Slashdot Updates 1057
The formkey bug that was wreaking havoc all weekend was fixed. It was a mistake in seeding rand that was causing a small percentage of users to have problems posting. It wasn't a conspiracy designed to thwart anyone, just you. Man it was a pain in the ass. But it was squashed on Sunday (thank god).
Anonymous Coward filtering is now in place. It's not exactly finished, but it'll do for now. Essentially there is now a user preference that sets all AC posts to -1. This has been a very common user request for some time, so turn it on if you like. It's currently off by default. It's only a baby step: eventually there will be more fine-tuned controls for anonymous posts, as well as comment types. For Example: I'd personally like to assign a -2 penalty on any comment rated 'funny' because most of them frankly just aren't funny at all. But humor is far too subjective to say that the moderation is unfair. Anyway, now everyone can decide for themselves. That should happen in the next few weeks.
Last up, I'm gonna talk a little about advertisements and subscriptions. Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months, and simply selling the banner ads you see on top of each page isn't going to be enough to keep us afloat if we keep growing. And selling banner ads in 2001 is an awful lot harder then it was in 1999.
The change will be a different ad size on the article page. Currently we have the standard banner size on top of all pages, but soon the article pages will instead have those huge square things that you see on CNet or ZD. I know this will be unpopular with many people, myself included, but when we make the switch, we will also have some sort of subscription system where you can pay a fee to disable them honestly. (No I don't know how much yet!)
Just to shut down the conspiracy theorists, nobody is forcing us to make these changes: The navbar. The new ad formats. The subscription system. I could just say 'No' to changes like these. But Slashdot is now four years old ... and I want it to still be here four years from now. I hope you can understand the expensive reality associated with making this site happen every day for a quarter of a million readers.
Now flame me if you feel it necessary. Get it out of your system.
How much? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ads are not necessarily bad... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Some contradiction here? (Score:3, Interesting)
Problem with the -2 for Funny (Score:2, Interesting)
A better solution: find the average of the ratings: If there are 4 Informative's and 1 Funny, Informative is how the post is rated.
Chris
Give me some targetted marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
Much like slashboxes, in that none selected will show you the default selection, and some selected will show only those type. Also show the default selection if none of the selected types are showing at that given moment.
I would be very receptive to setting those preferences. I think most other folk around here would too.
subscriptions? (Score:1, Interesting)
I've a question (Score:2, Interesting)
Money (Score:3, Interesting)
How much does it cost per month to operate Slashdot? How much for the hosting, and how much in salaries? Just Slashdot, not the rest of OSDN.
How much revenue is generated from the current banner ads? What are the rates charged, and what does that total up to per month?
How much revenue is expected to be generated by the new obnoxious banners? What rates will be charged, and what's the projection for monthly revenues?
How many ads does the average Slashdot reader see, and what does that translate to dollar-wise? What would be a fair amount to pay, to compensate for the loss of banner revenue?
The "conservation" alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
But, rather than feeding this trend and turning to more-obnoxious ads to cover the increased bandwidth, why not turn to conservation-based approaches? In short, reduce the bandwidth consumed for each page.
For example, a quick glance at the typical story's HTML reveals a lot of bloat, most of which could be removed by taking look-and-feel instructions out of the HTML and placing them into stylesheets. More than 10 percent savings seems realistic. And, unlike banner ads that have harmful side effects (such as annoyed readers), reducing HTML bloat has positive side effects like reduced download times and increased accessibility.
So before turning to increasingly evil ads, why not try conservation?
Re:Some contradiction here? (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, anyone reading will immediately consider anonymous information to be less valid than that which is attributed. In some cases, the inherent value of the information itself will overcome that initial doubtfulness.
But to suggest that
there are days when i browse at -1 to laugh at the asinine AC stuff, there are days when i browse at +2 because I don't have much time to spend. There are days where I'm annoyed that the three top rated posts are all "funny" rather than informative or directly on-topic. there are days when I'm not bothered by it at all.
I personally think that Taco is doing as well as could be expected at trying to make everyone happy, which of course he can't. But he can give us more and more options so we can make OURSELVES happy.
