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.
Man, things sure were a lot better back when Dice owned this place.
I'm sure they'll find a way to make it worse.
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.
Logan Abbott from BIZX here. Happy to answer any questions.
There is no remaining evidence of anyone working at slashdot to layoff...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
[...]and we can get some editors who actually read the site?
And destroy a tradition that dates back to when the site was independent, and run for love not money? Blasphemy!
"As a leading digital media company, we publish hundreds of popular web sites and provide advertising solutions for multiple industries such as travel & tourism, telecommunications, personal finance, credit, business products and more."
I'm not sure if that is good or bad, but I think we can probably expect more ads.
...onwards and (hopefully) upwards....I mean, it's not like it could get much worse after today's post about Shkreli beefing Wu-Tang. (WTF???)
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
What happens to his daily rants against code.org?
I for one welcome our new BIZX overlords... oh man I feel so lame ;-p
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?
I hear they'll redo the site to update it with a more modern look. I think they'll set up a site with test modifications, and call it 'Slashdot Bis' while collecting feedback, which they expect will be nearly universally positive.
Existing sites from BIZX are sites such as MyVoipProvider.com and 123Business.com. Just.. look at those two and draw your own conclusions.
This probably means all us commenters are going to have to train our Chinese replacements.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Where's the cows guy when you really need him?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Where's the cows guy when you really need him?
How can you be sure it's a guy? Are you saying that women can't be cows?
#cowsgate
lucm, indeed.
a) that treating slashdot as a money maker seemed to be a step in the wrong direction as far as "news for nerds" and yet here we go again
b) that "nerd" has become so hyper-realized since the 1990's, that basically everybody and their grandmother is a "nerd", now, completely eliminating any point in targeting anything at "nerds"
get dat granny nerd rap $$$, g's
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It really should be "don't forget to turn off the lights on your way out the door" dept.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Waht?
*animated old lady in a flower dress and shades*
yo
drop the pinochle, boise
this senior citizen's about to get noisy
i'm not crazy, just senile
but i can pick up rhymes like mahjongg tiles
my grand-daughter is a hacker, not a slacker
windows 10 since july 29th, cracker
taught this granny everything she knows
like how to search amazon for dildos
now i'm surfin' on over to the slash-dot
point my webcrawler from my aol
push the firehose button and blow it all to hell
tony bennett, drop the bass you crackhead
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Where's the cows guy when you really need him?
How can you be sure it's a guy? Are you saying that women can't be cows?
#cowsgate
Moo.
Brought to you by the "C" in LGBPTTQQIIAA+C.
Nothing posted to
If I had known I would still be hanging around here ten years later, I would have originally named myself "muscle memory" instead of the first lame thing that came into my mayfly head.
Wish list, two items, sorted from the banal to the sublime:
* working mdash and ndash in the text input box—it sends DFWesque-level geek chills down my spine to use the right one in absolutely every instance (please don't datamine the last ten years of my happy fiction)
* story summaries where you can identify the story topic without having through to the story, and where the discussion can start with the implications rather than everyone leaning in with giant RCA-era ear horns "eh, what did the summary just say?" "fuck if I know" "eh, did you just say 'duck'?" and so on
A lame story summary sets a bad tone for the entire thread. For some entirely ungeek reason so many summaries seem determined to end off with a woolly sentiment reminiscent of a late-afternoon chocolate-brownie special Olympics.
Actually, this has seemed somewhat less horrible for the last couple of months, I don't know why.
Believe it or not, usually you can just start the process by emailing them or messaging them on LinkedIn.
Slashdot, Dice, and Bizx are all cows. MOOOO!
On that note, I'll take the bacon and eggs with a side of hot grits, please.
Fuck off back to SoylentNews!
My bad x100
Wow.. don't often see members older than me :) Been around long enough and seen many transitions.. hopefully this will be better. While I still frequent /. daily, my participation in the threads has been limited for many years now.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
still some hanger on's though.
But seriously - when was the last time /. had any meaningful story before some other aggracator such as Hacker News? Rarely bother with the comments on something I've already read and seen comments elsewhere that for all intents will be similar to anything here.
It is kind of shocking that the new boss says they aren't going to make many changes (at least not soon!) Might really be dead by the time they try to fix it.
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!
Good. That deserves to be on the front page, at least once you've got a solid plan for how you are going to fix it.
Github is the obvious competitor you have to beat, or at least distinguish yourself from. If you're going to focus on source control you have to beat github on features. Make it easy for people to contribute to projects, while also respecting the contribution rules of that project.
My suggestion would be to focus on the things that github doesn't do. If you want to be a trusted place for downloading software, help us to trust the integrity of the binaries you are hosting. Host build & test servers that can be used to produce repeatable builds.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
We also need a wtf and stupid mod.
Don't reveal moderators name or anything. Just limit their ability to mod the same poster to a couple times per mod session and make meta moderation a priority again.
