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!
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.
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.
Fuck your gamergate. Nobody even knows what it's about except for a bunch of people trying to make it more mainstream than it is. It's not important. It doesn't affect actual (pro e-sport or casual) gamers. It's nothing, and it's NOT worthy of news.
Pretty much. The quality of articles seems to have gone down significantly, with a very strong bias towards pushing "synergy" with the rest of Dice. They weren't even subtle about it, either. Add to that the whole clusterfuck debacle with them trying to push Beta...
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.
As someone who ends up on the side of the pro-GG side of the argument more often than not, I can't imagine that Gamergate is all that important to anyone that far removed from either the people directly affected or anyone willing to jump in and be a part of it.
In fact, the reason I ended up doing any research on the matter at all is because another site I frequent tends to use terms like "Gamergater" as a derogatory term without any context as a reminder that we're supposed to think of that guy as bad (much the same way that "MRA" is used and misused) and thus disregard any opinions that the accused has for fear of catching the plague.
So I researched it. I had to do more work than I wanted to, really, particularly in proportion to how big it is. And it's not big. It's a teeny-tiny little world that to escape, all I have to do is browse away from any site talking about it and it's gone from my sight.
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.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
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.
The reason for this decision is that the Slashdot Media business no longer aligns with the broader DHI strategy, which has been refined to focus on providing digital recruitment tools and services to connect employers and recruiters with talent in multiple professional communities.
What that means in plain English is that DHI thought they could use this place as a jobs board until they noticed that companies want to hire productive employees who do actual work instead of wasting time on Slashdot.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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
There are problems with ethics in game journalism, but that's not what GamerGate is about. Don't forget that the original claim was that a developer slept with a journalist in exchange for positive coverage of her game, which turned out to be completely and demonstrably untrue. Even now, if you head over to Reddit or 8chan, that lie is still being pushed. If GamerGate really cared about ethics the first thing it would do is put its own house in order and apologise.
GamerGate uses the ethics angle as an excuse to harass. When confronted the harassers can point to the people posting about ethics as a way to deflect criticism and disown their actions. If you really care about ethics in journalism, you need to either find a new hashtag or make a real effort to clean up GamerGate. Get over to Reddit and heavily down-mod all those misogynist posts on the GG boards, for example. That isn't happening right now, completely discrediting the ethics angle.
In short, if you want to complain about ethics, you need to have them yourself first.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC