contributors.
Then, in the misguided quest for the almighty dollar the owners managed to kill it off entirely. It was a great loss.
Dice would be very foolish if they think that they can't manage to do the same to Slashdot.
Three Squirrels
Here's the real problem...Dice bought a niche website catering to a non-mainstream audience and is frustrated that ad revenue is not commensurate with a mainstream website, so now they want to maximize revenue by pushing the site to a wider audience. In other words, dumb it down, white space and images everywhere, probably sensational headlines...a copy of every other website out there. Here's what Dice needs to realize about Slashdot... We are your content. You are otherwise nothing more than a link page. A cheap version of Google News, and on to delay at that. We come here to make and (more importantly) read comments from the audience we have NOW. A wider audience will just mean it will turn into the CNN comments section tragedy of the commons and your content (read, us) will wander off to greener pastures. Just leave the option to use classic permanently, or make beta nearly indistinguishable from classic from a functional and feature standpoint, or best yet, do nothing. Accept that Slashdot is not going to be a cash cow for you. Maybe, if you listen to your customers and are very careful, you can pay the bills with it. But alienate your customers and that will be the end of Slashdot, slowly, but surely. Just accept that the product you purchased is for a specialized audience and stop trying it widen that audience. Instead of trying to maximize ad revenue by bringing more users that will change the community, try to maximize your profits in less obnoxious methods. Sell Slashdot apparel more openly, maybe develop a line of printed matter useful to the maker scene, consider adding a dedicated reviews section in current formatting. If you want an example of a site I think has managed to squeeze all the life out of their original classic page design while staying current would be Photo.net.
We have the code... A new slashdot clone could be created but would lose the audience. A few important problems with a replacement site:
1) All current content locked up and owned by dice. The new site could point to the old articles and discussions allowing them to be viewed in archived form. Dice could shut this down legally or play cat and mouse at obfuscating the links.
2) user iDs would be lost. Here's a solution. New site starts ID numbers at 2,000,000 or whatever. Older names and IDs are reserved and can only be re-registered thus: Login with prior slashdot ID, use a random number or string to verify. Enter this code in the user journal, new site verifies matching code and opens up old username on new site. This is a problem for those who've lost their passwords but they couldn't recover on classic slashdot anyways.
3) Who runs the site and selects articles? If enough old timers get together and agree on management the new site (let's call it "backdot" for now) enough momentum could be built to drive over a large part of the community. This could splinter however. It needs enough prominent user support to work.
It's possible to move much of the user base somewhere else but would require a lot of cooperation. Herding cats comes to mind.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
While I do like the added imagery of the new beta, I don't like home much vertical real estate it takes. The classic slashdot fits a whole lotta information in one vertical screen; the new beta design has so much vertical whitespace that I need to scroll down constantly, about twice as much as classic.
Dense is good (... sometimes). I vote for dense (... sometimes).
Dice can't see it, since must be new here (he he)...
The most loyal long time most avid readers of Slashdot, are not trolling the site, in protest of the failed beta. Never thought I would see the day ...
Where is GNAA, Natalie Portman grits, and frist prost when you need them!
Let me explain ...
I have been a regular visitor to Slashdot for around 15 years. For that, I get the checkbox to disable ads, though I browse with Javascript disabled so my browser does not slow down.
I come here for the discussions, and often read comments at +5, changing that only if I find a discussion interesting and warrants reading at a lower level.
The new beta uses JQuery for the comment threshold selector, and changes that on the fly. This means all the comments are loaded, but not visible, and processing any page with considerable number of comments will slow down MY computer! If I have a few tabs open to read later, my computer will be unusable.
What is worse it that they require you to click on the slider on every article to change the threshold! This is just insane!
If they insist that I enable Javascript to browse the site at the threshold I want, then they will lose me as a long time. I imagine that others long timers will hate the site too.
Dice have to remember that this site has two unmatched features, interlocked: a moderation system that is good at cutting down the trolling, spamming, and noise, and a comment section that is frequented by many people who are passionate about technology and other nerdy stuff.
If they wanted to intentionally ruin the site and drive people away, they would not have done any worse than what they are doing now.
If they manage to aggravate a lot of their users, the comment section will no longer be attractive to the audience. People are discussing alternatives already. Wisen up and kill the beta NOW!
And no, it is not about look and feel only. Lipstick on a pig does not make it pretty.
See the discussion here about CSS vs Javascript.
I wrote the above in a feedback form that I filled a while ago, and I am emailing this comment to their feedback@slashdot.org. Please send them feedback too.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
1) Please stop the never ending slide towards making slashdot into a "modern" graphics heavy website. If I want gizmodo or nbc.com I'll go there on my own.
2) I don't come here for wizbang buzzword features. I come here to READ about them.
3) My preference would be to even scrap the current implementation and go back 4-5 years when the site was much faster and more usable.
4) On the mobile side... you just need to start over. I find it very frustrating to use and have honestly almost removed it from my bookmarks.
If you're really listening, then you'll say:
"We get it. You don't like Beta. So, we're going to commit to allowing you to keep classic if that's the site you are loyal to."
You've been working on Beta for a long time. We've been aware of that. We're not responding to trying something new. We're responding to this bit from the message you retracted:
> "The new site is a work in progress so Classic Slashdot will be available from the footer for several more months."
We're responding to the implication that the functional site we love will be fully replaced with the awful beta; no takesies back. This very slim time frame of several months makes it clear that in your eyes, the new "slashdot" is nearly complete. The problem is, the real reason Beta sucks is because it's a different paradigm all together. It's not something you can fix by listening to feedback and tweaking over the next few months. It's a concept that needs to be scrapped.
I think I speak for many when I say the issue goes beyond ugliness. It's a frame of mind. It's what this site represents that you're changing. We are nerds. You really need to understand nerds better if we are your intended audience anymore. We like this site because it's functional and doesn't get in the way of OUR discussion. You're turning the site into buzzfeed. Save that crap for Slashdot BI.
Hi,
So, it is tempting to resurrect Technocrat.net now that Slashdot stinks worse than the last two times I shut down technocrat.net .
If you remember, we didn't get very many readers. We didn't get them because not enough people submitted usable articles.
As it happens, we don't just need a better Slashdot. We need a replacement for Groklaw. And I personally would be happier reading something with the absolute minimum of Javascript except perhaps in the submission editor. Maybe I'm old-fashioned.
I know that I can do it technically, and I have the server, and Cloudflare should be able to help me handle the load. But if it is like last time, and my wife observes that I'm talking to the same dozen guys all of the time, it's not going to work.
What do you think?
Bruce Perens.
Biggest problem with the new layout: Menu scrolling broken. The menu stays there consuming real estate as you scroll down every page.
We all know where the "Home" key is on the keyboard and can easily get back to the menu should we need it. Having it always present on the screen is not worth the real estate it consumes. If you make it scroll with the rest of the page (as anything on the page should) then I could probably get used to the new layout.
The right column on the main page is rather too big, but it does go away automatically if you make the window smaller (nice!) so not a big issue. I might have moved the threshold up so that it goes away sooner. At the smallest window width, literally only *half* of the window width is actually used for content, the rest is borders and the right column. That's not enough -- we're here for the content. A smaller right column size for borderline cases would be nice.