Charities have advisory boards to represent their communities.
Find some formal way of getting input from the community, with over-weighted representation from people who have been around awhile. Maybe set up a rotating system where anyone with good-or-better Karma and who has contributed at least once in each of the last 5 years and in at least 24 of the last 48 months and in at least 6 of the last 12 months and at least once in the last month gets a random shot at getting an invite to be on the "advisory board" for the next 3 months.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Clearly the meta-mod system that's currently in place is not working well, as we see far too much abusive moderation.
"Clearly"? Everything is clear to a madman.
Downmodding should be eliminated.
That's the whole point of metamod. Normally people can be trusted to mod things the right way, but if they are modding down for personal reasons, someone else gets a chance to call them on it.
You know what the biggest problem with metamod is? It's when they changed the UI for it from "agree"/"disagree" buttons to +/-... and didn't ever change the FAQ to indicate what the fuck + and - mean. Does it mean agree/disagree or does it mean the direction the original post should have been moderated?
And I don't know how new you are if you think that slashdot's moderation system is broken. There are 2 main things it has that make it work:
1: Every user doesn't get to moderate every fucking article, this is why Digg and Reddit moderation are so badly broken and cause group think and circle jerks. SO isn't quite as bad, but the "gamification" makes people care too much about points. Slashdot old farts remember when they hid your karma level because it became such a problem. (And the old farts also remember that it was capped at 50.)
2: You rarely get mod points. As you read articles you generate "token" points that eventually result in getting mod points. This ensures that it happens to older users and people who actually lurk and participate. If you have an alt account that you never use, it will never get mod points. (And if you didn't know what causes you to get mod points then STFU and lurkmoar.)
I'm looking forward to seeing what the new owners do with Slashdot.
And hopefully most of the people here will be realistic in their expectations - especially when it comes to how fast a site with 4,000,000+ users can turn.
#DeleteChrome
compete? It can just be SF with git.
remember when it was the place to find software? I do.
just use the git finance model and get reviews going again.
Hopefully the well isn't too poisoned. studies show it can take 2 to 3 years to rebuild trust.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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.
How can you be sure it's a guy? Are you saying that women can't be cows?
Sounds like bull.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
4chan is boring these days. Now /b/ is just filled with moralfags and normal people.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I would think it is possible for women to be cows but given the barrage of stories about no women in IT and coding i think it is improbable here.
Realize that many articles posted are posted due to what readers vote on in the Firehose ( http://slashdot.org/recent )
Go there now and then and do up and downvotes - it may actually change the site.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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
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.
we can only hope
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
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.
A lot of projects left sourceforge when they started bundling malware with downloads.
... and removal of modding from people like myself who tried to keep that one scientific.
At some point climate science denial became vogue in here, complete with links to Forbes
There's a lot of goodwill to win back for a couple of environments that have to compete for users.
Good Luck.
...but I see the Slashcott has finally had an effect.
: - )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The old ones have awakened!
The end is nigh!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
So you like stuff like the APK spammer?
(Silently ducks and slides away)
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
....how about on the stories that are not yet "official" but are available to logged in users (grey title bar instead of green), let them comment, if they wish, and then if the story makes it to the official front page, just move it there, comments and all, instead of re-posting it and losing those comments in the process.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
Still a financial model comment, but I just noticed that option to disable advertising? Apparently it's something I said?
So let me say a few words about our sponsors' advertising: Desperate. Bullshit. BAD company.
Can't recall the last time I saw an exception. Ads are worthless tripe for a simple reason. It's quite expensive to produce a truly superior product, but it's relatively vastly cheaper to produce ads.
Actually, the situation is even worse than that. If you did produce a truly superior product, the marginal cost of those last increments of quality are so expensive that your competitors can grab big profits by splitting the difference from good enough--especially with the support of advertising.
Off topic there, but as it applies to slashdot, ads do NOT add value and I normally see all ads as red flags to AVOID shopping with that company. The MORE ads they throw at me, the LESS likely the product is worth buying. That's become a big part of what's wrong with the Internet, but inverting the model is probably too big a project for slashdot to tackle...
Still... Perhaps you want a hint?
(But I warn you that I'm so clueless I couldn't catch a clue if I was dipped in clue musk and dropped in a field of desperate clues in the middle of clue mating season.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Does this mean we can finally delete our projects off Sourceforge, or will they simply F' us more and add more malware?
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.
Who put on women's clothing and hang around in bars?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Thankfully the lack of unicode support prevents that from being a real threat.
Well, he does that because English still tries to apply gender to words. Of course he could write one or person to replace the he, but the him is hard. BTW most European languages suck at this topic.
Anyway, some dadaist performance would be appreciated.
Please can we have stories written in clear English with unfamiliar terms defined and links to primary sources (but no paywalls).
And please stop saying "synergies".