That said, the suggested large ads are a PITA, and after being on
I suggest that they'd probably do better selling karma than ad space!
Why I don't like Junkbuster (Score:2, Interesting)
I feel like many of these sites are providing me with a cool service or interesting reading, and the least I can do is glance at what their advertisings are offering. Often, if I really like what a site has, I will click on the ad out of pity, and sometimes read what they have to offer.
This is how capitalism works. If you like the site, and you are even slightly interested in the ad, click on it. Both the site's owners and the advertiser deserve at least a shot.
But please don't... (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that absolutely pisses me off about the CNet and ZDNet ads is that they make the browser unusable and choppy untill you scroll them away. Don't put those there. Use simple images or light-weight animated GIFs.
Use PayPal. You have a solid, reliable reader base of what, half a million users? Create a yearly "pledge" drive similar to NPR stations. Get 1/10th of people to give you $5-50 bucks and you're all set. If you can't even get that, then the "community" doesn't deserve web sites like this.
Ads will kill readership, period. It's sad, but true. And because of the fact that you've given away the code, there are tons of options out there that will fill the void (for a while at least).
Re:Paying for _community_ content? (Score:2, Interesting)
That way, the people who provide the content in the first place get rewarded for doing so (i.e. they don't get adverts, and whatever other value gets added). Those who don't, don't. After all, if nobody submitted interesting content, slashdot would die.
Re:Please inact a subscription service! (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the value of slashdot is in the user comments, and I think it is only fair to give a "free ride" to those who contribute the most highly rated content.
Also, people who were bored with sitting at the +50 cap would have a way to reduce their Karma other than resorting to a week-long trolling spree.
How much does it cost to run Slashdot? (Score:2, Interesting)
(Not me, but I'll happily look at big-ass ads as long as there's no popups or Flash ads.)
Since
So what's the actual cost breakdown?
Why this is a good change (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, information wants to be free. But it's NOT free as in beer.
As an aside, anyone notice how hard VA is trying to move people towards Newsforge? The banners exclaiming that Newsforge has twice as many news stories per day as Slashdot and LinuxToday combined? Now the brand building banner, etc? To me, this smacks of at least partial desperation; trying to create something that people will recognize and flock back to, even if the parent company should go bankrupt.
Sure, Slashdot is popular. Lots of people read it. But it is also becoming more and more stigmatized as the battlefield of business-ignorant fanatics. People who are worthless to any business, thus advertising to them is less productive than, say, advertising on a big, serious-looking site, with a more professional-looking design. With less hysterical stories about losing our rights to privacy and pirating music, and more stories about, for instance, "Caldera target[ting] developers with latest workstation", which is an actual Newsforge headline.
One of these two sites is somewhat appealing to business, and thus to advertisers. One of them is easier to sell as serious newsmedia. One of them has a heavy editorial hand, columns, and no negative image of being filles with Linux fanboys and other unwashed freaks.
The other one is Slashdot.
Somehow, I feel that OSDN is trying to direct as much traffic towards its more 'serious' site as possible, leaving Slashdot as a more 'hobbyist' site than anything else. Obviously they can't do anything directly about it, or those aforementioned fanboys (yeah, I'm one of them) would screaming bloody murder. But it can 'integrate' Slashdot into its OSDN thingee, adding bars, and big adverts, and subscription programs, and watering it down from its original incarnation.
Sure, it's necessary to survive economically, to some extent. But ultimately, Slashdot doesn't pay. It takes quite a lot of hardware, and SIGNIFICANT bandwidth. How much do you think VA makes on those Thinkgeek banners? To make up for the black hole of cash that is
But then maybe it's just a mad conspiracy theory.
And let me repeat: information may want to be free, but that's NOT free as in beer.
Donations? (Score:4, Interesting)
Multi-site kind of deal (OSDN) (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't there a way that /.'s bandwidth requirements (Score:-1, Interesting)
Here's a concept: mod the ads (Score:5, Interesting)
So here's an idea: mod the ads. Users may voluntarily mod the ads based on how much they think the ads provide any value-add to life.
collaborative filtering (Score:4, Interesting)
With collaborative filtering, each slashdotter would view posts that were moderated up by other slashdotters who had similar preferences in the past.
