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.
Stay tuned!
That's all I've got to say about that.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... time to find another sucker ^H^H^^H buyer ...
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.
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?
Maybe the next company will have more of a clue in managing the /. asset.
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?
Even Dice hates it now.
That sounds like terrible news. Really, it would be hard to have a less coherent business plan than the ones that have been used thus far.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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. :) )
I hope they don't toss the editors out on the street!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
From a cannon, perhaps? Please?!?
[DHI], however, has not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business;
Maybe they should have, I don't know, worked on making their "recruitment business" less of a steaming pile of sub-mediocrity? It's been a joke since before they started shitting all over slashdot and chased most of the users who might have been valuable enough to "leverage."
And Sourceforge? Christ, even that NAME is a liability now.
I think I can rummage that much up for this site. Given what I've seen around here lately I would expect $5 would cover the expenses of this site for everything but the web hosting costs (which shouldn't be awful considering how few people still read this site). I could probably get the other users to kick in $5 each as well, as we could really have a party.
Or do we have to buy sourceforge in the same purchase as well? That is actually worth something. We might need a banker.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Can't handle this roller coaster, almost as much drama as reddit. /s
bye.
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.
Not with that amount of cash you can't..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The behavior was so bad over at Sourceforge that it was probably illegal:
https://forum.filezilla-projec...
Finally news for nerds that matters.
They mention plans to sell Slashdot Media and SourceForge... Then the rest of the financial report only talks about Slashdot Media and nothing about SF.
Perhaps they realized they utterly destroyed SF to the point where it's an unrecoverable lost cause.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
How many unique visitors does this site get anymore? For many years I would visit this site daily for the in depth discussions of technical news. Sadly, with the scooping by sometimes days by other news or congregator sites, I seem to only visit once a week now. Even the number of comments shown for each story is way down. It's as if our beloved /. is a shell of what it once was because the community left and moved on to other sites.
With the declining revenue, anyone could see this coming.
What would it cost to buy out slashdot, presuming it was running at a profit with a skeleton crew before it was sold to dice? Form a non profit, buy the site, rights, etc etc. $2 million? Is slashdot even worth that much? Would they take $300,000 in return for perpetual dice.com banner ads or something? Their tax lawyers would be able to write it off as a loss/capital gain and shareholders could swallow it due to the perpetual advertising presence. We could keep the existing staff and just turn it back in to the independent walled garden it was at one point.
If dice.com, an IT jobs site, could not turn a profit with this, and weren't able to monetize slashdot without destroying what little value it had, I doubt the market value is much more than 95% of the current ad revenue they're getting. These sorts of sites aren't really geared towards being sold to the highest bidder, as the community is ready to walk at any point so you're kind of stuck with the revenue it's already generating via banner ads.
Maybe they could just gift it to the community with the advertising condition? We all knew the buyout was a terrible idea, maybe it's time to just give back the site.
moox. for a new generation.
I expect the end is near for slashdot. Its been a nice run, but all things must come to an end. Either it doesn't get sold and shutdown or it gets sold to someone who used the domain names for something else, but slashdot is now in hospice.
So long and thanks for all the fish!
The site has become unviewable due to flash and other stupidity used for advertising tying up CPU.
People here don't use "fail" as a noun, and we don't think everything is epic. Please, oh great and mighty flying spaghetti monster, don't let the next owner turn /. into another digg.
[X] CowboyNeal made me, you insensitive clod!
I figure Slashdot can't be worth more than about $100,000 USD. Valuing SourceForge is a bit more complicated. A lot of traffic, but major damage to the brand lately.
Something like. Kickstarter, or a purchase by a successful community member or three, isn't out of the question.
I'm moving house next week and that was going to bring my number of house moves equal to slashdot owners since I've been a member.
And then this happens.
Damn you all!
-- "I know that this is vitriol, no solution, spleen-venting, but I feel better having screamed, don't you ?"
REDDIT! REDDIT! REDDIT!
I told you people!
¾ ¾ somethin' about a filter
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Don't try and increase the pageviews or market share. Focus on your original audience of nerds who work in IT and you will keep the audience you have.
Cut back on the high-response, low-quality articles about politics and personality, and stick to news about machines, programming languages, and science / engineering breakthroughs. News articles that are actually useful for your readership. Sociopolitical stories with a technology slant are weak sauce and belong on lesser sites like reddit.
The Register is a good example of a site that caters to its audience with a wide range of informative and entertaining articles. Try to replicate their mix of topics.
Get rid of the blatant attempts at getting money from us (like Slashdot Deals). It's sleazy and I doubt you make any money on it.
If you're going to tweak the web page design, make a better mobile site and cut back on the javascript.
I've offered them 14,500 bottle caps and $100 in NCR money. They want me to throw in 12 bottles of Nuka-Cola and a box of Fancy Lad Snacks because of some contractual obligation to Pudge.
We're still in negotiations. If I end up buying the place, I plan to paint it green and forward the link it to Soylent News.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The moderation has been particularly awful lately. Many perfectly fine comments get modded down to -1. Usually they don't even show the reason for the downmod. It's even getting common to see stories with only a few comments, and all have been modded down. Moderation mistakes are to be expected, of course, but a lot of these downmoddings appear to be targeted. It isn't just GNAA or BSD-is-dying trolls being downmodded, but rather people who have dared to present an independent viewpoint. It's getting to be like Reddit or Hacker News, where if you don't barf out whatever has been deemed to be the "correct viewpoint" then you're treated as a pariah and downmodded without restraint. It wasn't always like this. Dissent and disagreement used to be one of the best parts of /.'s discussions.
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.
...Ellen Pao and Tommy Craggs are looking for new opportunities.
I finally agree with you, sexconker!
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
AKA "Fuck, we can't make money by just buying an established site and then trying to shove our shit into it without consideration of our userbase".
To be honest, I'm already elsewhere - even paying to go elsewhere in some cases. Slashdot is just nostalgia nowadays. Partly because of the various DHI "user monetisation" cockups.
for me and others to comment about the story with out reading it first? If not I'm out of there...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I bid 25 Quaatlus on the newcomer!
The question is; can you buy Slashdot with Bitcoin?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"We couldn't destroy the forum because the users complained, so we've gotta sell!"
When did they get an editor?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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.
But i'd buy Slash Media just so I could fire the ass hats at SourceForge who try to monetize other peoples work. No we won't want your nagware, we never have and never will.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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
Why not The Register? Sarcasm is their biz such that they may be able to tolerate being trashed by nerds....and enjoy shooting back.
Table-ized A.I.
The chains will soon be lifted.
Register as a digital church of Pastafarian and save on the taxes... or was that Boing Boing that started that mess, I forget now.
So slashdot is moving to the new Tumblr format, where everything you say is wrong and sexist and privileged and mysogynistic and ableist?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Good. May the next owner put the "Read XX Comments" link back at the bottom of the story where it's supposed to be.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
After reading all the comments on this, I get to the bottom of the page and the fortune reads: "If all else fails, lower your standards."
Yup.... sounds about right.
This is so fucking funny. KARMA IS A MOTHERFUCKER!!!! I hope at least one of these assholes eats a fucking bullet.
Yep. And they're extremely difficult to deal with contextually, unless you take the time to generate a full transcript - ugh. So (a) waste your time watching, (b) waste your time writing up a transcript, (c) take the time to post... and (d) everyone has already moved on.
Most video "stories" are for droolers. If you can't write it up, it often isn't worth saying. Exceptions being movies of Pluto, that sort of science-y goodness. I don't think I've ever seen *anything* on the idiot box that was worth a full page of actual cogent explanation. And "interviews".... ffs, just write it down.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
From the not-likely-to-happen department.
Bark less. Wag more.
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.
Gut feeling says that you guys go to china.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Point being, I'm actually quite glad that Slashdot didn't add Gamergate to the stinking, festering pile of identity politics it already took upon itself to be responsible for.
I would have been all for /. simply covering the journalism scandal (and resulting failed blackout&censorship, and eventual reform to ethics policies) and leaving identity politics out of it. Problem is, they tried to do the exact opposite and it blew up spectactularly in their faces.
Business as usual until we find a buyer (and hopefully after).
Slashdot opened for business in 1997 --- and it remains, despite cosmetic changes good and bad, very much a reflection of the us vs them geek mind-set of the nineties.
It's been awhile since a new idea has made it past the gates.
Compared to the Internet population as a whole, far, far, more people who stop by here are still in school --- and they aren't hanging around as long as they used to.
"The cow goes moo."
The Slashdot gender gap is real, though much narrower than the Great Divide you see at Ars Technica. "Who visits Slashdot?", "Who Visits Ars Technica?"