If you're taking suggestions for things to change, how about fixing this: If you view comments in nested mode, and the comments take up multiple pages, the successive pages don't work properly. On this article, the second page of comments repeats about 90% of the first page. Some cases even show the *exact same* content on the first and second pages; for instance, http://hardware.slashdot.org/c... at a threshhold of 0 gives me identical content for the first five pages.
"Fuck, we couldn't monetize those geeks after all, even after breaking our promises and showing ads to people with the 'Disable Advertising' switch that they paid for, and they had no interest in our jacket reviews, business management articles, or videos of utter shite, so let's sell it off cheap"
I could link to any single one of those stories as you well know - so what exactly are you trying to do here?
Here is the link leading to a steaming pile of such shit.
www.google.com/search?q=slashdot+women+not+fit+for+it
Are you really so useless at using computers that you could not do it yourself?
f you don't like justice and/or progress
ah...
we-must-force-girls-to-like-coding
...that doesn't sound very just or progressive to me.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I for one welcome our new BizX over...Oh, who am I kidding? I haven't logged in close to ten years. I'll probably log in again when Slashdot gets sold again to post about the same message. Carry on. /waves feebly.
No, but I used to work for Microsoft.
I could link to any single one of those stories as you well know - so what exactly are you trying to do here?
You keep saying that: "You *could* link to it". But you don't. Because those comments you say exist, those sexist comments about where a women's place is... those comments either don't exist or are all made by AC's and have been downmodded into oblivion. Yeah, sure, you *could* link to "stories", but you don't have any evidence for your assertion - 'assertions are made that sitting typing in an office is "mens work"'.
So, again, can you actually link to a comment where the poster implies that CS is mens work? Because all you do is get angry that people ask for evidence.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
" Slashdot Media no longer fits within the Company's core strategic initiatives"
Are you going to leverage synergies as well?
Hello,
It troubles me that the dice fam has purchased the now sold out Slashdot. These days it is difficult to find unbiased news sources, and selling to a spammer company is telling. I hope everyone who made Slashdot what it was makes a killing off of Dice. I'm also somewhat pleased that I have found better sources of news for nerds on stuff that matters.
Slashdot always allowed me to turn off ads. I never did, but now I will blacklist slashdot's advertisers via ghostery through my "untrusted" browser. That is, if I ever bother to come back. I don't care for Dice. I think they are, in my opinion, a disreputable company. You may, of course, do as you will.
I clicked on the date on my computer just to check that it was not April 1st. - just to be sure that this story is for real.
*** Don't be dull.***
Can we get a shock collar for timothy, to encourage him to RTFA a bit closer before posting summaries :) Just a little shock... not too often...
But seriously, I was here at the start and I would like to have a reason to come back to /. It got taken off my start page and into a once a week catchup folder a few years ago. Can you take Taco out of cryo storage and reboot him? Mind you, the patch list would be a total bastard.
I'm reading Slashdot daily for about 18 years already using lynx (I very much like it that way), but for quite a while already nested mode does not have the full text of postings anymore. Would be nice if that could be changed.
And greek letters, we can't even write like "micro-" properly.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Just limit their ability to mod the same poster to a couple times per mod session
This is already the case -- you can mod someone up to three times per mod session, and any further mods of that user don't change post scores (while still using up your mod points).
In any case, I disagree with such a limit, because there are many persistent trolls and posters with an axe to grind. An example (of the latter) is mdsolar, who has over the last few years submitted numerous anti-nuclear energy stories, then within the associated discussions bashes everyone who supports nuclear energy, with personal insults, false and misleading "facts", and worse. While moderators do punish various posts of his, he counters that by sheer volume. Limiting moderation against individuals limits the only corrective action one can take against such posters.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Should I remove sourceforge from my uBlock blacklist? Or will they continue to inject malware?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
So next you'll want a Ferrarri and complain if it's not red? You are summing up all I hatr about these stupid "SJW" vs "MRA" discussions. Moving the goalposts - so a comment isn't a comment if made by an AC and then modded up?
Listen, if you want to complain that men on slashdot are in favour oppressing women, you should be able to provide at least one post, right? AC's have always posted shit - trolls posting goatse doesn't provide evidence that slashdot is pro-goatse. Similarly trolls posting anti-women shit is not evidence that slashdot is anti-women.
BTW: asking for evidence happens all the time. Some of the smarter oppression-olympics regulars (AmiMoJo, for example) now simply stop making the claim you continue making, because there's always someone who's going to say "where's this anti-women post you are referring to?", and then fail to be impressed when you link to some downmodded AC post that sits with the GNAA posts.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I used to read and contribute comments to slash dot. But the comments have become predictable pro-privacy, pro-freedom, pro-opensource, ra, ra, ra, anti-establishment and largely anti-government. Post a different point of view than the heard and you get modded down. I got tired of the same old points of view and the echos. Intelligent argument enlightens. Well it used to.