There was a great site called moviecritic.com (which unfortunately has since been shut down due to budget limitations) that used collaborative filtering to recommend movies. I found it incredibly useful, and discovered some great movies that I never would have watched otherwise.
With collaborative filtering, stories could also be 'recommended' without forcing the user to rule out entire categories of stories. The beauty of collaborative filtering is that it does not assume anything a priori other than the fact that if two individuals have shared common preferences in the past, they are likely to agree again in the future.
Traditional moderation could be accomplished simply by tallying the votes that each post received.
mmm
p.s. I'd be glad to help build this functionality into slashcode if there is sufficient interest.
Re:Some contradiction here? (Score:1, Interesting)
The advantage of pseudonyms is that they protect privacy while still allowing a writer to build a reputation -- whether good or bad. And that allows readers to make informed decisions about whose words they want to read, and what biases those authors may have.
Even if a slashdotter wanted to make some comments and not have them associated with previous comments from the same nym (perhaps they had revealed in the past that they are employed writing video drivers for OmniMegaView video cards, and now they want to blow the whistle on OmniMegaViews treatment of its gay employees), an easy option is open to them. Simply create two (or more) user accounts.
Use one nym for posting work-related or technical material, another for comments that might be embarrassing in some way, and a third for flaming the trolls back to the stone age. Readers would have no way of knowing that the nyms all represented the same person in real life.
"On Slashdot, nobody knows you're really CowboyNeal."
I think, though, that it would be better to increase the penalty for AC's, rather than set them to -1. If one could, say, hit them with an extra -2 penalty, that would still let those rare AC comments that had been strongly modded up pass through. In any case, this would only be an option -- if you object to it so strongly, don't turn it on.
P.S. The plural of mongoose is polygoose.
Re:As long as there are no X10 ads... (Score:3, Interesting)
new ads (Score:2, Interesting)
Voluntary micro donations. (Score:3, Interesting)
I also like the idea of a subscription system for OSDN, so that I can avoid ads in all OSDN sites. Of course, the economics and technology consideration may outweigh this possibility.
As has been iterated before (but never enough), I really like
--Outta' Sync
Slashdot's Missed Opportunities (Score:5, Interesting)
With a captive audience, why didn't you guys write an auction service, like ebay, or a classifed ad section, for a fee. You have a community of people, you are well known, take advantage of it. You have scalability experience. Over the last 3 years you could have really built something. And ebay has proven this to be the best way to make $$ over the internet.
I doubt ads anymore will help you - good luck. you remind me of netscape. they had millions of people going to their home page daily, and only belatedly realized they could create a portal service like Yahoo. They blew it, and finally died. They would still be huge today if they had woken up.
alex
Re:Please inact a subscription service! (Score:3, Interesting)
It makes sense, too. In theory, better content means more readers will visit the site, thereby increasing the "effectiveness" of the ads on the site. (I abstain from the argument of whether ads are effective at all.)
Subscriptions should add value (Score:5, Interesting)
Subscriptions that eliminate banner ads do not add much value for the purchaser especially in a technically savvy crowd like Slashdot where users that know how to install and configure JunkBuster [junkbuster.com] to get rid of ads abound. For subscriptions to be valuable source of revenue then the people who subscribe must get a considerable amount more than the people who don't to make it worth it. Suggestions I can think of right of the bat
A lot of the ideas are probably unworkable but they are put there to give an idea as to the kind of things that people are more likely to pay for than not.
All of these may seem distasteful but considering that VA Linux probably doesn't have much longer to go I think the Slashdot folks need to take a long hard look at how they're going to keep financing the site if they still want it to exist in four or five years.
Flame Away.
Re:Some contradiction here? (Score:3, Interesting)
slashdot used to be a place where important and interesting topics were discussed and genuinely important and interesting people such as Alan Cox, John Carmack and Bruce Perens would post and discuss.
Today, slashdot is full of karma whoring bitches who post blindingly obvious comments to articles. The only people posting interesting comments to the articles are trolls such as egg troll [slashdot.org], Trollman 5000 [slashdot.org], the sporks, cyborg_monkey et al. Their posts may be crude and unwelcome by most of you, but as a slashdot veteran being surrounded with linux wannabes posting blindingly obvious yet 'insightful' comments it is a breath of fresh air.
You only need to look at moderation in the slashdot article Ask Slashdot: Opposing Open Source? [slashdot.org] to see what i mean: the article was all about opposing points to open source software, yet we had blindingly obvious karma whoring posts [slashdot.org] about microsoft's well known postition on the subject and the not-very-insightful karma whoring posts by a bunch of linux wannabes [slashdot.org] giving their un-valuable opinions [slashdot.org], and yet whenever something new [slashdot.org] was presented, even in jest, it was moderated troll or flamebait.
I want an option that allows me to browse only the -1 posts. These posts are the only insightful and interesting material being posted on this site.
Sinking feeling (Score:1, Interesting)
/. was something that I have looked toward as the brightest and best point of rebellion against big government, greedy corporations, dumb profiteering politicians, and most of the other things wrong with the world. Somehow it feels as if it too, is now going over to the other side, succumbing to the inevitable financial realities.
If I may indulge in a quote:
The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away. Fear will keep the local
...
Do not be too proud of this financial terror you have constructed. It's ability to destroy the free internet is insignificant next to the power of Open Source!
Slashdot should run on donations (Score:2, Interesting)
I had a hand in running a site that cost about US$700/month in bandwidth charges. All content was provided by the site's community, and the whole thing was paid for by that same community (no ads!). The site was IMPORTANT to that community, so important that the money was always there.
Is
It's important to me. I read
I don't need to know the costs, and I don't think I'll be buying 'accountability' (I know what a miserable job running a site like this can be).
I just need my
All about sacrifice... (Score:2, Interesting)
Another thing is to modify the comments list to work in a frame or subject basis by limiting to the first 100-200 words of a comment. Soem comments go on for miles on end and therefore are useless. Should a comment have a rating of 0, only post title, +1 = 50 words, +2 = 100 words, +3 = 200 words, +4 would be whole comment.
This would help reduce your bandwidth use, allow you to get a smaller pipe, and live longer in this hellish economy.
It is called content management... And if you can't learn to manage your content delivery system properly, then yes, you can not survive in the future.
What about a distributed model... (Score:2, Interesting)
How Much Bandwidth Stylesheets Can Save You... (Score:5, Interesting)
I love Slashdot, and I'm willing to pay for it because I know it costs money to run a website and ads aren't cutting it these days. However, they're basically throwing away the bandwidth they would like us to pay for. The HTML produced by Slash is crap, frankly.
I used HTML Tidy to automatically convert the page to stylesheets as opposed to old-fasioned obsolete HTML formatting tags. The old version of the page was ~230K. The new version of the page, using stylesheets, was ~160K. That's a ~43% bandwith savings, right there, with little effort. If you include images, there's still a 35% reduction in bandwidth.
Also, have the Slash crew explored Apache's on-the-fly zip compression abilities (it's a separate module, I don't know the name)? It eats CPU power, obviously, but HTML can be compressed by 90% or more when zipped. The cost of more web boxen would be more than paid for by the bandwidth savings, I'd wager... especially if Slashdot is getting free hosting from it's parent company.
Bottom line: I'll pay for Slashdot's content, but not for lazy Slashdot coding. If you want us to pay for bandwidth, show us you're using it as efficiently as possible. Because you're not right now. You're like a guy begging for food with a sandwich sticking out of his pocket... I just DON'T wanna hear it. And yes, I know there's other costs associated with running the website besides bandwidth, and the ad market is shit right now.
Re:Please inact a subscription service! (Score:1, Interesting)
Seriously I think it's an okay idea, but I don't think giving people the incentive to ruin discussion by whoring just so they can maintain their free subscription is a great idea.
And it'd be nice if there was a similarily free option for the thousands of lurkers who just like to read the comments and don't post much.
And I don't think Taco's ISP accepts karma points as payment.