You can't hope to talk sensibly about tech unless you can place it in a larger social context --- and if at least 40% of your audience is female, you can't put gender issues in tech on the back burner and expect to survive.
Nathan Grayson wrote an article that gave positive coverage to Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest, without disclosing that he was thanked in the credits and clearly knew Quinn. DQ was only one of 50 games covered in the two paragraph article, yet was somehow singled out in three ways:
a) The article’s title “Admission Quest” was a play on DQ’s title.
b) The only screenshot (a huge background to the title) featured from any of the games was from DQ.
c) DQ was the first game (of only four) mentioned in the very short prose, praised as a “powerful Twine darling.”
Grayson wrote another article about Quinn’s role in a failed game jam TV show, painting her in a positive light. Despite the fact that the two were good enough friends to have planned an upcoming trip to Vegas together, this article also failed to disclose their relationship.
You can try to ignore the accusation, censor and libel those who exposed what Grayson did, or try to strawman the accusation into something else . . . but none of that makes it go away.
...once it sells, I just might come back 'round and clean up my profile a bit, and maybe even start reading here again.
This sig no verb.
If slashdot does fail to get bought, and disappears, as seems all too likely, everybody go on over to pipedot. Heck, even if that doesn't happen, please split your time and spend some over there too. The site engineering is superb. All it needs is 10 or 100 times the user base.
Here's my list of potential buyers, in rough order of preference:
CmdrTaco
Crowd-funded non-profit entity
Some unheard of benign tech group
Another tech news company
Some unheard of business acquisition group
NewsCorp
Microsoft Corporation
Unfortunately that same list is much less amusing when sorted on probability.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Great list of things that could be improved. Here are a few more:
I would like all comments on one page. Current limit is 100 max per page. I suggested to them that, when you pay, you get a new limit -- could be 500, etc. -- as one of the features. Point is, things get faster, bandwidth gets cheaper, every day. Why the limit? When you have a thread with, say, 500 or more comments, the only way you get them all on one page is at +4 or +5. But you miss so much when you browse at that level.
In the pay-to-play category, some of the things you would like could be rewards for paying. SIG size, for example. Those who don't like big (or any) SIGs would still be able to block them.
Remove or greatly limit underrated mod -- the stealth mod of choice for mod bombers. (1) use it, you lose 4 other mods, or (2) use it, and it goes up for meta-moderating right away. And (3) abuse it, and lose mod points for a month, then 3, then a year.
Remove mind-numbingly stupid posts -- Golden Girls, goats.*, etc. If they have been replied to, then *** them out, or put one of the quotes at the bottom of each page in there. Just make it clear the post was useless and has been removed.
Consider removing mods altogether from controversial subjects -- politics in particular.
I come here for the love
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.
...instead of the rehashed crap I've already read elsewhere. I could subscribe to a newspaper if I wanted that.
Hey look, Modded Troll because I pointed out the problem. I think the point is made.
I'm just an old redneck from the days of 300 baud, but I like the character set on a discussion forum to be clipped at 7 bits.
Dorks started fooling around with that eighth bit almost as soon as it was allowed.
I assume this post was meant to be attached to the grandparent post, not mine.
He would never do something so constructive. APK's modus operandi consists of three things: 1) Posting screeds about hosts files in any discussion related to adblock, 2) Stalking his critics, and 3) Being a total beta cuck.
My theory is that he does his best shitposting after masturbating while watching his morbidly obese wife get fucked some nigger she picked up off the street. Arms sore and hands covered in cum, he pulls out the laptop to diddle with his shitty little hosts file software and troll slashdot to the sounds of his wifes gigantic ass clapping while being pounded to a screaming orgasm by a 10 inch nigger dick.
Being unable to pleasure his corpulent wife himself--owing mainly to his micropenis--he convinced himself that if nigger dick made his darling wife happy, then it made him happy. I think secretly, he wishes he was born a nigger with a 10 inch dong, rather than a text book aspergers syndrome faggot with a hard-on for hosts files.
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
Of course as an AC it wouldn't be possible to actually hold you to any sort of accountability so why not just volunteer to contribute a gazillion dollars? The last couple of years the number of Anonymous Cowards posting in every thread has exploded, while the average quality of their posts has deteriorated to only slightly better than what is found on Free Republic. I hope the buyer finds some way to get the AC plague under control. Something Awful got fed up enough they got rid of the Anon option entirely, and they never looked back.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Except neither side was willing to let any of that go. That's the problem I had with it.