I have also gotten tired of the misogynistic gamer gate crap when there is an article about sexual harassment or women's experience in the technical/gaming world. Boys explaining that the complaints are always the women's fault and that they should just get a thicker skin.
So I like the articles, but rarely read the comments.
It will be sad to see Slashdot decline more. I guess it is time to move on and let a new generation pickup the reigns with new sites and new media.
An old gray beard UNIX/Linux Sysadmin
RLH
So then I did.
You posted a link to slashdot stories, all in *favour* of women. The comments on those stories are not reflective of your claim "assertion that CS is mens work".
In short, you claim "many people say this on slashdot", but then can't find any to link to.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It is also worth doing some screening for systemic modding. While I haven't tried keeping track of it, I have noticed a trend of particularly disingenuous modding in favor of entities which can afford to have lots and lots of interns or propaganda units. You might set some of your nerds on thinking what kind of techniques you should be implementing to check for this or in response. Remember, aside from the health of the discussion on the site, even catching evidence of it one in a hundred times will probably give you great press from a business POV.
Sounds like something from a 1990s cyberpunk novel.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
... and make it as a GitHub competitor? GitHub is good, but far from perfect.
I have to say that immature troll ratio is high. The fact that they no longer get modded out of existence tells me that everyone else is of the same mind as them, so it's a community problem.
Fixing that is much more of an issue than just clamping down on moderation. We've gone from small geek clique to teenagers en masse who think it's cool to be contrary. It's especially noticeable when topics come up that were discussed years ago, that require a modicum of experience, or that require some of the older skills. The techy articles are gone and even when one does pop up, there's nothing new in it - there was one on processor cache design a while back and it was... lacking.
I can't see a way back from here to be honest. Unfortunately, the "it's cool to be on Slashdot" crowd are also creeping over into all the clone sites. There's comments on SoylentNews that I read and cringe and just think "I don't want to be associated with you by being on the same board". Not just opinions, but the expression of them, and the trolling.
It's time to move on but I've not found a place to move on to that's similar. Maybe the kind of intellectual-yet-open-to-all boards of old no longer work in the mass-Internet era.
The articles went downhill long ago, the comments have gone downhill ever since, and there's not much left to stick around for.
We also need a wtf and stupid mod.
:)
Don't reveal moderators name or anything. Just limit their ability to mod the same poster to a couple times per mod session and make meta moderation a priority again.
Good points.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Woosh.
nice post thanks for the information and visiting to your website helps me a lot AP 10th Class Result 2016 Latest recruitments
I was just about to suggest the very same thing. Sourceforge has been dead to me ever since that fiasco erupted.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Yup, that guy sure has the /. mod spirit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sorry, this week I have mod points and have to behave. Trolling the firehose is something I can do again next week when I don't have to mod the shit that I upvote.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If we are going to fix moderation, the most important fix is to eliminate the funny and overrated mods. Things are funny because they are insightful, so just use the insightful mod. Things are bad for reasons, nobody should be able to just say "overrated". This would eliminate a lot of the stupidity from moderation, including pack rape with the funny mod.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>Second of all, there should be no concept of a downmod.
Look what that did for E-Bay. Single worst decision that site ever did.
For some years now I've proposed something in between your two viewpoints regarding the overrated mod -- make it cost more. That can be in the form that using an OR mod pushes back the time you get your next set of mods. Or using an OR mod uses up 3 (or 5) of your mod points.
Not all mods are equal. Modding down an obvious AC troll is at the "who cares" end of the spectrum -- we all stop reading such posts quickly enough anyway. Modding down a well-worded comment that happens to be in the minority opinion is at the other extreme -- a gestapo tactic. That won't get corrected (on average) in the metamod process, btw.
The OR mod is the worst as the user of it doesn't even give a reason for using it -- "I vote you down...cuz." I would rather see more "4" and "5" posts that should be 2's and 3's, than see good thoughts buried.
Maybe add a punitive touch to the system -- "worst mod of the week" where you then feature the post, and the moderator's name is shown. Pretty sure that person won't do that again any time soon.
Since a big part of the goal of Slashdot is to encourage comments, why not have a thread on the moderation system say once a week? Maybe those who work at slashdot don't even post to it. Have it be a free-for-all, a true brain-storming session.
You could make the worst mod of the week the name of the weekly "comment on the mod system" thread. Bet it would be the most commented thread every week.
I come here for the love
"Synergies" being the fourth word uttered. Subsidiaries created just for the transaction. Where's my bullshit bingo card? Quickly, time is running out!
Also, props to them for saying they want to "keep SourceForge...as a trusted destination for open source software discovery, development, collaboration and distribution". It takes a massive pair to look someone in the face and say that. I'm talking about "I'm going to the shops, get my wheelbarrow" massive.
Massive pair.
Is meta moderation still even a thing? I can't remember the last time I was asked to do it.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I'm curious what they paid per user. I wouldn't mind moving to a co-op model. How much could it possibly cost to run this place per year?