Re:Please enact a spell checker! (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't believe that even enact is properly used.
But hey, a spell check WOULD be useful, and would it really be that difficult to pipe it through something? OK, yeah, extra computing power and extra expense. But hey, that'd be one of these k3wl extras!
Seriously though, I have no problem with subscription, as long as it's done right. Being able to turn off ads if I pay for it sounds like a decent idea. Actually, if I could target ads to myself through the preferences, that may not be a bad plan either, and I'm sure the marketing folks would eat it up.
Re:Animated ads (Score:2, Interesting)
rather than complaining that we don't want big annoying ads, we should be finding ways to make the Internet more profitable for businesses without them.
Learn from Google (Score:5, Interesting)
I love text ads. I click on ads on Google more than any other website because they are targeted and easy on my eyes. Banners with cycling images make you wait to see what the ad is for.
I'm not sure what the costs of slashdot are that are increasing, but I'm sure that there are effective ways to reduce them. Is it the server load? If you use technologies that are more efficent or pass the processing onto the client ( like XML, XSLT, and CSS ) then it would be less cost to you. Also using text ads would decrease load.
On another note: I think that a better, more streamlined, ad free slashdot would be worth a few cents a day. I suggest if you move to a pay system (which I would love) then use a micropay system. Something like $0.03 per page load. It is the fairest way to go, and would encourage people to start reading slashdot because there wouldn't be a commitment.
Re:How much? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is more akin to subscribing to a magazine. I used to subscribe to a lot of magazines. Then I discovered that I actually didn't have the time to get $30 or so of value from each one, instead I was simply skimming most of them. The result was that I greatly reduced the number that I subscribe too.
The same will be true of web sites. If they think the competition was bad before, wait until users have to start making choices about what web sites they have time to get real value from.
Note though, my first post didn't say I wasn't willing to pay for a _reasonable_ subscription and in my opinion that is now more then a few dollars a year to make up for my ad viewing.
My choice here is even easier then the magazines however as I can filter the ads from my end if they aren't reasonable in their pricing.
Re:Some contradiction here? (Score:2, Interesting)
In my experience, posting anything negative about Linux will get you modded down. Posting positive things about Microsoft can also get you modded down, but not as often. The chances of getting modded down for this decreases for posts over about 2k and for posts that begin with "I know I'm going to get modded down for this...", but I've found that if you state an opinion that is contrary to Slashdot groupthink, you need to post anonymously.
This post here, for example, is one that probably should have been posted anonymously, but in my little utopian world, I think I should be able to have an opinion without cowering behind anononymity just because a few monderators think anyone who doesn't like Linux is automatically a troll.
I'd filter anonymous posts, but there are quite a decent ones out there. But most people on Slashdot seem to believe that if you're not being insighful and interesting, or if you post less than 5 lines of text, it's best to be anonymous.
How to solve the problem?
What we need is an "anonymous" checkbox, and then an "I'm an idiot" checkbox.
Or a new moderation, "-1 Asshole." That way, if you don't agree with the poster, you can still mark them as Troll, but if someone is linking goatse.cx, you can mark them as being just plain annoying.
Re:Money (Score:3, Interesting)
I just have to add a big "me too" to that.
Slashdot should disclose the figures. My PBS station tells me how much the digital doodad that they are required to buy will cost, how much money they need to raise, etc. And they get taken care of, and I do my part.
But if people don't see the numbers, they'll either think, "Well, my x won't be enough to help," or "Damn, with my x bucks, I'm practically shouldering the thing all by myself."
Show us the numbers, Slashdot.
Re:Give me some targetted marketing (Score:2, Interesting)
We have to create incensitives not to lie, myslead readers or unnecessarly annoy. Don't you just hate being technicaly-not-quite-lied to? Let registered users vote againts particular adds. Those generaly disliked will have a lower probability of being displayed.
Hey! Moderations systems for adds!
But lets not put it on the slashdot alone to come up with it. Community effort here we come :
Start a source forge projet. Publish an probabilistic advertisement interface for slash. Let everybody implement it in any various ways they can think. Then, offer a selection of the best ones from the user preference page. "Whose add manager do you want to use today? Linus', RMS' or CmdrTaco's?"