Well, I concede you've got me there.
/. users (including me) still recognized the propaganda for what it was and call it out. Yes, I admit it's very difficult for me to "let that go" unchallenged. Fortunately, even that editor tactic didn't work for very long.
As I've said before, Slashdot's ownership/editors soon realized that straightforwardly anti-Gamergate articles were getting soundly debunked in the comments, so they stopped mentioning it directly in the title or summary (the recent Brianna Wu interview is rare in that regard, at least these days).
Instead, they've posted countless articles with the same pattern: "Harrassment, mysogyny, threats. Harrassment, mysogyny, threats . . . oh btw Gamergate" (i.e. they attempted to wrap GG in identity politics). Many
Utf8 not being implemented is a feature, not a bug. We can communicate quite well in ASCII without having silly quote marks that face the "proper" way and those dumb Unicode drawing characters. It also helps a lot to keep the conversations in a language that all of us speak.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
slashdot.aol.com
A complete lack of ipv6. Its 2015, get with the times.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Where is my nobel prize, I can predict the future by reading the website of DHI, and drawing clues.
The only thing I would change about the editing is make it markdown.
Markdown is so much easier and faster to type. HTML made sense when it was the best we had and Everyone on slashdot could type HTML. There are a load of 'nerds' out there that have no need for HTML.
Can we just follow the GreenBay packers model of business? I would honestly chip in money if I could own a part of /. or what ever it became. /. has been a part of my life for longer than it hasn't been. I read it through highschool. I read it between classes. I read it at work. It will forever be one of the few places that could stay up for 9/11.
I've been reading here long enough to know that there are some movers and shakers in the industry. Heck even 'nobodies' like me could probably pull some strings or help contribute to Slashdot 2.0. I would buy a share of Slashdot if it became a 'contributer owned community' rather than some big conglomerate. It started out as a few guys wanting to chat online. It's a bit bigger than that so just add more owners, don't sell it to someone big.
Reddit is going to shit. I'm not a fan of Voat. I just want my old slashdot back. It's the only place I can type more than a paragraph and people will possibly actually read it. No 'tl;dr'. I actually treated mod points
And if not, anyone here want to make a distributed slashdot style platform? NNTP for messages, IRC for chat, *Coin (for distributed voting/Karma). The world has moved on since Perl 20 years ago. Lets take what we've learned and make something new.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
Something something my lawn.
Microsoft chairman John Thompson announced today its intention to buy Slashdot Media from DHI Group Inc. "It's our intention to buy these two properties [slashdot & sourceforge] from DHI; first thing we'll rename it to Backwardslashdot, as that's more in line with our corporate culture, and that other thing we'll need to look at." Asked as to the reasoning behind the acquisition on the financial reporters conference call, Thompson added "It's a bit like when Ballmer bought Skaip... Sky-pee... this will all become clear in the near future."
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
While I agree that there should be no (-1, Disagree) moderation, there have been times I've wished for (-1, Wrong) or (-1, Dumbass).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
My Slashcott finally worked!
: - )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...to see what happens to posts with the word Slashcott in them, since the one a few minutes ago disappeared without a trace.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The problem with slashdot crowd-sourced comment moderation is that if you say something that the in-crowd disagrees with, you can be banned. By other users!
Only temporarily. Your post may be downvoted, and perhaps your karma will be hurt if you keep doing it repeatedly. If you build up a reputation as a complete jerk or shill, you may just have to abandon your uid and start over... and that's what you deserve if you end up that way.
It is not about spam. It is about groupthink.
Here's the reality: I've posted MANY things here that disagree with the normal "groupthink" of the Slashdot community, and I've gotten +5 insightful. Why? Because when I do so, I support my points. I explain my position. I often cite reputable sources, particularly when I'm addressing something that's particularly contentious.
You do that here, and people appreciate it. If you provide good information, you WILL get upvoted. Over the years, I've found this site to have some of the most open-minded mods anywhere, as long as you back up what you say. Sure, there have been a few times I've had such a post modded down into oblivion, but only a few. The vast majority of the time when I am reasonable (not a jerk), present rational arguments and evidence, etc., an informative post will get modded up, regardless of whether it agrees with the majority opinion here.
Does it get tiresome to keep having to explain myself and minority opinions or unknown facts over and over? Sure -- but that's what true discussion requires.
