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DHI Group Inc. Announces Plans to Sell Slashdot Media
An anonymous reader writes: DHI Group Inc. (formerly known as Dice Holdings Inc.) announced plans to sell Slashdot Media (slashdot.org & sourceforge.net) in their Q2 financial report. This is being reported by multiple sources.
Editor's note: Yep, looks like we're being sold again. We'll keep you folks updated, but for now I don't have any more information than is contained in the press release. Business as usual until we find a buyer (and hopefully after). The company prepared a statement for our blog as well — feel free to discuss the news here, there, or in both places.
1. ramrodding of Beta down everyone's throats
2. shameful attempt to ignore Gamergate (still not a single article on
3. constant stories about women being less represented in STEM vs. the general population, with analysis of the cause always limited to accusations of sexism (and devoid of analysis of innate female preferences, or corporate agendas designed to inflate the workforce)
* Honorable mention for Bennett Haselton
The Company, however, has not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business
I, for one, am damn proud you were also unable to "leverage" the user base against Gamergate in order to protect corrupt journalists and fall in line with rest of the colluding outlets who tried to cover up the scandal and smear the dissenters (fuck knows why you thought it was a good idea to try). Countless other forums outright banned pro-GG discussion, and Slashdot's long history of user moderation and fierce opposition to censorship must have been a much-needed thorn in your side.
This is a website read by NERDS, not people wearing business suits.
If you want to make money with this website, don't do the same stupid mistakes as DHI Group Inc.
Keep the news and topics nerds-related. Make sure you have nerds on your staff to manage the website and keep your hands off everything.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Maybe we can buy it and make it not-for-profit or something. Does anyone know how much they're asking?
Hey, any of you Slashdot geeks won the lottery lately and have lotsa money you don't know what to do with?
Just think, you could be the new hero riding in on your shining horse to save us all! (Until we all become disillusioned with you, and we'll flame you like we have everyone else. :) )
Beta is awful, thats just a fact of life and so many others have confirmed it in this thread. Among other reasons this turd is being sent to auction:
s/audience/community. you did that to yourselves, you could have undone it any time you wanted to. we're respected professionals, not a captive audience. we are intelligent enough to run this site. and many, many others like it.
slashvertisements. how much more do you need to milk from this site. Theres a reason people put "slashdot without adblock is awful" in their sigs. we never asked for videos.
The layout has gone to shit. Look at soylentnews.org, now back at yourself, now back at soylentnews. note how soylent listened to its users and implemented SSL? they never added tags, they never forced new icons for every iota of topic, and nobody pushed like and share on all social media abilities.
Good people go to bed earlier.
As bad as what they did to Slashdot has been, I feel Sourceforge got shafted far, far worse.
I mean, the Slashvertisements and other abortive attempts to ram Dice content down our throats really weren't all that surprising. If anything, the only surprise was that they thought it work in the first place, especially given how ham-handed they were about doing it.
With Sourceforge, however, they were basically caught injecting malware/crapware into downloads. That's about as shady as it gets, and it's going to be extremely hard to get anyone to trust code from there in the future. It would be like... I don't know, maybe if Slashdot was discovered to have been running disinformation/propaganda campaigns for the government/intelligence agencies or something that were paying Dice for it.
What's the price? The community could conceivably use some crowd-funding platform and everyone could pitch in $5 if they wanted to. I would imagine that ads could cover most of the hosting and bandwidth expenses and the community can just take turns filling the editor role such that the ongoing costs should be minimal. Anything extra could always go towards supporting open source development efforts.
I, for one, think the editors will welcome they're new non-DICE overlords. Let's hope for everyone's sake, this idea catches on.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
Seems like it would be cheaper to just stand up your own Slashcode server and call it NextDot or something. I'd rather spend the money on hosting than give it to Dice.
I read the internet for the articles.
Sure it could. HuffPoo, anybody?
(There is supposed to be a Sarcmark® here, but my $1.99 check hasn't cleared, yet...)
then piss in it every day for three years or so, and invite your corporate buddies to do the same. Wonder why fewer and fewer people come by for a swim, and why you can't make any money from fishing in the lake. Sell it, probably at a loss, and move on to your next 'conquest'. Way to go Dice!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
"Watch Fox News buy it and bring back myspace."
Worse, Slate could buy it, trying out a succession of new commenting systems that don't work properly. At the end the first year, we'll be wishing we had Beta back.
Hint:
An article about yet-another-buyout / possible closedown of the site gets 150-ish comments, most of them crowing on how bad DHI have treated us.
I'm pretty low-numbered nowadays, yet I used to be the "newbie" on here.
The Reg gets more comments per article and has a lot more articles. Even SoylentNews gets not-much-less than Slashdot does and that's basically a startup Slash-clone.
Site is not what it was, it would be quite a trick to bring it back now.
That was the `80s Bill. I think he has actual hobbies now, like fighting malaria and ruining education.