As time goes on, you drop from the list those that generate the innaceptable click-throught.
I claim this converges to very useful advertisements, both for the advertisers and the readers.
Re:Some contradiction here? (Score:3, Interesting)
I do exactly that all the time, and don't get modded down very frequently for it.
but I've found that if you state an opinion that is contrary to Slashdot groupthink, you need to post anonymously.
As long as you justify your position I have found that you can state whatever you wish to. As long as you don't post defamitory or just plain stupid comments I haven't had much of a problem expressing my opinion.
Or a new moderation, "-1 Asshole."
Does it really matter? The labels don't do anything anyways as everything is filtered on score instead.
This post here, for example, is one that probably should have been posted anonymously
Why? I see absolutely nothing wrong with what you're saying, you've stated a point and you're backing it up. I'd be surprised if you got negatively modded just because you were expressing your opinion, and indeed if you were for that reason then it would be incredibly hypocritical of the people doing the moderation, since we're all trying to fight for freedom of speech et al.
I browse at 2, and I find that works out great. That means that either you're an AC who said something important enough to get +2 on it, you're a regular user who said something important enough to get at least a +1 on it, or you have a history of saying good things and thus you've probably got something interesting to say.
Personally I find it pathetic that there are loosers out there who think that it's cool to get in the first post on a story or post stupid ascii art about goatse.cx, quite frankly I think they need to get a life, but unfortunately that's part of life here. I think that the current moderation system works, not perfectly for anything pro linux is bound to get modded up, and sometimes stupid/funny gets modded up as well, but usually the moderations are fair. If anything I'd suggest to remove the cap for moderation, allow it to go as high as you want, or at least maybe to +6 or +7, and possibly give the ability to filter/sort based on the description of the moderations since right now they mean really nothing. Especially since the last moderation sets the description, it's kinda pointless if you have +4, Interesting and then a -1, Overrated so your comment is now (+4, Overrated)...
Ah well, this is but a news forum, I think we have more important battles to fight =)
Re:Some contradiction here? (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree in the assumption that all new users and linux wanabes are responsible for this. I for example try to keep my posts restricted to my personal areas of expertese (spelling not being one of those areas) and pure speculation. I don't post on the future trends in the open source movement because I simply don't know shit about them. I'm intersted to see what others have to say though... and I think I've learned alot from Slashdot in my year or so here.
Now into that speculation. I've noted that Slashdot tends to be straying from what many consider its origional purpose to be. Most of the reader base sees this site as dedicated first and foremost to news about Linux, high tecnology, and science. Nonetheless, we've branched out. Articles on personal liberties (many of which really don't belong to "your rights online") and poltical developments grace these pages.
Perhaps, other niche groups need their own slashdot? I've seen a few uses of the slashcode in various poorly frequented news sights, but nothing of the scope that Slashdot has.
As a history buff myself, I'd be curious to see the reaction a site like, oh, say Pastdot would get
Point being, I think a lot of the AC posts and trolls we see here are a result of two things. 10 year olds with to much time on their hands, and people looking to discuss issues who really aren't part of this "community" or clique if you prefer. Perhaps
Re:Money (Score:3, Interesting)
Around 10% of OPB's radio listeners are contributing members. OPB gets 51% of their revenues from member contributions. Last week, 7,000 listeners pledged a little over $500,000.
These are the kinds of numbers we should be hearing from Slashdot.
Syndicate content (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps "features" could be created by taking the base story and any posts that add significant information and those features could be sold. Sort of a "Premium Slashback".
Re:Subscriptions should add value (Score:2, Interesting)
1. I like the idea of a @slashdot forwarding address (real mailboxes are too expensive to run well). I don't know what you mean by "no dynamic content" on a web page
2. There are lots of good ideas for better filtering but few seem to have wide popularity. They'd have to implement a lot of options to please enough subscribers.
3. Buying a +1 is a bad idea, having $x of disposably income has no bearing on the quality of one's posts. The point of moderation is to help the audience find their way to the best the community has to offer. Monkey around with that and you hurt the quality of the site.