I'm Leif and I design (among other things) user interfaces for a living.
With all the "fuck beta" posts leading all the other comment sections, it was interesting to hear from various folks who provided constructive feedback in this post. From the "fuck beta" posts, I thought the problem was Microsoft shilling, user data collection, invasion of privacy, and a host of other matters that would antagonize the Slashdot base.
It seems that the actual issues are more practical:
- Comment section doesn't have most of the features
- Javascript is a problem for some people
It seems like both of these just require more coding time. For my two cents, the site has a little too much white space. I realize clean looks with lots of white space is the going design, but I think there's not the right balance currently and it makes the site difficult to take in. Slightly smaller font, slightly less line spacing. Everywhere. Make it tighter.
The stories all seem normal enough: black holes, at least one Apple story a day, freedom of communication, etc etc. Users are correct in saying Slashdot is not a news site, it's a debate site. The most important content on the site are the comments. I feel that's just a matter of time.
I also feel like no one is going to read my 6 page post which would only be half a page without the idea that someone is supposed to write with a red pen between above each line of my words. And after previewing, it looks like I have 10 line breaks between paragraphs...hopefully submission fixes that.
Slashdot is the comment system. In many ways, it's a forum in disguise, with each topic just an excuse to converse on that topic. Practically speaking, the only concrete difference between slashdot and an actual forum is that rank-and-file members can't start new topics.
So if you make the comment system suck, you have essentially put a stake through the heart of slashdot. It doesn't matter how pretty you think the front page is, or needs to be -- we come here to read the comments, not the fucking stories.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Timothy et al, please just stop and look at what you're doing. The beta is awful. The beta is awful because it seriously fucks up the one feature that has made Slashdot a site worth using since its inception: the user contributions.
The stories themselves are rarely why I bother to check Slashdot, I've always been more interested in the discussion. The discussion on Slashdot has been more interesting than the stories for several reasons. One major reason is the discussions would almost always add information about a story that wasn't linked to by the story itself or the editors. A Slashdot post would bring up a topic and then allow a bunch of nerds with an interest in that subject to chime in and share what they knew. Many times the people being written about in the Slashdot stories were Slashdot users themselves and could give first hand information.
Besides the contributions themselves the moderation system is actually pretty damned good. Positive discussion more often than not gets highly promoted. Because of the way mod points work there's little incentive to do anything but promote interesting commentary or demote outright trolling. Because of this system it's pretty easy to find worthwhile discussion no matter the topic.
It's because of these things that Slashdot's value comes almost entirely from its user contributions rather than news aggregation. In 1997 news aggregation like Slashdot was new and interesting. Today every site does it. What every site does not have is an intelligent and interested user base that will add value to the stories themselves.
The user comments section of almost every large website is a cesspool. Not only do they not have meaningful moderation but there's no community interested in promoting discussion. The design of the sites themselves also discourage long form commentary and encourage useless drive-by commentary.
The beta is it seems to be promoting Slashdot's weaknesses and hiding or abandoning its strengths. Promote user commentary and support the users in commenting on and moderating stories. Fix the character encoding problems and support Markdown for markup. Give the comments a lot of room with readable fonts and don't add whitespace just to add whitespace. Lose the fucking JavaScript popups and animations, I should be able to park my cursor anywhere on the screen and not have to worry about some attention grabbing animation happening.
In short remember that Slashdot users are not an audience, they are a community of contributors. Without the users there is no Slashdot.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Here's our official survey. Thanks for contributing.
Hi!
I'd personally give it until after BETA is sorted out. If Dice somehow miraculously sorts out the commenting problem, Slashdot stands a chance as sticking around.
If they don't, then you'll definitely see an exodus.
There is, of course, the possibility that the users would migrate around to other sites that pop up in the interim (such as altslash) which would be the risk/trade off you'd make by waiting. It's difficult to assess how long you'd be able to wait before needing to actually get the site running, but I'd hazard the 'right after we hear a response from Dice about this topic' as the breaking point.
At any rate, I know I'd love to see a site like that around.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
I'll be honest here too. I actually could have probably lived with Beta as it is now. But it would have taken a whole lot of work with user styles.
1. That person who decided lines should be doublespaced? Their head, on a pike, to serve as a warning to others who think websites should look like a 3rd grader's book report.
Hm, I actually hadn't noticed that as a problem. But it should be easy to fix in Stylish CSS.
2. Get collapsed/abbreviated/full comments working again so the MyCleanPC troll doesn't take up 100000 screenfuls of realestate: http://beta.slashdot.org/story...
I was working on this when the good news came down that Beta is delayed. It turns out that when displaying only, say, level 2 and higher comments, all the comments are there - just hidden. Furthermore, if I forced displaying of all comment headers:
article.com-hide header[style="display: none;"] { display:inline !important; }
...the bodies were hidden, but clicking the header would show the body. The main problems being that the formatting was all messed up and the little arrow on the left was backwards. But these things could be fixed in time.
3. Do something to stop wasting the right side of the comments. Flow the comments around the sidebar. Pack the sidebar stuff up higher. I don't know, how the heck do comments fit below the sidebar now (I even have mod points and the modpoint sidebar), but can't with the gigantic picture and doublespaced text in the summary?
On the current Slashdot, there's a moderate-sized chunk of space on the left lost. On the Beta, there's a somewhat larger chunk lost on the right...and on the right of the comments...and on the borders on both sides of the page. I'd say the two best one-liners in my user style were to fix the borders:
.container { width: 96% !important; }
and to fix the post padding - particularly on the right side:
.comment-article.com-show { padding: 15px 5px 10px 15px !important; }
Could the beta be better? Absolutely. But it's not the end of the world from my perspective.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
I have been anonymously reading Slashdot's *comments* for the majority of my IT career. I browse the site compulsively, multiple times a day. I have introduced countless people to the site. I spread interesting links to colleagues and family. In my small way I drive traffic to Slashdot.
I have been tempted to join Slashdot many times, but for one reason or another never completed the process, until today. I do sometimes contribute as an Anonymous Coward. My miniscule contributions are nothing to cherish, but it is the comments and the contributions of the rest of the community that make this site.
I created an account to add my voice to the conversation, because this matters to me deeply. The way you are going about introducing change here will not work. Others have mentioned that this site doesn't have an audience, but they are only partially correct.
There isn't really, to me, a distinction between the site and the community - they are synonymous and I have been an avid consumer of all the myrid ideas and information flow that this community has put on display over the years. I am an audience, though a small audience. The show I'm here to see really has nothing to do with the submissions. What I am here to see is the community, the comments, the current conversation.
Let me beat a dead horse: There are brilliant people here. There is high quality discourse here. There is an incredible amount of information here. (OK, there's also metric tons of bullshit :) ) But - the value here is the people, generating content by the thousands of lines. If you change the site in ways that alienate these people who've built it, or if you make it difficult to sustain the conversation then it dies. And when those brilliant folks scatter to wherever they wind up, then Slashdot really will be left with just an audience. And I can tell you, Slashdot with an audience and no contributors will only have that audience for about a week.
-The Other Curtis
I would imagine the fact that this being, perhaps, one of the largest and most discerning groups of techno-literate and bullshit doublespeak phobic groups on the entire planet....I would imagine that would give someone in the organization some pause. Someone with enough pull that they might be able to communicate how suicidal that move would be to someone who might care, if for nothing more than profit potential concerns.
/., as it has been deemed both unprofitable and perhaps a waste of money...perhaps even a way to bury value from another investment.
We are the filters. We see through this shit. This is perhaps why we aren't as click-baitable. Why we are so ad-averse. Why typical marketing paradigms have had no effect on us. We have the wherewithal to recognize it, the technical ability to eliminate it and the common sense to disregard it.
We aren't against being monetized. Lots of us make money doing that very thing. We are indeed a fickle crowd, but we are huge. We are smart. We want to be engaged.
...I'm starting to believe, as previously suggested, that this is an effort to bury
...who knows, lets get all tinfoil-hatty...maybe a conglomeration of so many technorati is undesirable to certain elements of society. Who knows what we might come up with? Tor? Mesh network? Uncompromisable encryption? Internet3? This is a concentration of brainpower from all ends of the information industry. All ends of all spectrums in information tech, electronics, security, programming, logic, mathematics, physics, all manner of political disciplines...maybe we're just a dangerous group?
Color me jaded, but, I think this is the end.
I'd just like to say to my comrades, It's been a brilliant and illuminating journey (for the most part). I've learned much, I've laughed even more. This one last hurrah has embiggened my heart. We have all universally united against a common foe--mediocritization...likely in vain.
I'll see you guys on the other side...wherever that may be.
Look: we're not "the audience", expecting to be amused or enlightened. We're slashdot. The point, which you seem to be missing, is slashdot is its contributors, who come here to interact.
Every time I see the beta design I grope for the alternate link that gets me back to the perhaps-weird but familiar interface I like. That's what I expect. If you want to change it, fine, it's your site, but the contributors will go somewhere they prefer and it won't be here.
I'm all for modernizing UIs. Any UI that sits stagnant for an extended period can drift into a case where while it is much beloved, it is not as nice as it could be with some newer thought/style applied to it.
However, when the replacement UI does not keep, at it's core, the essence of what made the former UI so popular, one encounters significant resistance.
Many here will tell you that what makes Slashdot a part of their daily lives is not the articles. Sure the articles are topic starters and they contain some good information in many cases. But the reason many of us read Slashdot every day is that it is made up of a body of commentators who add the actual value of the website. Regardless of what the article may be, or how mundane or sensational the headline is, I have a clear "wait and see" response to it all until I've seen what the Slashdot community has made of the topic. I know that this crowd will dig into topics, look up facts, even unattractive ones, and find the interesting layers that are never part of the original articles.
Articles are the START of a conversation. The herd of intelligent, resourceful, knowledgeable detectives who live here are the actual product that I'm here to consume. I am THEIR audience, not Slashdot's.
All that being said, any changes that take away from my ability to easily consume the comments here is a step in the wrong direction. The new comments system for me is a complete non-starter. It lacks the view of the thread as the thread organically grows. It lacks the ability to see high rated comments inline while still seeing their position within the overall discussion without turning on everything. In short, it makes it harder to do what I'm here to do.
The rest is all window dressing to me. Bigger pictures, cleaner fonts and such. Yes, these things can be great when done well. I'm not suggesting that what we have in the beta is "done well" but rather that it could be done well if you scrap what you have and start over with a new focus on "what is our product" and realize that the answer is "our commenters".
Given the backlash that Slashdot is experiencing, my suggestion would be this:
Announce that you are cancelling the current beta and going back to the drawing board with a renewed focus on the site's content and purpose.
Make it clear that you do not believe that Slashdot is not "just another news site and should be formatted as such".
Show some appreciation for the legendary comment system that Slashdot has grown over the years and a dedication to remain faithful to it.
Then you can start over, and instead of going for a grand redesign, take an iterative approach. Small moves, in alignment with the community.
In the end, your readers are different than any other website news service, they know more about site design and site construction than you do. So tap into that and stop treating them like they are reading Engadget.
Hopefully this feedback helps out.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
There's no ad impressions when we are sitting on a single page scrolling through the comments, that's why they don't appear to care about the comments, even though that is what drives traffic to the site. IT"S NOT ABOUT THE ARTICLES it's about the quality of the discussions and the mod system. Toss that and we could replace you with any of a thousand tech blog sites. STOP IT!
For as long as I have been using the internet and the web I have yet to find a comment system that works as well as Slashdot does.
I don't get why no one has copied it. Slashcode is out there.
The karma system, meta-moderation, mod points...it's all there.
Disqus, stack exchange, discourse they are all shit compared to what Slashdot has grown.
You fuck with the ecosystem of curation of comments and I might as well be reading reddit, gizmodo, or some other site's 3rd rate system.
Which means I might as well not come here.
On mobile
after
the
first
few
posts
every
new
one
looks
like
this.
Plus, I can't see that I have mod points, can't moderate, can't see my post history. Read my lips: on mobile beat is unusable, on desktop only slightly better
Yeah, I've been on Slashdot for awhile too. But I won't be back anymore when the classic site becomes unavailable. Since the community is the actual product here, let's just fork it and we'll all go somewhere else. Maybe we can't call it Slashdot, but who cares? Let's just start a new site for all the old Slashdot members with the classic look.
That's what Slashdot has, and why it has persisted throughout the years. I've always loved that I can come to Slashdot to learn what truly educated and intelligent people have to say on the matters of the day. A story on Lockheed Martin? One of the team members will probably post the scoop on what's really happening. That is useful knowledge. It is valuable to me. Part of why it developed was the infrastructure of the site and how it allowed the best discussion to float to the top. Part of it was an absence of anything really like it back in the day. Part of it was happenstance.
But now that all of us long-time Slashdot readers know what the shape of the best form of Slashdot felt like, I believe it's possible to re-create that elsewhere, especially if the PHBs at Dice absolutely insist on killing this precious object. Furthermore, there are many of us who have great ideas on how to recast Slashdot with new features that would enhance the community, not detract from it.
Call out a channel for all of us to discuss what that is, and we'll hop on and iron out the requirements. An open source community redesigning itself would be an excellent reaffirmation of the principle of open source.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
There was a time when Slashdot was my home page -- first thing I read when I turned on the internet. That time has long passed. I'm not sure whether I grew up or Slashdot grew down. In the end I think RSS feeds and the proliferation and maturation of other tech sites with original content like Ars Technica filled some of what Slashdot used to do for me. Much of the news here is 12 hours behind the top of my feed.
I still come back often. It's not for the news like it was in the 90's but for the comments. When I want to know what's happening, I hit Google or Hacker News or Ars, but when I want to know what other people like me think about something, I wait for it to hit Slashdot's front page.
To me it feels like DICE thinks the articles are the content. They're not. The content comes below the articles which are only there (IMHO) to spark a discussion. So my feedback: Take a few months and learn about the community that makes Slashdot work. It seems clear that you have not. Then work the redesign to fit the ethos of that community. You can mess up the front page all you want to try to get new audience, but take a second or third look at everything below the article when you try this again in Fall of 2014.
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
We have seen this before.
There is a vibrant, thriving CGM site. (CGM == community generated media).
An entity with money buys the site.
Things stay the same for a while. Invariably, the owning entity wants feature, UI, and usability changes made to their new property.
These changes aren't being made to serve the interests of the existing community.
Here's what happens.
Either, the community dissolves entirely, and something wonderful disappears and dies.
Or, the community mostly moves to a new site, which rallies around what people liked about the old site.
Here is a very specific example. There is a site called "Audiworld". It ran, for a very long time, a funny and antiquated forum software called "KAWF". Audiworld was the top destination on the English speaking internet for Audi enthusiasts. Absolutely excellent technical information about the cars, and many off-topic forums developed to serve the die-hard user community the site had.
Audiworld was bought by InternetBrands and converted to vBulletin. This was against the wishes and strong feedback from most of the cornerstone members of the community.
IB persisted and did the conversion.
Within a week or so, "Quattroworld" showed up as a competitor, and nearly ALL of the technical experts and cornerstone members dumped Audiworld and moved to Quattroworld.
Quattoworld simply chose to keep running the previous forum software.
Compare the two sites now:
The "converted" forum:
http://forums.audiworld.com/fo...
The rebellion forum:
http://forums.quattroworld.com...
Look at the information density in the topic listing on the KAWF based forum (the second one). The design is text heavy, information dense, not filled with ads and distractions.
It works on any device; it works on browsers from 10 years ago.
Now look at the vBulletin based forum.
Look at the quality of questions in the vBulletin form.
See any answers?
No, you don't.
Communities are the life of sites like slashdot. You piss off your community at your peril.
We are not interested in suffering so that you can expand your audience. We don't want an expanded audience. The people who should be here are here. The people who haven't found out about here yet will find out, and when they find it, they won't mind the design of the site.
How many other web forums does John Carmack post in? How many other forums get occasional visits from Linux developers? Where else do you see the occasional Microsoft and Apple employee talking about things candidly and without bashing each other?
Stack Exchange has excellent technical content and lots of very bright posters -- but it isn't a social community like this one.
When Classic is retired, and its inevitable replacement has lower information density and makes reading and participating more cumbersome, this community will leave.
Hopefully, it will go somewhere else that runs a fork of the classic code, and life will go on for us, the contributors.
But if not, then it will die entirely. The web will be a worse place; and I will consider myself worse off for the loss.
Your community doesn't need a site redesign. We haven't asked for it. We don't want it. So you're not doing it for us.
If you're not serving us, you've outlived your usefulness.
The internet routes around defects. You'd do well to remember that.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
How about keeping Classic /. for paying users? All the freeloaders could get the new UI. I'd pay to keep my classic UI.
Dice has had months of feedback to change or improve the situation with Beta but has chosen instead to respond with a giant "fuck you" to its user base. That includes Timothy's non-answer, which is just another "fuck off" in so many fine words. Needless to say, it is that user base which the site is about. It is why people come here and what advertisers pay money to reach. Since Dice has demonstrated an unresponsiveness for months, including this last message from Timothy, it is time to escalate to Dice's bosses, the advertisers.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Why lynx? Because if it works with lynx it not only works with all browsers, it works with the search engines. That ensures that even the comments are searchable. As it is, the javascript is not only a major security hole it slows things down noticeably, even on fast hardware. I didn't buy this fast machine for Dice to use, I bought it because I want a snappy and responsive UI even when browsing the web. That includes Slashdot. Further, working in lynx ensures that screen readers can use the page, meaning that those with little or no sight can still use the web site. It's less work to avoid the javascript and reaches more people and search engines. Beta sucks and just needs to go away. If the powers that be still feel compelled to make changes, scrap Beta and start over beginning with usability and accessiblity.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I am a stick-in-the-mud. I admit it. But the very first time I got the Beta, I specifically hunted down how to turn it off BEFORE I had even read an article. It was unreadable not because of bugs or beta-ness (who here hasn't trialled beta software or written their own?). It was just poor in a multitude of ways that another month's work for your designers won't fix.
But that's not the problem. Half of people will love it, half will hate it. The problem I have is even the implication of "it'll go ahead anyway but maybe we'll tweak it to shut you up". You just don't have the userbase size or user attitude to pull that off.
You rolled out a beta site to PAID customers like me (I may not have given YOU money, but I voluntarily donated to your predecessors to get rid of adverts and stay on old shitty designs once already). Without asking. Without much of a hint that it was even on the horizon (I heard other commenters getting it). With option to turn off, buried under a UI I didn't know or want, but then you ploughed on and folded 25% of your users in.
And then didn't give a shit about the "Fuck off beta" cookie NEVER holding on any of my devices and requiring me to fuck it or the message off every visit. You didn't notice nor care as the boycott began. You let it build to spoil EVERY article before even an official comment, let alone an article. Even that crappy "hoodie" sales video didn't take that long to get a response.
You don't care. What I take from this official notice is that you are going to plough on ahead, and that crippling a quarter of your users for weeks on end is "necessary" (there I was thinking that running beta.slashdot.org separately until commenters were telling people to use it would be better, no?)
I think you forgot that your audience probably include people who roll out larger websites on a daily basis, and people who have survived any number of enforced OS and design changes by being able to fix broken shit for themselves. This is our leisure site. We don't want to, and won't, tolerate shit and excuses that exist to make your boss's site look like his golfing pal's, and you not wanting to admit that the redesign was TOTALLY blind, without user input at the critical stage (before you spend money), and would now make you look silly after spending $X on it to not roll it out anyway (what else would you put on your performance review?).
We don't give a shit about that. We're easy to satisfy. Post the articles that we submit and rate ourselves in a boring old unmaintained interface. How fucking hard is that?
Ok logged in to comment on this. Yes my id number is rather high. I've scrounged this site for years before finally getting around to making an account. The new UI does not fit in with what slashdot is. Not a fan over here. However, this comments and responses section reminds me of when ebay revamped its website scheme and interface a year or 2 ago. Lots of comments from sellers having problems, new interface, lots of "we are listening" talk. And plenty of "well, we're going ahead with what we think it needs instead of what you the user wants" The way i see it, you are trying to attract a new fan base, "audience", or user group and figure that the existing user group will adapt. Some of us will, some of us won't. On a side note "UX design" is bullshit marketing buzzword speak. You might as well say you are updating your page for SEO reasons and want to replace eHOW. Pages of the same crap as everybody else and nothing interesting anymore.
The new beta looks is horrible, less space for the stories, unused borders, way too big font... Please keep the classic look an option, not only for the near future. I'll migrate to altslashdot.org or similar efforts if the new look is gonna be forced. This is from a 15 years slashdot reader.
Ok, you need to redesign the site.
We get it.
Anyone who has tried to read the comment threads on an iPhone gets it. Slashdot didn't make the transition to the separation of content and display well, limiting your flexibility when it comes to adapting to the plethora of new devices popping up. Among other things which I'm sure include "monetizing" the site more.
So, you need to redesign the site. Got it.
