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."
Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because it goes against Dice's plans for Slashdot.
You make some good points, but the thing I don't understand about this idea that Dice is intentionally repurposing Slashdot is that 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. So, can someone please explain to me why the deliberate destruction of Slashdot would be in Dice's business interest? Also, if that's what they wanted to do, why bother with a transition to a new format at all? Why not just pull the plug on the old site if you don't care about alienating the existing "audience" because you'll be doing something completely different with the domain?
It seems far more logical to me that they would try to retain the current "audience" as much as possible, which is where most of the value of the site is. 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."
So, personally, I think they want to restore profitability via a change in format (which may or may not work - probably not), while somehow retaining as much of the current "audience" as they can. That may be an impossible task, but if we assume they're currently losing money on Slashdot, they don't have much to lose by trying. At the very worst, they could make it break even by just shutting it down, then make a modest profit by selling the domain name for $100K or whatever.
mmmmmmmm...copy pasta... /. aint broke so dont fix it.
The new site is not "movin on up". It's more like "movin on down", a step backwards.
Dice, I am protesting the beta site. I will not follow any links from an article and I will not participate in any meaningful discussion.
You speak of a wider audience, who is this wider audience? Oh, I get it. You aren't satisfied with 3+ million registered users and now you need to attract the clueless hordes to drive up advertising revenue. /. isnt about the news, its about the comments and its simplicity. We dont need pictures or silly web2.0html5socialmediabatmobile layouts or interfaces. Just gives us the damn text summary, links and the goodness of the comment section.
Fellow /.'ers, join me in this protest. Do not post a comment related to an article or click any links. Instead, post a comment in protest of the beta design. Mods (who wish to participate in the protest): Mod up protest comments comments only. Do not mod down on-topic comments as it isn't fair to the poster.
I'm not part of the vocal crowd, but I do support the efforts. Let me explain clearly and concisely on what's going on.
/. is useful mainly because of the discussion threads (ie. user contribution), yet the management consider you "audience", even if you are actually the reason of the site's traffic.
1. You are considered "audience";
2. In 2013 the site failed to increase on ad-revenue. And there is no evidence it will increase in the future. Hence Dice decided to slash the site's budget from several millions to zero. (source: http://www.prnewswire.com/news... "Recent Developments" chapter).
3. Hence, in layman's terma, Dice has (most probably) decided to kill the site.
4. Since there is no budget, you will (most probably) not see the Classic functionality implemented in Beta (comment and moderation system, which is the heart of the community, which is the heart of the site)
5. Hence, Dice's "reaching out to the audience" at this point is pretty useless, as they might as well listen, but they will do nothing about it.
6. Hence, this site is already dead. The community wants to migrate to better shores and there are several ideas as to how/where. Not calling them out by name, because I don't want to be slanted.
7. At this point, I don't think the Slashcott will be of any effect, but it's worth trying; you never know.
Bonus Point. Since the heart of the site is user-generated content, an aspect of the boycott is stopping the regular flow of comments. Can't argue with that.
Hope this helps.