I couldn't have said it better myself.
I'm another active slashdot user since '99. I'd also hate to see it go away. And to resonate what you just said, I think it's quite marvelous that a post about Slashdot being sold has become a post about what Slashdot is and what we'd like to see it become. Not to mention the fact that it's already has 650+ posts. I appreciate our community caring about our community.
And I appreciate the BIZX owner who was interviewed who had this to say: “What impressed us about Slashdot was the quality of the typical community member and how truly informed and educated they were on a wide variety of discussion topics that directly relate to today’s relevant tech news. There’s a lot more noise on the Internet now than there was when Slashdot was created, but we think the Slashdot user base is one of the most knowledgeable and informed communities anywhere on the web. We ultimately plan to listen to the community.” I hope that means he understands the community and appreciates its value. Yes, he intends to make money, but let's hope he does it in a way that doesn't destroy the community.
As a technology director and math teacher in the state of Minnesota, I appreciate the opportunity to contribute my perspective to this community, and I value the perspective of others who also contribute to it. Despite Slashdot's many struggles and failures, its community remains vibrant. BIZX, please don't destroy that.
My advice? Focus on content quality - Slashdot could easily post 3x the stories it does today, and have better QA - just by maybe hiring someone with some journalism credentials rather than making the people who write the back end server code pretend to be editors. Improve the quality and make it "must read" material that people are willing to pay for. And try encouraging some writers to create original content - not BS video interviews with talking heads from sponsors, but actual longform journalism. If Slashdot is actually a good enough read, you can monetize a subscription tier that echoes "Slate Plus," "ESPN Insider," etc.
In Slashdot's "glory days," it didn't have a lot of competition. There was no Gawker/Gizmodo/iO9/whatever to read about the coolest Star Wars prequel rumors; people came to Slashdot for that. Even though there's a lot of competition now, Slashdot (barely) hangs on to a superior virtue: a better quality of commenters and a better moderation system than other "nerd" sites. Slashdot was never very well managed, even back in the "CmdrTaco/Hemos Glory Days." Inject some QA into the story vetting/writing process and you'll see a resurgence of readership.
It might become clearer that you are promoting things which are essentially opposite to each other.
I.e. Readership and commenters - not the same people. Also, quantity ain't quality.
"3x the stories" only mean that those who comment and discuss ON A SINGLE STORY now miss out on even seeing 3 times more stories.
Say, you spend an hour each day on slashdot, and it takes you 1 minute to read through summaries of 20-24 daily stories and another 5-15 minutes to read through 4++ comments, after which you'll make 1-3 insightful posts, each taking you at least 15 minutes.
That's 22+10+2*15.
Little over an hour, on average. About hour and a half on the higher end.
Multiply the number of stories by 3, and now summaries alone takes up all of your Slashdot ALLOTTED time.
While a day still comes with only 24 hours in it to do all the things that need to be done "today".
Godforbid you stumble onto an interesting discussion or debate.
There goes your time for work, for your wife and kids, you get fired, wife leaves you and takes the kids, economy tanks, you turn to drugs and online porn...
Why do you hate America so much?
And while that might seem great from the "keep them glued to the screen" standpoint of a marketing drone - it clashes with the reality where, despite the popular opinion, Slashdot readership are no longer basement dwelling teenagers.
A 6-digit UID correlates with a 30+ age now. And it's impolite to stare at one's 5-digit and lower UID. Cause they may die soon.
That's 25% (or more) of actual commenters/readers. And where nearly all of the "better quality of commenters" comes from.
Also, that's where the disposable income is, for those looking to "monetize" the "audience".
At the same time, increase of the number of stories now means those same numbers of commenters comment LESS per story - cause they too have the same number of hours in their day.
And as it took decades to reach 4+ million UIDs - there's no chance in hell that will become 12+ million over night to maintain the comments per story ratio.
More stories to read == less time to comment.
I.e. Increase in the number of stories takes up time and kills discussion - that thing everyone is here for.
And if you somehow figure out a formula for better quality of comments and discussions... I reserve the right to be the first to congratulate you on getting the last Nobel Peace Prize. Like... the final one. Ever.
As you'd basically discover world peace.
Also, you owe me 10% of that money for the idea.
Fuck it... Make it 9%. It IS world peace...
As for gamifying moderation... which is what karma boils down to...
You don't want to turn your democratic process (voting comments up/down) into a gotta-catch-them-all game of collecting perks and badges.
BTW, remember achievem
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Apparently a bunch of nerds discussing tech and saying whatever the fuck they want didn't turn out to be the easy cash machine they expected it to be.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Now /. is dead.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If you wanna see the full effect of that post something negative about Amazon next time there's an article on them.
Amazing how fast you get modded down.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I find APK annoying but i can easily skip over the posts. The ones that really drove me crazy was the mycleanPC floods.