So, you created "Beta", whether because of an edict from the new corporate masters or whether it's an internally driven project, it was immediately obvious whoever did Beta ( on mobile especially) didn't even do a basic "This is how people use the site" survey. Or if they did, they did a really shitty job. Maybe they read the comments and thought those were the truth. Anyway.
So, here's a thought:
What if you did the redesign in an open/community driven manner?
Set up a persistent discussion (make it a tab, "Changes are a coming to Slashdot", weigh in with a comment) and explain what changes you want to make, and why. Let the community hash it out. Maybe let us vote on a feature, and allow us to test it out on some dummy (or real) stories to see how it works. Allow us to view different stories under the new look and layout. Maybe with a button that changes the CSS a la CSS Zengarden (simplest reference site) or that redirects us to the same story at beta1.slashdot.org, beta2.slashdot.org, etc if it requires serious architectural changes that can't be done with just a reskin. Or something similar.
Also, set up a persistent discussion board where you guys explain the issues you're trying to fix and why(!) and see what the community has to say. You have one of the largest dens of geeks of varying skill and knowledge levels on this site and it's quite possible they may have an actual solution for you, or a simpler one, or a better one. I know the guys who run slashdot are super-geeks, but you can't know everything (root != god, sorry). But the community has an incredible amount of combined knowledge. Use it. And read the comments at level 1 or 2, since the way the slashdot moderation system works, a lot of valid commentary will get pushed down over the most artful use of an obligatory xkcd Natalie Portman reference.
Then, instead of committing to wholesale bulk changing the site (come on, you have to know better. Who's forcing that on you? New management? Tell them what's up.), make incremental changes. Maybe to one set of features of a subsystem, or an entire section or something. If that section of the site is "Difficult" to fix because it's interwoven with other parts of the site, then spend the time to unravel it. You're going to have to anyway.
But regardless, instead of making bulk changes and driving away the people that allow this site to make enough money for it to change corporate hands a few times, include the community. Maybe we'll have feature suggestions you didn't even know about. Maybe we'll have a solution to what you thought were inexplicable problems that are easily solved because you're just aware the solution exists. Maybe you're agonizing over a feature no one uses.
But try including the community. And it's a community, not an "Audience". Nor are we users. We're a community. Of people. Online. If you need to spin it for the new corporate overlords, we are the biggest "stakeholder" in the redesign. Frame the problem that way on the whiteboards and in the meetings with the IT people.
The beta and redesign comments have spilled into way too many comment threads. Because you guys are clearly managing it poorly. Or someone from corporate is managing it poorly. You've got once change to do this right. Because if you drive the community away, like the former inhabitants of Chernobyl and mySpace, they're not coming back.
Maybe it takes a little longer than it should. Unless you've got some corporate budget target to meet, that's ok with most of us. If it takes a year, or two. Who cares if it results in a truly better slashdot? Put
Reeses
I would prefer a permanent option to use what will likely soon be the 'classic' format. Please, when something isn't broke - don't fix it. Particularly when your own visitors have not asked for it.
Most of us have been here longer than current ownership and management, consider ourselves and each other a large part of why there still is a Slashdot, and think the way to vote with our feet is to stay and deliver a swift clue boot to the behind of ownership and management about how we feel about our Slashdot.
If we didn't think of it as our Slashdot, we wouldn't be here in the first place.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It's as simple as that - you do not understand WHY people visit Slashdot.
Nobody goes here to read amazing fresh news. It's safe to say what whatever "news" you put up have already been posted elsewhere at least half a day before. Your users come here for the discussions, to read what other Slashdot users think about the stories and to reply to those comments. That's why the comments are absolutely, 100%, the most important thing on the Slashdot website, and your beta site makes them much more annoying to read and reply to. Seriously, how can you NOT see that this will cause an exodus if it will go live? This is not a minor inconvenience people will get used to after a few days, it is a fundamental flaw, like replacing the juicy steak on someone's plate with a huge steaming turd.
Your website redesign is going in a completely wrong direction. Everybody is telling you that, you claim to hear it, but you ignore it. This won't end well.
Oh, and get rid of all that whitespace. I am using a 27" screen, not a portrait-oriented iPad, thank you very much.
Soulskill, I'm actually curious. Can you dig in the organization and find out why there's a redesign at this point? What marketing problem are you trying to address with the change? What technical problems? Can the technical problems be addressed with the same look, feel, and feature set?
I'm curious as to why the Beta site is what it is. From the outside, it appears as though a redesign was someone's pet project: Rather than a little new CSS and some minor tweaks to fit a new style, as well as a few new features, somebody decided to go full potato and write a whole new front-end platform. Why? What's wrong with current Slashdot?
It seems to me what you have is a combination of "We feel old, can we do something?" and peoples' pet projects. Slashdot doesn't seem to be market re-targetting--we get the same articles, unlike Trove where I actually get Project Management news--and a site re-design isn't the first step to bringing in new visitors. A site re-design most effectively eliminates current user base, with the trade-off that more of the churn should stay--this is something you do when a lot of people come to your site briefly, but lose interest in one or two visits.
Maybe this project was just initiated wrong. Maybe it should have been something wholly different, like an incremental improvement in features rather than a complete facelift. If you lopped the top title bar off Beta and stuck it on Classic, I would find that interesting: Beta has some new features, or at least makes features I've never explored visible to me. Completely reworking the site is huge shock, and has alienated some users. Comparing these, the former is just an incremental step--an addition of functionality without disrupting the existing site layout--while the latter is disruptive and risky.
I just don't see the business case for the latter--what problem are you trying to solve?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
My name's Beta, you insensitive clod :P
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I'm afraid I can't answer all of your questions, as I'm not part of the team who decided on the redesign.
What I can tell you is that website designs need to continue updating. Slashdot has seen a few redesigns over the years, most recently in 2011. I get that it's really jarring to have it all change at once, rather than incrementally. The thing with minor tweaks and the occasional new feature is that the need for those things never ends -- it's a treadmill.
Keeping up on the treadmill is what some sites choose to do, and it's perfectly valid -- but you also lose the opportunity to make significant changes, and eventually your site just looks old and ill-maintained. This redesign is an attempt to catch up and keep the site current -- not just for now, but for several years from now.
It's not a re-targeting -- we don't want different demographics. But we also don't want to turn off new users in our existing demographic.
It's nice to finally hear that they hear us, folks.
Just because they say they hear us doesn't mean they really grok the situation. All we know for sure is that they are aware that a lot of slashdot users are very vocally angry and protesting their redesign. Whether this will result in any tangible positive action is quite a separate issue. We need actions, now words. They've been warned and now they need to show (not tell) us that they Get It.
Although this hasn't been handled very well, it sounds like they're trying to improve. So, let's think positive and give 'em another chance
Saying it hasn't been handled well grossly understates things. They screwed up BAD. It's pretty rare that you see any topic on slashdot get everyone on a single side of an issue. The fact that this redesign has managed to get pretty much everyone pissed off is a clear indication of how badly they screwed up. Furthermore slashdot doesn't exactly have a sterling history of giving a shit about user feedback. There are loads of technical and editorial flaws that have been ignored for well over a decade. With that sort of history in mind I see little reason to extend any benefit of the doubt. The mere fact that we haven't already left should be about as much as they should expect to get.
