Slashdot Mirror
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.
I would love to see Slashdot purchased by an open-source-minded non-profit. That's the core audience, why not let the lunatics run the asylum?
Given the rough estimate of a company's value (if it's not publicly traded) is about 4 times its yearly profits, I'd say Slashdot is worth somewhere between $12m and $16m.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Can we buy it with funding via kickstarter? How much do we need to raise?
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
It has the advantage of once having been worth something. People have a fondness for it. It might tempt back some of the old users. Social networks have an advantage in that they're worth more when more people are there, and that history might just barely let them leverage that.
The main value of the site, at least to me, was always its user base. I didn't RTFA because the commenters would often be able to give me a better summary of what was really going on. Especially when TFA was clickbait; I could see why it was clickbait without having to read it myself. Or for sciencey stuff that's out of my domain, Slashdot often had people who could explain it at my level. (That is, more than the average layman, but less than a grad student in that field.)
I'm not gonna get my hopes up, but I'll note that I'm still here, though mostly lurking. There may be others waiting for an improvement to the site's management to contribute more.
You've basically just described SoylentNews, a Slashdot clone that appeared when the Slashdot Beta shit really started heating up.
And you know what? I think it's clear that it's an absolute hell-hole that's worse than Slashdot today, even!
That community is small. It's small because many of the regular users there are best described as obnoxious extremists. They naturally drive away most normal users with their toxicity.
The few remaining normal users tend to get modded out of the community quite quickly, merely for daring to express ideas that the extremists dislike.
The submissions are affected, too. Many of them are pretty much identical copies of submissions that appeared on Slashdot hours or days earlier. The original submissions are typically from the extremists, and usually focus on some obscure and minor political controversy somewhere, typically without any relevant connection to science, or mathematics, or technology, or computing, or software. Good stories don't have a chance at making the front page there.
We don't need the same sort of toxic environment developing here at Slashdot. As bad as things may seem here, they are nowhere near as bad as at SoylentNews, in my view. At least there are some normal users here. Letting the extremists run the show here, too, would just drive away these normal users, resulting in yet another imbalanced, biased environment where moderation is used to attack people with original or controversial opinions.
I guess I should've taken that $2k offer my 3 digit UID when I chance. It's been a fun 18 years or so, but the future of /. doesn't seem to bright.
Fuck Ajit Pai