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!
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?
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.
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. :) )
From a cannon, perhaps? Please?!?
No kidding. They need to be dropped on to the street from a very high altitude.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Finally news for nerds that matters.
I'd like to see someone buy all three of Slashdot, Reddit and Digg. "SlashRedDigg, where trolls are the news."
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!
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).
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.
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.
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...
Slashdot Media comprises both Slashdot, (this site) and SourceForge, so yes, they are planning to sell both. I don't think that means that both divisions will necessarily go to the same buyer; heck, Dice might not manage to sell either division, never mind both of them...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
>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.
In order to "maximize the synergy", they should sell SourceForge to Sony. You'd know exactly what you were getting with their products.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
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
Well, when Dice bought Geeknet media properties Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode three years ago, they paid $20 million for the bundle. All three sites have undergone significant decline since then (Freecode is basically dead), but I very much doubt that Dice plans to take that big a loss on the sale.
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.
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.
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