Further cynicism isn't helpful at this point and can only lead to the demise of something that we've enjoyed for a long time.
Heaping piles of cynicism and critique along with threats to leave seems to be the only way to actually get their attention. They are taking care of the demise part quite adequately themselves. People come to slashdot for (mostly) intelligent debate about (mostly) technical topics. Nobody gives a shit about "achievements" or friends or silly graphics or eyecandy. They're treating information density like it is something to be feared when in fact their "audience" (a condescending term if there ever was one) actually prefers it that dense. Worse, they have completely missed the fact that THE most important thing about slashdot is the comments. The fact that the beta handles this so badly speaks louder than any PR statement they could possibly issue.
In short they screwed up bad and are getting spanked for it. They need to own it, pull up their pants and get on with the job of fixing the problem. More weasel word "we hear you" statements are a waste of everyone's time.
On the positive side:
These comments are purely on the visual aspects. I've not yet tried the other functionality, nor do I want to when the current beta visual outlook makes my eyes bleed.
Final comments - Consider your audience - by and large, they are mostly techies. They are used to dealing with information dense screens of information and want things quickly. They don't have time to waste scrolling up and down. Obsurdly narrow comment columns are just about the worst thing you can force someone to look at. Don't do it. With the classic site, I can set the widths to what I want and read at my comfort using half of my screen. The beta site makes me waste a whole screen. It doesn't matter how many screens we may have, but one of them is not going to be dedicated just to one website. No way.
Of course, no one likes change - look at how much flack facebook gets everytime they update their visuals - but if you can correct most of the visual oversights and errors you have added to the beta site - if you make the information as accessible as the classic site, perhaps the backlash will be reduced to a dull rumble?
Just a thought.
And no, aside from testing, I won't be using the beta site, nor will I attempt to read through the discussions with that visual layout.
I fiddled with Firebug on the Beta site, and made a few changes that amazingly improves the look'n'feel of it:
- Remove article images.
- Remove the CSS line-height property from both submission and comments.
- Distinguish where submitter intro ends and submission begins. "Quotes" are not enough - the old blockquote worked nicely.
- Make the submission text color black. It feels hazy as it is now.
- Let comments flow full-width. Having them constrained by the huge sidebar is awful.
In general, it seems like you're turning Slashdot from a community driven site to a more modern publisher/aggregator style site, which won't work. If the comments aren't the primary focus, Slashdot loses what makes it Slashdot.
I can get up to date news everywhere - I can't get quality commentary anywhere but Slashdot.
I'm reminded of the Gizmodo redesign. The new site was terrible for readability, destroyed the comment system, and the regular commenters all screamed to high heaven about it.
...basically what I'm saying to you, Slashdot, is don't try to fix things based on the complaints and then decide you've gotten close enough and push ahead anyway. If you can't actually get the new features to work correctly without breaking the beloved functionality of the site, then ABANDON THE UPDATE. You're better off losing the work you've put into the redesign than losing the core of your userbase.
Gizmodo said they were listening and implementing fixes for the issues, but it would take time, give them two months. Two months passed, nothing changed. Anyone who broached the subject was either outright banned, or shouted down and personally insulted by the editors. The lack of fixes was justified by saying "page impressions are higher than ever", so that must mean the redesign was great. But meanwhile, the long time core of commenters all slowly dribbled away from the site.
That giant pile of bullshit made me leave Gizmodo and never go back. I'm hoping Slashdot doesn't do the same thing with this redesign.
Doesn't matter how fast your hardware is; it is always faster without Javascript.
Uhhhh, no. Compare load-times with AJAX-based interfaces versus full-form reloads. Yeah, it might take a bit of time to process the JS initially, but then you can significantly decrease the bandwidth needed to load new content by only sending updates etc.
One of the things that still annoys me about classic is that logging in triggers a full page reload
"Audience?!?!", you're performing for us some how? We're not your audience. In web design we, the visitors and contributors to this site, are the client. You think CmdrTaco built this thing for himself? No, he built it for the community. When you build a website for yourself or some other entity--person or corporation--you or that entity are NOT the ones who drive features or major changes, your site visitors are. Why? Because if they aren't happy or served, they will go somewhere else. It would be a shame to see an internet institution like /. fall. Its design is its brand identity. A first year marketing student could tell you that after a bit of research. Take that away and you lose so much. Sure, it has evolved a bit over time, but to throw the whole thing out and make the site look like every other blog news aggregator is just completely ignorant. To not solicit early design concept input from members that ARE professional web designers and developers is doubly so. I understand. Corporations want to make money off their web properties through ad impressions. Fair enough, but some of us have also paid rent, so to speak and to snub those for input was also bad form. I am sorry folks but you just hit too many strikes on top of the zero improvement in editorial quality since things changed hands. That would be a vast improvement to the site, more so than a redesign. The old boys had an excuse. They had day jobs or were devs for the site. I just think that what you have done will lead to at least one million registered members leaving and not looking back. Members who have been loyal and community minded for decades. It's just a shame.
Gawd, I'll admit it I'm old now. I was young then... but creeping up on 50 makes me old.
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that MBAs and IT people are enemies. And this new beta site is a prime example of that. Sometimes things are "good enough". Slashdot is good enough- and has been for a long time. But the MBAs say "we need more profit". And now they are going to make things shiny.
Slashdot by itself makes money. But it needs to make more money. DIGG was destroyed that way. Didn't that site finally sell to it's new owners fro a small sum?
Want to fix Slashdot? Make it a site that technical people "graduate to" as they become seasoned. Which would mean making no changes whatsoever!
Slowly, I'm watching MBA types eviscerate, good, profitable websites for short term profit. Don't do it to Slashdot.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Tl;DR Go google "Audiworld" "KAWF" "Exodus" Few years ago, Audiworld.com was bought out by Internetbrands. Audiworld's underlying forum engine is an open source project called KAWF. Its a threaded style and most would call basic. Its "Audience" though otherwise. Fast forward: All of InternetBrands automotive forums they own, runs a forum engine by vBulliten. Well, that didnt align up to what the rest of their portfolio they owned (eg common underlying foundation to make it easy to push ads to their "Audience" $$$$$$) IB created a Beta site to preview the NEW Audiworld. With credit, they made a solid attempt to keep the look and feel of the old forums to please the hundreds of thousands of members of its "Audience" daily. It wasnt the same. In the end the community "Audience" said a resounding "No, we dont like it". InternetBrands made the change anyways. After all Management knows better than its "Audience" A few of the core "audience" started another website called Quattroworld.com which ran the opensource KAWF forum software that they created similar feel for their "Audience" The result was a HUGE mass exodus. Any reference on Audiworld pointing to Quattroworld, InternetBrands immediately started removing the posts so people can find their new home. Their familiar community. Audiworld sits today a former to its once glorious self with little "Audience" but its not the 400lb gorilla it once was. Dice... Take a lesson. Sure, you can change over . Your management knows better than these insensitive clods here. You can introduce bot posted articles that promote a self serving advertising interest. You can make the look and feel easier to browse on phone. (I dont BTW) You will run off the nerds to another news for nerds forums. I only have a six digit 500K UserID, so I dont know what I'm talking about.
This is my signature.
Why not start at the beginning and tell us why the heck you're redesigning in the first place.
I read you're little "WE HEAR YOU" post. And no, you're still not listening. If you were, you'd know that we like slashdot just the way it is. No redesign. Why are you trying to change it at all?!? We're all baffled. Your stupid little post just said "we'll slow down". But nobody asked you to "slow down". We /told/ you to stop. Just don't touch anything.
If, for some unfathomable reason, you think you do need to change things, why don't you start by explaining why. Why are you trying to make /. look just like Ars Technica? Are your revenues hurting and you need to work more ads in there or increase readership to charge more for your ads? What gives. Why change it at all?
And if it's is revenue-related, why not just ask for money like Wikimedia. I donate to them every time they ask because I value their service. I'd give /. $5 ever once in a while too. I don't want to click on any ads, nor do I want to sign up for some paid account (I rarley log in anyway). I just want to read my FA's and comments. (Okay, maybe just headlines and comments).
The comments section of the beta is absolutely terrible, horribly unusable. The way it is now, the day beta's comment section is the only option, would be the last day I come here. I cannot begin to think of how it could be fixed without a complete rewrite or a kluge that puts classic's comment section in its stead. The two biggest problems:
1. The comment boxes NEED to span the full width of the page.
2. Every little feature in the classic comment boxes (UID #, moderation breakdown, parent post link, etc) MUST be retained.
3. Changing view thresholds needs to be easy, persistent, and actually work.
That having been said, I actually don't mind the beta's main page. As it is right now, it is at least usable and visually appealing. Helpful improvements:
1. Some more customization (font sizes and maybe an option for the green and white bar for the headlines).
2. If they want to keep the giant picture next to each story, the picture should be directly related to the thing being discussed. A picture next to a story about a fire at Iron Mountain should show the actual fire at iron mountain. If no picture on that level is available, stick with the small generic graphics.
I remember Kevin Rose justifying changing the design for Digg.com on his "Random" TV show / video blog before they went live... "We don't want Digg to be like Slashdot who never changes". Shortly after the changes Digg traffic tanked from Alexa 150 to 1000+. They lost millions upon millions of dollars.
My point is this, the design doesn't make the site the content does (eg Craigslist).
Instead of spending another 6+ months on this new site, how about you spend the time to actually find and create compelling stories that people want to read instead?
You're content really is bad & you know you've been skating by for far to long. Really, the only saving grace of the entire site is the comment section (you know your community...)
You know, spend time on the news site that reports on & investigates on.... news.
I've been a reader, moderator and meta-moderator since 1998 or 1997. Last fucking century.
I've read and participated in many of the flare-up (remember John Katz?) and redesigns. All of them have been an issue, but nothing like this one. This one really is different; it's not just old people bitching about "the new thing".
To be brief, the redesign sucks. It took a layout that is simple, clean, easy to read (and more importantly, easy to skim) and turned it into a "modern" mess. UI is hard. Really hard. This time, the UI team just missed the boat. The new design makes it harder to read the site. It looks prettier to some people, but it's harder to read.
Secondly, you shouldn't even consider changing over until the comments works. The comments should be the first thing you get right. When /. was born, there wasn't much else like it, but now there's a million tech blogs. What makes slashdot different is the comments. When the comments are broken, there's not much difference between you and Engadget.
Most of us only have so much time in the day to gather "news". I can scan Google news, Ars, Engadget, Gizmodo and all the rest, but when I want to read good commentary from smart people who have an interest, I come here. Kill that, and you're no longer the innovator you started out as; you're just another copycat.
Bite the bullet, admit defeat, and try again. This time, figure out why people like me have been coming to the same website for 15 years. Slashdot and Ars have been part of my daily reading, since I got on the internet. Two sites. Please don't make it one.
We've had only a few major redesigns since 1997; we think it's time for another.
You've had one in 2009 that was so utterly horrible that it resulted in on of two times I used the journal, in over 15 years.
No, it's not time for another. There is never a time for a redesign. There can be a need for one, but that's a totally different thing. You know, a need happens to address a problem. The very people that make this site - because people come for the articles so little the abbreviation RTFA originated here - have told you strongly that there isn't a problem that needs fixing.
The argument is "broader audience". That's a business need. That basically means "we think we can make more money off this site". Which is perfectly fine if it doesn't conflict with the needs of the audience you already have. Else what you do isn't growing the audience, it's exchanging it.
People are already talking about setting up /. replacements. People with the know-how, resources and drive to actually do it. In a time where the sentiment on this site is strong enough that it could actually gain momentum. If you still haven't realized that you're playing with a live handgrenade, you are dangerously stupid.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1) Many of us do NOT want to give up Slashdot "classic" AT ALL and have said so repeatedly and forcefully. Yet you still tell us that it will only be available until you are done fine tuning the new look. (a new look moreover that we've said we hate)
2) you claim to recognize that what makes Slashdot so special is the community, but I think you fail to recognize a key aspect of this community. We are chemists, physicists, developers, sysadmins, engineers and so on. A HUGE percentage of us are not just geeks, but professionally trained and qualified geeks in some profession that takes brains. Over the years we've self-selected that demographic. Your desire to be "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience." runs the risk of diluting what the Slashdot community is. You are courting a new Eternal September and it appears that you don't even realize you are doing so. boards.4chan.org/b/ would cease to be what it is if it became mainstream. I think you can recognize and agree with that. A flood of pop culture would destroy /. just as a flood of nice average folks would destroy /b/ and drive out the /b/tards.
3) This seriously is a New Coke vs Classic Coke moment. Like the people at Coca-cola, you want to increase your market, I get that. Like Coca-cola, you are attempting to do so by copying the kind of features found among the competition. They failed to allow for the fact that they had spent decades differentiating themselves from Pepsi. Copying the Pepsi taste threw all that away. Slashdot is not primarily a content producer, but a news aggregator, so if you go with the glossy magazine look, what is there to separate you from say Ars Technica? We geeks often make a bit of a fetish out of choosing hobbies, sources of info and social situations that are less accessible to the common herd. In other words, we kind of like being outsiders. If you expand your market, you'd be throwing away that abstract sense of clique-ishness that attracts me to this place. I'm probably not alone in that feeling...
4) At the same time, you're not fixing things that in the group opinion, should have been fixed ages ago. Where is the Unicode and foreign language support? I personally support the long standing choice to not allow full HTML in comments, but I may be in the minority on that. I still think we should be able to incorporate umlauts and other accent characters though.