Anyways, i am willing to put up with some crap from time to time. I purposely add value points to troll and flamebait mods so those posts do not get buried in my feed. Maybe I'm used to it?
Was freecode / freshmeat included? Please, please, please - this is one site I was sorry to see go. There was so much history and potential there along with the old school slashdot. I hope it was, and there is some plan for necromancy.
I've followed this site since it was CmdrTaco's blog (though as AnonCoward until explosion of hot grits). I doubt it's possible to recapture the late 90's / early 2000's style community here, but I second a lot of the comments about bringing back the older focus of the site.
Also - please let us change usernames!!!! My uid ain't that high, but I'd rather like to switch to my normal online moniker and not lose past karma / connections. If not changing the username, at least let us change display name.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
I came to Slashdot day after day to read the COMMENTS, on interesting stories and topics, but the comments.
Because the community filtered the idiots, the corporate shills (and they are relentless), etc. to let emerge comments that I could read nowhere else: a spontaneous comment by Steve Wozniak, INFORMED comments, about copyrights issues, like NY lawyer for example, people at the top of the game. Informed and intelligent comments by scientists, or really gifted amateurs.
Not a vigorous debate for debate sake, a sophisticated debate where you learn about issues.
It's all about the community, and fighting entropic forces attempting to parasite it.
It's all about the COMMUNITY, and having its best members come back, the one we want to read, because most have left.
I am hopeful from what I read here and wish us all the best of luck.
Aww, crap:
From TFA:
“We’re excited about the synergies this acquisition brings and see both our existing operation and the Slashdot Media business benefiting significantly as a combined entity,”
The new owner led off with buzzwords - which means Slashdot actually *is* doomed.
*sigh*... I'll start packing...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I sincerely hope that the new owners just shut this site down. What's the difference between /. circa 2000 vs. now? Today, this site is frequented by the biggest bunch of whiners I've ever seen. They literally complain about *everything*:
"I saw a typo". "I saw an ad". "I saw a paywall". "I saw a CSS style I didn't like". "I saw a post submitted by a user I don't like". "I saw a social justice warrior commenting on something". "I saw a feminist trying to ruin nerds' lives". "I saw a story that wasn't 105% technical".
Jesus Christ. Just stop complaining about everything and go do something else, okay? Biggest group of entitled nerd complainers I've ever seen.
Even a troll may have a point! Sometimes I miss the "+1 Troll" mod option!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Interesting - I used to see that effect for Apple but it seems to have lessened.
Seriously about Apple, post something negative about Apple, someone clicks your name, looks for other posts in other unrelated articles, then bookmarks your profile so they can mod you down next time they have points.
I was starting to take Apple mod-downs as a badge of honor.
I've started noticing that Slashdot is employing the Facebook style "post shunning". Even browsing at -1 I don't see all the posts anymore, say something not in line with the globalist agenda and you get sidelined. If you click on a parent post you'll see the shunned replies, but otherwise they're vapor. I've set my Slashdot back to classic and there seems to be less of that but I'm still not sure I see it all.
I see for calls to change the mod system - as someone who's been abused by Apple Fanbois I disagree, meta-moderation was great and the system itself was genius. I just want it to go back, it was great, with enough Meta Moderation fanbois lose their bite.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
"We’re excited about the synergies this acquisition" I had to stop reading at this point.
Is meta moderation still even a thing? I can't remember the last time I was asked to do it.
not only is it still a thing but there is even a redirect from /metamod.pl to the new address. that's commitment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm a little late to the unsolicited advice party here, but here's some anyway:
I invite the new corporate overlords to think of Slashdot as a cougar in a cage. If you feed him meat, he will tolerate you. If you keep trying to feed him stuff that's not meat, he will eventually die, but not before he makes his best attempt to catch and eat you. If you attempt to sell him consulting services or try to force him to behave like a "civilized human being", he will initially ignore you, because he is in fact a cougar, and has no need for either consulting services or manners. And if you persist at it long enough to become annoying, he will, again, attempt to eat you.
How about even just putting some verbage back into the rules/FAQ/etc about focusing on positive moderation?
The biggest problem with moderation is that you can't moderate and comment in the same discussion. It would be double-plus awesome if you could at least post in a different thread. I understand why you don't want people to be moderating direct replies, but the truth is that the people best-qualified to comment are also the people best-qualified to moderate. There must be some better way to solve this problem than to prevent the people best-qualified to do both from doing both.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why hello startswithsometrash, fancy seeing you using a crap argument....
Silence is a state of mime.
Bizx.info is an advertising platform. I can't see that slashdot will become anything other than an advertising platform, with less emphasis on tech that matters.
You can see it basically being folded up into a larger advertising platform that will have all the charm of TMZ or Gawker.
Oh well. It was a good run though.... what 20 years?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Whatever happened to metamod? I used to get a link for that about once a week, and then it just vanished.
