Slashdot Mirror
Finnish Police Board Wants Justification For Wikipedia's Fundraising Campaign
linjaaho writes "Yesterday, the admin list of Finnish language Wikipedia received a request for comment from the National Police Board of Finland. The Police Board claims that the fundraising message appearing on the top of the Wikipedia pages is illegal fundraising and is punishable by criminal law. The Police Board asks how much money have they raised and ask for justification for the campaign. This is not the first time the Police Board has attacked fundraising; in 2012, a crowdfunded textbook Kickstarter project was delayed by a similar request for comment."
Not sharing your vision and intentions with your users is underhanded, by it is hardly a conspiracy. Dice is, in my opinion, just trying out a Hail Mary business plan.
Dice made a bad investment in buying Slashdot. Assuming that they aren't using sleight-of-hand accounting, not only did Dice not see the profit they expected, they aren't making a profit at all. In trying to minimize their losses, scavenging the website and its resources is perhaps the only option they think is left.
this idea that Dice is intentionally repurposing Slashdot
The fact remains that, by their own account, /. is a B2B social platform. We all surely agree that, as it is now, /. can hardly be called that. No matter how ill conceived it may sound, that is indeed what they have in mind with their Beta revamp.
if they do so, they lose almost all the value of the existing site, leaving only a well known domain name and some sort of "brand". The former is easy to come by, and the latter is of no value if all its previous "audience" becomes disillusioned with it.
In treating /. as a B2B site, Dice will lose many of its existing users. Since /. is all about the comments, all they will end up with is a no more than a well known IT brand. I assume they expect the number of new visits to very quickly surpass the abandonment rate of their existing userbase. Even if they aren't "out to get us", crippling the commenting and moderation systems (e.g. no visible UIDs nor any direct links to comments) is a hare brained idea that will ruin /. for the majority of slashdotters. It will, in short, create a mass exodus to other forums. Sadly, none of them have a moderation system that comes anywhere close to Slashcode.
If we assume they're losing money with the current format, it might be logical to for them to change formats, though there's a significant risk of alienating the current "audience" if they change it too much too fast, or otherwise handle the transition badly - as they've clearly done. As the old saying goes, "Don't ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence."
I think we're both saying the same thing.