Here are my straightforward suggestions for expanding your appeal and market without killing off what Slashdot is to us long loyal members: a) Allow the full Unicode set and such
b) Don't EVER "dumb it down". You can try expanding the range of news items you list, maybe add images to if they are truly relevant to the story, but do not simplify things. In fact; feel free to get MORE detailed, more in-depth. Make your own articles +5 Informative or Insightful!
c) spellcheck, spellcheck spellcheck. There should be more to editing that picking a story and copypasta the summary submitted.
d) You already have slashdot.jp , why not slashdot.ru or maybe slashdot.eu ?(which would feature multiple languages, but probably primarily French and German). While you're at it, put links to the other language sites at the bottom of the page.
e) I for one would love to be able to read the days most actively commented stories from the Japanese Slashdot. (or any other language geeky articles might be published in) I have no idea how hard it would be to implement a *decent* auto-translation of top articles in foreign languages. I think it would be easy to do shitty translation on the fly, so the challenge would be t
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Fuck the beta and everything it stands for. When classic is gone this long time lurker is also gone. Slash will go the way Digg did if they don't change course... and dice doesnt give a shit so that aint happening. So fuck them too and what they have done to /.
Let's cut to the chase.
The bottom line is that readers here are your product, and the readers simply do not like the new beta for a number of reasons, including:
* Moderation (which is part of what makes Slashdot's unique brand so unique) is horribly broken
* You are making it look like a slick magazine. Another aspect of Slashdot's unique brand is the image for each story on the front page
* View levels is broken - it seems to be highest modded or all, with nothing in between.
* the wide, ever-expanding gutters are obnoxious. The story and discussion pages are mostly text; forget the gutters.
* You are following a common trend of using far too much white space - we know the site has to include ads and you are trying to make room for them on the page, but what we're happiest with is ads which are subtle (think google's adwords) rather than obnoxious.
regarding ads: many (if not most) of us block that crap because all too often PHBs who decide to include ads somehow think that by getting all up in our face that they'll convince us to buy their product, when in fact the opposite is true; if you try to block the content I am viewing, start blaring loud audio ads when I am checking out the site late at night, or are otherwise rude and obnoxious, we will take note of the advertiser and NOT buy their product. Online ad techniques which might work in broadcast (being obnoxious, loud, etc.) works against you online, because you're getting in the way.
Keep the ads subtle and cut way, way down on the white space.
Also, when checking out tech news we like the content crammed into a small area for easy, rapid skimming
We (the readers, who are your product, if you recall how publishing and broadcasting work) have made it clear many times that generally we like the site as-is, but would like to see some bugs fixed (such as enabling unicode) and a better choice of editors before a story is published - and maybe do some cursory fact checking prior to posting, and maybe post some more timely stories, instead of stories which were published days or even weeks over on reddit, etc.
Don't change the look and feel of the site; fix what is actually broken, and maintain your product (readership) marketability. By deploying the new beta site without addressing a lot of major flaws, you are going to lose readership, which makes your product (readership numbers) a much lesser value to your customers (the advertisers).
Oh, and the mobile site? Has anyone at Dice even TRIED slashdot on a mobile device? The mobile site simply does not work.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
First I would dispute this as being Beta software. I've been doing beta testing and QA for many years - now I teach audio and media theory, but I am still actively involved with software development. Slashdot Beta is actually Slashdot Alpha. Beta is feature complete. Whatever Slashdot is, is not. I go to Beta. I post a response. I get a notice that says:
You had mail. Paul read it, so ask him what it said.
Trademarks property of their respective owners. Comments owned by the poster. Copyright © 2014 Dice. All Rights Reserved. Slashdot is a Dice Holdings, Inc. service
Well, (1.) I can't "had mail", and (2.) who the fuck is Paul?
And why do I still have to type fucking HTML code to format a comment? That's been a royal pain in the balls since like *forever*, and one of the least attractive aspects of this website, and yet THAT is still required to use in comments - there's no Rich Text editor, something even the dorkiest of third rate commenting systems has. So, you've "improved" the site, but not made it more usable.
So, I figure, well, maybe I should go look at the "mail I had", and lo and behold, I can't find the link to my account. I scroll up - not there. Then I realise I had CTRL-plus a few times to make things bigger (I'm in the process of getting new glasses, so I need to blow things up a lot so I can see them until my new lenses arrive). So: I go back to the old slashdot, and I see the horizontal scroll bar. I go to the new site, and the scroll bar is missing. Which is stupid and wrong. So, I figure "they can't have deleted access to my account" so I go CTRL-minus a few times and bingo - the link to my account appears. So I click it and I cannot find any link to a messaging or email feature.
So, at that point, I'm getting kind of pissed off.
So, I post some stuff in a comment, you know - contributing like the good scout I usually am. I type a line, put in a paragraph command, and what happens? IT CHANGES FONT! WTF?!?!?!
No - Beta is not a beta - It's mid alpha, at best. I appreciate slashdot wanting to be more friendly to mobile platforms - that is understandable. What you fail to realise is you CAN do both - just sniff out the reciever and feed it the version of code it needs. If you can do it for fucking IE6, you can do the same for iOS or Android. Lots of other sites do that, why can't you?
I have FREQUENTLY reposted slashdot articles on FB and other social media. I post fairly often - usually 2 - 3 per week. I have excellent karma. I am (way) old enough to know better - old enough to know good from bad and quality from dross. I regularly mod comments. This slashdot "beta" is bullshit. Laughably inferior software.
If this "beta" goes through with its present (dys)functionality, I will likely reduce my presence and activity here.
I'm sort of known for having posts that say "Dear (so and so) FUCK YOU!" Sometimes, I get moderated as flamebait or troll when I do that, but sometimes I get modded as +5 Insightful when I do that. I don't think it is terrifically insightful to say this, but it is honest and I do believe I speak for many others when I say:
Dear Slashdot / Dice / developers and designers
FUCK YOU.
You want to improve things here? DO THIS: ,and a desktop version, just like you would modify your CSS etc by sniffing out the browser.
1. Fork it so there is an iOS version, an Android version
2. Don't change fonts when a paragraph command is entered.
3. I shouldn't have to enter HTML in the first place. RTF editors have been around for ages. Give us a nice simple one that recognises return character as a paragraph break, allows bolding and italicisation or BOTH AT ONCE by selecting text and clicking a button or two, and finally the use of text as a link by simply selecting the text, clicking a link button which brings up a text field for the URL with a "done" button. That would bring slashdot up to 1998. 4. The white space looks all designery-ish, but it doesn't help me read it any faster.
That is all.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The /. staff aren't censoring comments. People like me, with mod points, are. Shit that's off topic is off topic, no matter how full of righteous fury the poster is or how justified they think they are in posting off topic comments.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
I won't get into my detailed, point-by-point criticisms of the beta, because they already have that. Instead, I want to express the thing that bothers me the most by far about all this. As some commenters above have pointed out, it's tied into them calling us an "audience".
My biggest problem with the redesign is that it calls out, loud and clear, that Slashdot no longer values the existing community. The redesign is including things that are of no value at all to us, and is omitting things that are of great value. That means they want a different community altogether. Or, not a community at all, but an "audience".
This phrase in the OP sent chills up my spine: "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience." That's pure marketing-speak for "we need to have readers in a more profitable demographic". The problem is, that demographic wants things that are completely incompatible with what most in the existing community wants.
This feedback from timothy (and I thank him for it, truly -- communication is better than silence) has made me more pessimistic about the future of Slashdot than I was before. It communicates very strongly that they are wanting to turn Slashdot into something common, mass-produced, and intended for "consumption" by a more general "audience".
In other words, it seems that they want it to stop being Slashdot at all.