> Yay! It will either get better, or finally die.
That is NOT the only option. It could get worse AND stick around for a very long time.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
You have to admit, your post does sound a little, well, angry and extremist.
How about letting your users go there and see for themselves just how "extremist" it is?
Do... do we have some way of stopping them?
People don't get modded out of the community. They may be modded down, like here, but SN doesn't permaban people for expressing unpopular opinion like Slashdot does.
I think what he meant is that people get tired of being modded down all the time and leave.
What I can say is that a lot of the assertions you are making are bullshit, and you should leave it up to the few remaining non-corporate-sockpuppet users you have to decide for themselves.
Now you have to admit, this smells of extremism. The hostility. The defensiveness. The strong emotional statements that don't seem based in reality. OTOH, I'm almost certainly a corporate shill who can be ignored? Because Slashdot.
1) No, that's completely wrong. Think about that one a bit harder.
2) You'll find this is the situation with moderators pretty much everywhere in real life; you must be young
3) Also wrong, and obviously so; you know very well posting to a thread you moderated will undo the moderation, and frankly it matters very little since moderation can't completely remove any posts.
4) You'll find this is also true of the internet in general.
5) You'll find the distinction between these two types of posts is only clear if you're the one who posted it. This is a universal constant of society too; nothing to do with slashcode.
6) You didn't think this one out very carefully either, obviously.
7) See #6. What, do you think getting all your friends to help gang up and moderate some poor sucker's post to -1000 is gonna actually help this situation any? Careful... your hidden agenda is showing...
8) see #5
9) Seriously? all your complaints above and you actually still think someone is gonna use a "disagree" moderation when they can call it a troll or flamebait? you said yourself there's no accountability.... come on. if you want to actually address problems you have to actually think out your "solutions" to their logical conclusion. Even if you could enforce use of "disagree" moderation, there's absolutely no sane world where disagreeing with someone's post should be justification for being allowed to moderate it. In fact, quite the opposite; what your suggestion creates here is called a "conflict of interest." At best, this suggestion doesn't change anything at all and just adds server load and development costs. At worst, it actually causes/exacerbates a problem you claim to care about; that legitimate posts are unfairly moderated down.
10) I'm not even sure what you mean by this. The moderator points are assigned clearly by past behavior. Don't post anonymously so much and you'll get more moderator points to spend. Simple. This point also appears to be wrong, but Its possible I just don't understand what you mean, or you meant to type something else.
And then we have:
11) I guess I don't know about any delays, but my guess is its a server-load/hosting-cost issue. Not all ACs are going to be the honorable gentlemen you envision them to be; many of them are actually trying to crash or infect Slashdot's servers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the real world, I can't imagine any high profile website that allows users to post content anonymously without any sort of throttle whatsoever. You must not maintain web software for a living.
12) Ok this one you're right about, and I actually agree with you. Someone clearly needs to brush up on their understanding of character sets and regular expressions, because the data handling of this text field is so amateur-hour 1996. Its pretty embarrassing to see it still behaving the same exact way in 2015. They should have put development man-hours into fixing this first, instead of that whole "Slashdot Beta" boondoggle.
13) God help us all if you actually get your way on this one. The rest of us would rather NOT see every single user's stupid rich-content banner-ad signature. I'm certain the signature character limit was specifically chosen to prohibit the ability for the signatures to carry a Google tracking tag. Your other opinions might just be misguided, but this one makes me suspect you're actually a bad person, who seeks to do harm on those around him.
And of course...
14) Ok, I agree here too. The editing sucks. At least they could fix obvious typos and grammatical errors, missing links, outright inaccuracies, etc. Its pretty clear most of them take zero pride in their work, or else their parents just didn't discipline them enough as children.
15) No, the firehose is there so all submissions are visible by the users. If you think its a waste of time just don't use it. Nobody ever implied you should in the first place. Your lack of self control isn't a justification for removing
Disagree != misunderstand.
Nice advertisement in your signature.
NO. Just no.
I agree with you about the stupid character set problem and the need for better editors/editing, but almost everything else you complain about is actually what makes moderation here vastly superior to just about any other site. It's certainly not perfect, and there are perhaps tweaks to be done to moderation, but if we did what you suggest, it would completely fill the site with crap posts and allow the moderation to be gamed as on every other internet site.
Most of your complaints could be solved by not posting AC and by contributing positively to the site (and thus getting good karma). If users can't be bothered to do that, I don't want to see their posts. I only want to see an AC if it's a really superior post, so the default moderation levels are about right. Again, it's not perfect, but it's superior to most sites and to almost everything you're proposing.
Slashdot only needs some slight tweaks to get back to being excellent again.
1. 1 minute between posts
2. User names of people who moderated a post listed
3. Lower bar to entry for getting mod points, because at the moment you have to choose between commenting freely and gaming the system to get mod points
4. Get rid of the share button
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC