Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot and SourceForge Sold, Now Under New Management (bizx.info)
kodiaktau writes with a link to today's announcement that DHI Group, Inc. (which you might know better as Dice, the company that bought Slashdot and sister site SourceForge in 2012) today announced that it completed the sale of its Slashdot and SourceForge businesses (together referred to as 'Slashdot Media') to BIZX, LLC in a transaction that closed on January 27, 2016. Financial terms were not disclosed. DHI first announced its plan to sell Slashdot Media in July 2015 as part of its strategy to focus on its core brands, as Slashdot Media no longer fits within the Company's core strategic initiatives. KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. served as the Company's exclusive financial advisor for the transaction. (FOSS Force has a short article with some more info BIZX and the sale.)
same as the old boss
New /. overlords? Get this site back to "News for nerds" and news that matters, and you'll keep me here.
The announcement implies there are 30 (thirty) people working at SlashDot. Given the poorly edited article summaries and near-daily front page dups, what do these thirty people actually DO?
Well, my main reaction is "What? Again?" Been following slashdot off and on for some years, and mostly impressed by the LOST potential. Could do so much better, but obviously the financial models don't work that way.
Say.... What if you could buy a $10 charity share to implement a new feature or support a server for the next year? If enough people chip in, then the feature gets funded or the server keeps running. If not, maybe you'll see something else you want to support--or they can rewrite the project until it is persuasive enough to get the donors. I think most people are basically nice folks, and if you make it easier to do nice things, then they will do so.
Point to the opposite extreme. Microsoft has terrible service, but their financial model works great. Ditto a number of other highly offensive but profitable companies, usually distinguished by their mediocre software and services. Slashdot (and open source) could do better?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Here is a question: are you planning on posting more Ghostkillah stories that link to TMZ? Because that is totally the Slashdot audience.
Can you please weed out the bullshiat "you are all cows" homophobic rant posts that have been defiling this once great site for far too long?
Where the hell did Beta go? Everyone here seemed on board and then whoosh, nothing. Like a giant vacuum where no one can hear you compliment the web 3.0 interface. It's a wasted opportunity.
That ... that goes beyond the pale, even for Slashdot trolling. You might as well be reading out load from the Necronomicon.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Holy fuck. The last thing Slashdot needs is to become another censoring shithole like Reddit or HN. If those sites have taught us anything it's that it's preferable to have real, true, open discussion, even if that means putting up with a few so-called "troll" comments every now and then.
If you want dumb, inane, watered-down discussion, then they the fuck don't you just go to Reddit and stay there?
Slashdot has a great opportunity to reinvent itself as a tech/science/math-focused site with an emphasis on unhindered discussion. The censorship you propose doesn't help with achieving that goal. In fact, what you're proposing will destroy Slashdot faster than anyone could ever imagine.
So-called "trolls" are a good thing. They're a sign of vibrant, vigorous discussion. That's why we see so few of them at Reddit or HN: those sites have the blandest circle-jerk discussion the world has ever seen!
Can we save the cynicism for when they actually do something bad?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Seasoned C++ dev here and would love to work remote for you writing new code. Attend conferences, etc.
Reader every single day of my life since 1999, always posting anon but I do have a 4-5 digit UID iirc.
Surely you have heard of what the Soylent News guys are doing... I could never remember to keep going there but I did like what they were doing and I think you should offer to join forces with them. They had sane demands.
Wish you got back to the hacker/code-monkey feel with extensive coverage of open source conferences and a more relaxed editorial tone. The sarcasm and non-pc tones especially shaped the feel that I enjoyed.
Keep politics out of here *except* all the privacy issues as well as NSA and government surveillance stuff which should be *increased* in volume. Examples....
* John Kerry doing X/Y/Z -> NO
* Senate passing a bill to backdoor encryption -> YES
* Trump insults $MINORITY -> NO
* Russian hackers infiltrate $COUNTRY's telcom and ISPs -> YES
* Hillary takes a poop -> NO
Help expose people to new things they've never heard of instead of just repeating the already-trending buzzwords. For instance when everyone else talks about a new Arduino board (could care less), perhaps you could mention something more obscure and hacker-ish such as ZigBee or whatever. If my non-tech-savy friend knows all the issues, please don't cover it here. Only new stuff without repeating it.
Important, please assume the average reader is a daily one and not an every-other-day reader. That means *NOT REPEATING CONTENT*. I want to stress that I do my best to hit this site every day unless I'm literally ill, and then I'll use the [prev] buttons to catch up on my own. I think most people I've ever met who also use slashdot are the same. It seems the site now thinks we are 2 to 3 day consumers and it just regurgitates news for a few days as if I wasn't here to spot that same stuff yesterday or the day before.
If anything, let me tell you that your presence in the comments section is a good thing. We all seem to revolt quite obviously when something is bad. The previous owners seemed "distant" and blind and deaf to all the complaining. I understand ignoring some small grassroots troll group but when literally 90% of the comments are supporting the same complaint, LISTEN.
Another thing, we are more of a "get-off-my-lawn" type than most readers. Do not ever force anything upon me. You have no clue what us programmers do. I had coded some nice parsing scripts to layout slashdot in a console quite cleanly and wish there was a richer api to fetch the content as if I wasn't even on the website. Imagine offering up the whole site's backend API without requiring a registration id and throttle/rate limit instead? Boy, I'd code up so many cool embedded viewers inside all my favorite apps.... Provide the content and let me re-craft my own digestion of that similar to RSS readers but enhanced.
That's enough for now. So far by just being here you seem to have a better chance than absent-dice. Cheers.
Maybe we'll see the end of the Friday night "SJW" vs "MRA" clickbait fight where assertions are made that sitting typing in an office is "mens work", as if we are all 1920s lumberjacks or something.
Bizx LLC is an advertising and marketing company. So... I don't really hold out much hope of improvement.
I'd recommend some amount of openness and honesty. If in doubt, consider what happened when Dice tried to stifle the story on what they were doing to Sourceforge, and then tried to stifle that they'd stifled the story. While everyone here has been happy to hear from you, if they get the idea that you won't follow through with what you said or want something to quietly go away, they can get viscous. I think nerds place a much higher value on honest and efficient communication.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Some details to consider:
1. Promote the Firehose more ( http://slashdot.org/recent ) - it seems that too few people don't realize that they can vote for stories that they have.
2. Improved spam filtering so that links to stories on questionable sites doesn't have to appear at all. Also comment spam like this APK spam that has started to appear lately should at least be slowed. (Moderation option "Spam" that can be used without mod point loss should be possible for comments that have some spam characteristics, and if a number of moderators tag it as Spam it probably is.)
3. There's no guide to what the color coding means in the Firehose.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Second of all, there should be no concept of a downmod.
Without downmod SlashDot will become a dumpster diving experience. I find the StackExchange system interesting, where each downmod costs you a little karma. I am not advocating it, as there is probably more trolls than modders on this site at any given time. On the other hand, the downmodding of unpopular opinions is vicious.
I don't like the "mobile" site introduced by Dice either.
As you may know, down at the bottom of the page is a link to use the "classic" interface. That's always worked great on all my mobile devices, even old tiny ones, and it works great on a desktop too.
I check Slashdot a couple times per day, mostly on my phone. The good old-fashioned simple html of Classic works fine imho.
They also announced the focus will move from technology to Japanese Girl Bands.
3B Junior Rocks!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not linking to click-bait isn't anti-free speech. The article *still* exists.
I just don't want to see /. cluttered up with spam.