It was nice to be able to either confirm some positive mods, and do away with abusive moderations.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Emojis along with Like/Love/Sad/Angry/Happy/Wow moderation?
I'm ok with that if they move to a picture heavy format.
I have been a regular visitor/commenter on Slashdot for over 16 years.
There are some quick fixes to be done, both technology and editorial.
- This site is about one thing: discussion! Not the articles, not the editorializing. Discussion is why everyone comes here. The stories are just jumping points for discussions.
- Fix Unicode. It is 2016 now, and it took a motivated programmer on SoylentNews a moderate effort to fix Unicode in Slashcode. Go get the fix from there.
- Stop linking to sites that don't display right with Javascript and/or Ad blockers. We are nerds here, and most of us disable Javascript and have ad blockers. Sites like Forbes is not welcome here, and daily posts by StartsWithABang are frustrating.
- Move back the main link to the article from the story title, down in the text. The colors make this link all but invisible, and we get side discussions of "there is no link in the story", "yes, there is, it is in the title", and these are unnecessary and frustrating.
- Freeze any UI changes. Do not even go back to the pre-beta version of the site. Just freeze it to what has been running for many months and users have gotten accustomed to. The exception is invisible links, and when foreground and background are the same color when mousing over.
Will post more if I think of some.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
They should sell slashdot more often.
Just wanted to add that I also have been an everyday reader since the late 1990's. My deepest regret is that I couldn't remember my login from then, so I had to make a new one about 10 years ago. Darn :). I haven't made many posts, but love this site!!!! I agree with almost all the comments here on what makes this site so compelling. I like posts about FOSS, Linux, etc, and issues surrounding them. (Glad SCO died the terrible death it deserved!!). I enjoy articles about cutting edge issues and tech, and hope Slashdot lives long and prospers.
I agree with this.
I have never done the "post as AC in order to moderate in the same discussion" thing and there have been times when I throw away all mods done in order to comment. It is not a deal breaker, but I do like the idea of not being able to moderate in threads you have commented it (but being able to moderate in the same discussion).
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Who are you calling old?
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
I hope we regain some good reasons for me to bother logging in...
Used to read this a lot, have account from like 1995 or something. Lately its just people complaining about stuff I think is way less important than it really is, although maybe I'm just getting older and all the things you young-ins care about is meaningless to me :)
Peace, or Not?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The folks that frequent this site _love_ guns. To a disturbing degree, as will be demonstrated by this comment being down-modded into oblivion.
In the Android browser, I don't get the same issue of the blank grey area, but I do have to scroll sideways. Whichever element has it's width set to pixels or inches, they should remove that width declaration or set it to a percentage. Then the browser can flow the page to the appropriate width.
"DHI first announced its plan to sell Slashdot Media in July 2015"
Tell me again, when was the Slashdot beta?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
They also announced the focus will move from technology to Japanese Girl Bands.
3B Junior Rocks!
Oh good, about time they improved things around here.
Domo Arigato Mr Roboto!
Click the link to their website, and you can understand where things stand. The Age of Slashvertisement hasn't even begun yet....
Clueless and Groupthink maybe?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Good for https://soylentnews.org/
As a project maintainer myself, I really fear for Sourceforge. It seems to be progressively becoming Geocities and I'd rather stab a fork in my eye before migrating my project to some sort of social network crap like GitHub. Did that sound resentful much? :D
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
They should sell slashdot more often.
Give it a few hours, and Slashdot will post a story about how it's being sold to someone named, "Rob Malda."
Slashdot's comment moderation system is better than just about every other site's, but there is still room for improvement.
Why cap comment scores at 5? Because of that arbitrary cap, we end up with some +5 comments that are much better than others.
Lift the cap, so users can see what the Slashdot community really thinks about each comment. Then we will see, for example, the occasional incredibly profound comment attain a score of +10, and we can filter accordingly if there are a large number of +5s and we don't have time to read them all.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Great, that was my Friday night for three next seven years.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Seems I stopped visiting around 2 years ago... but I've been reading a lot more, recently.
/. seems to have mostly escaped the "can't allow wrong-think" that's hit a lot of the other big sites - and that itself is enough to bring me back.
As a regular user back then, I'd say it'd be awesome to see some stability return, no "We've got a sexy new UI to roll out / THE GOGGLES THEY DO NOTHING!", and just focus on giving the ancient nerds of the net a lovely place for our eventual retirement homes.
I thought the slashdot effect and being slashdotted were by far the highest form of endorsement based on competence, the ability to attract interest as opposed to forcing it on people. Perhaps it's the business model advertising can eventually evolve into. I found it most telling when people simply weren't ready for being slashdotted, that told me something about the sincerity of the people behind the product. They had spent more resources making something cool than on annoying ads.
To frame it in the context of a once popular slashdot meme, In Soviet Russia, you annoy advertisers.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I think I can figure out all the other ones... but what is the '+' supposed to represent?
I believe it's an inclusivity catch-all. One writer called it "and beyond." Going by my construction above, it appears not to include identifying as bovine.
Nothing posted to
It'll be front page as soon as we fix it. Thanks for the suggestions.
But what does that say about us? The majority of you (myself included) will be on here until the last day, long after it's Geocitied or MySpaced itself.
... Cashing out
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
Great idea.
The old ones have awakened!
The end is nigh!
We're not old, you are just young! 8-)
I, for one, welcome our new BIZX, LLC overlords.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
In all seriousness, what project is even left at SourceForge that you care about? FileZilla can DIAF.
WTF?
Looks like a comment about stuff that annoys me shook up some sort of ticking time bomb blaming the world for his problems. I suppose that explains the attack from nowhere and the refusal to admit that things were discussed to death in earlier articles.
Now since you are big on ignoring comments you don't like and pretend they don't exist, how about ignoring any comments that reference those comments you don't like instead of trying to start some sort of fight? We would have avoided all this pointless idiocy and your goading to sift through all that slime again.
Here are the UI annoyances I referred to in my previous reply to you (which is here).
The links following the title is a bad idea. The site made its community used to all links being in the text of the story, but someone decided that a link should go in the title. See this screenshot, and look at where "(phoronix.com)" is? That is really annoying. Make it go back to where we are used to it (in the story text).
In this screenshot the background color is dark when the mouse moves to the drop down list. That is distracting and obscures the choices. The background color should remain white with no change when the mouse is moved in, as in this screenshot.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Great idea.
Thanks, here's another great idea: allow Slashdot members to send private messages to each other.
There are times when members want to continue a conversation with each other, while drifting into off-topic territory; or where one member wants to pick the brain of another and/or collaborate on Something Big; or where member A is so impressed with member B's posts, that A wants to offer employment to B.
Currently, if you want to contact another Slashdot member, you use the kludge of replying to one of that member's comments. And of course there's no guarantee that member is even checking to see whether any replies are coming in. Furthermore there's no way to privately exchange phone numbers, etc.
Slashdot is a collection of really big brains, who are unbelievably handicapped by the lack of a way to communicate with each other. Unleash the potential! By doing so, Slashdot would attract even more really big brains.
(You many have noticed my really low user ID, 3683. Having observed things since the beginning, I know whereof I speak about the limitations that are holding Slashdot back.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Upon reflection, I think I'm more than discouraged by your reply. "More of the same" is definitely not the answer for the ongoing problems... Actually, one part of your answer could be interpreted as "But even less so", which seems to be a tacit admission that things have been going in the wrong direction.
(Of course, we already had the explicit evidence of the transfer of ownership itself. Not even sure it should be called a sale, since I've seen too many cases where such a deal was actually just a transfer of debt...)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Thanks for the clarification, but it makes me feel like I failed to make my suggestion sufficiently clear. Yes, I certainly think you should give priority to new features that users want, but I think you should give the highest priority to features they want badly enough to help pay for. My suggested mechanism to implement this approach would involve "charity shares" at a suggested 'retail' price of $10 per share. (However, one of the viral mechanisms that might be worth considering would be to allow overselling of shares (within the schedule constraints) to drive the per share cost down while pushing the priority up.)
By making the linkage between new features (or ongoing costs) and the people who use those features (or incur the costs) more explicit, then you have a fundamentally different economic model. Rather than paying with our privacy in the usual push-driven advertising models, we would be rewarded by appearing on the donor page associated with the project documentation of the features we funded. Yeah, it's a small thing, but I think it would be enough for me to justify donating some of my money, small though my wallet be, and in a sense you can compare the smallness with the small value of a click on an ad...
Of course the real question is whether or not there are a lot of people who might be similarly motivated by a convenient way to make slashdot better. I don't think you can judge by my poor salesmanship of the idea. How about if I offer to put up some seed money? (However, in that more substantial case I would want to see a pretty solid business plan... I'd need to believe there is some chance I'd recover my capital--but I am willing to gamble on the idea.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Slashdot probably has more uses for a marketing agency than trying to sell stuff to engineers.
I would use primarily it as a research lab. You have a great community of dedicated people who will contribute valuable content.
You can just let it live, gather valuable information, and play your experiments there. Do they contribute more when headlines are more sensationalist? Do they react to unfair moderation? How many ads will they put up with before complaining?
Also... can this be used to leverage engineers as "influencers" ? I don't mean slashvertisements, I mean well planned manipulation.
Totally agree on downmods, even though I rarely use them.
But is it true that unpopular opinions are downmodded? I see unpopular opinions sitting at +5 quite often.
That merely indicates that they are... popular. There is a smooth transition between "troll" and "i disagree" and there is no discrete distinction that can be easily made. I often read the comment "There is no "I disagree" moderation on Slashdot." Maybe adding "I disagree" down-mod can make things a little more explicit.