All that whining about the beta version made them think, "Fuck you, I'll just sell your ass to Opra Winfrey"
Perhaps they didn't think about the fact that the userbase actually liked things the way they were, didn't really care about a mobile version, and were more upset by the under-the-hood deficiencies than by the UI...
I may be projecting, but I've been using Slashdot for the better part of two decades, lurking since almost the beginning. Cleanup, evolutionary changes, mild tweaking all work fine, but revolutionary changes like a complete UI shift just piss people off. Killed Fark, killed Digg, and probably a bunch of other sites.
It seems like when a website's users start leaving it's usually disproportionately the positive contributors more than the run-of-the-mill or the trolls that go. That lowers the quality overall, which further drives away more positive contributors, turning the place into a cesspool that almost mocks what it was intended to be. I've seen it happen probably a dozen times over the years on various forums. Unfortunately management isn't usually smart enough to cater toward their power users even though those people drive the reasons for everyone else to come to the forum. Lose the power users and you have no focus as a draw anymore.
Slashdot is on the tipping point of that. Consider how long it takes for long-running, obvious troll posts to get modded down after a new article and discussion is posted. Used to be almost instatneous, now the Golden Girls and the G** N****r posts are seen for some time before being modded down.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The title says the main idea, but here are some more details in my usual rambling style... :-)
== More details (and should be better/conciser, but headache plus other stuff to do)
When you wake up in the early morning before sunrise, you may feel you need to turn on a lightbulb to get around safely otherwise in the dark. That lightbulb seems blindingly bright -- so bright you can't look at it. You need that lightbulb though. Then, hours later, after the sun is up, you may forget the lightbulb is even on -- it is bright everywhere, and the bulb hardly stands out. Is that the story of Slashdot? As well as the story of many other tech innovations and communities and individuals (perhaps even myself)? These tools, communities, and individuals help bootstrap something greater and then just fade into the background.
As a different analogy, each year, seeds produce the next generation of plants that produce more seeds, but generations later, who thinks of (or thanks) the seeds from years ago that made everything possible? It remains important for our own mental health to be thankful for the past generations that made our life possible (an idea very strong in some Native American culture, and even made into politics by C. H. Douglas and Social Credit) -- but it is perhaps too much to expect direct gratitude for our own contributions. "We do what we must because we can"? :-) Or maybe because we "should". Or even just because it was "fun" (a preference for fun perhaps shaped by millions of years of evolution and selection for survival). Sure, some people get remembered and celebrated because they won some commercial popularity contest (Edison, Gates, Jobs), but most just get mostly forgotten (Steinmetz/Tesla, Kildall, Wozniak/Wayne). Even Doug Engelbart's obituary did not even get a full open article on the Slashdot home page, just a title line (and I and others complained about that at the time). People like Peter H. Huyck & Nellie W. Kremenak (who wrote the very insightful "Design & Memory: Computer Programming in the 20th Century" in 1980) get essentially no mention, as does William Kent (who wrote "Data & Reality" in 1978). I'm continually amazed how little mention Smalltalk (Kay, Ingalls, Goldberg, etc.) gets these days -- it seems almost entirely forgotten, even if Java and now JavaScript is step-by-step reinventing most of it (often badly) -- even as the Smalltalk community struggles on, and when I squint just right, I see the web as a Smalltalk image Theodore Sturgeon envisioned ubiquitous mobile networked wearable nanotech-built computing in the 1950s in "The Skills of Xanadu", which inspired Ted Nelson and other technologists (myself included), but who remembers him for that? Chuck Moore (Forth) and James Martin (everything IT) likewise are near forgotten at this point, as far as their name coming up much in discussion. Even Clifford Berry and John Vincent Atanassoff are pretty much forgotten, even given their Atanasoffâ"Berry Computer (ABC) the main reasons digital computing was not burdened with core patents early on. And those are just a few I know who are public or published figures. And that does not include the people like high school teachers Jack Woelfel, Joe Maurer, David Gray, or many others (including my father) who made a big difference in my own personal computing education (but few others would ever hear of outside of where I grew up).
I can also look at old computer magazines and catalogs from decades ago and see so much diversity of hardware ideas before the PC monoculture took over. Still, as Manuel De Landa said, uniformity at one level can promote diversity at another. A lot of different software has been built on the Windows/Intel hardware/OS monoculture. Hardware and OS diversity seems also to be going up again with Smartphones and Chromebooks. Although again, with lots of soon to be forgotten developers -- even if it may mean a lot to the developer and their local community and successors that they did what they did. An
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.