4. This is a recently implemented option, and a very good one. Despite my first comment above, I think this is new enough to be changed to a subscribers-only option without hurting the draw of the site.
5. A good idea, anything that helps me get past what I've read between reloads is good.
6. This goes too far in voliating my first point about changing the non-paying user's experience of the site. Providing subscribers *addtional* options is a better idea.
7. Bad idea, watch the number of comments drop like a stone with the number of readers and ad revenue close behind.
8. I know little of the story submission process to really know what impact this would have. My impression is the majority of stories do not come from repeat submitters so you'd be cutting off most of the stories that make it through.
What does Slashdot provide readers?
1. Editors of the story submissions which could be improved at the low level, spelling, fact checking but is under-appreciated at the high level submission selection. IMO Kuroshin's process is different but not better than Slashdot's small group.
2. reader comments which are highly variable in quality but not short on "good" ones
3. A backend and interface which makes reading and commenting fairly easy. If you've been around long enough, it's easy to remember when the signal to noise ratio was better but its seemingly easy to forget how crappy most community web sites were to read and participate in. Slashdot has shared this beyond its own domain not only through Slashcode but also through inspiring countless clones with similar look 'n feel.
Granted, spawning the Slashdot Way for community web sites is something that's done. I don't expect Slashdot to be the source of the next major advancement in, well, anything, technologically. Rather, I expect it to maintain its standards, incrementally improve technologically, and try to remain "relevant."
How much I would pay for a subscription to Slashdot naturally depends on what's offered. My measuring stick is my Wired subscription. I pay $12/year for Wired. It's filled with a buttload of ads and it's not as good as it used to be but it's permanent, easy to look at, cheaper than it used to be, and a decent number of those ads are interesting/informative/funny. I could see myself paying that much for Slashdot. However I haven't paid for online content yet so it's hard to be certain.
Market existing innovation. (Score:2, Interesting)
How about forking a commercial version of Slashcode?
I'm dead serious; surely there are people who would be willing to register an enhanced or optimized version at a reasonable price. I've paid to license both WWWThreads and vBulletin, and those are just message boards. A full featured content management system like Slashcode ought to fetch a decent registration fee. Throw a professional installation into the package and I guarantee there will be buyers.
I love open source as much as the next guy, and I've written my share of giveaways. But "free as in beer" doesn't put food on the table. Beer either, for that matter. And it sure doesn't pay for the bandwidth and colo overhead incurred by a site with this much traffic. Being generous with your code is nice, and it gets your name out there in a positive light, but the Slashdot crew don't need the publicity anymore. They need to keep the bills paid.
Shaun
Re:Here's a concept: mod the ads (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this is a smart idea. In the more corporate world, when I sign up for things, they give me the option to "value-add" my name to mailing lists, and to receieve "product notifications".
In this pessimistic anti-marketing community, perhaps it could be done well to reverse this, and instead of saying what you like, say what you hate. Mod DOWN the bad stories.
As an aside, I would pay for Slashdot if they hired a lawyer to give legal commentary on relevant stories. I'm not pretending to have a business model where this would work. However, it would be far more educational and enlightening if a comment about SomeBadCompany's lawyers taking candy from a baby could have a few quotes from relevant law.
And no, I'm not even American. But, I still think it would be interesting.
Re:Some contradiction here? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you challenge to the status quo, you're a troll.
Re:Paying for _community_ content? (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh? Since when is content an acceptable form of payment?
You also seem to be missing the difference between Slashdot and Salon - paying a subscription to Slashdot will, based on everything I have ever heard CmdrTaco say about it, never change the *content* you are able to read, but rather things around the content.
The last I checked, running an ad off of Doubleclick was never considered "content." If you pay the subscription, you lose the ad - YOU DO NOT LOSE CONTENT.
So you are not paying for (user-provided) content.
You also mention the difference between in pre- and post-Andover takeover. You seem to trace differences back to this purchase without considering other possibilities. Is is not possible that Slashdot grew enormously during this time and, as a result, hosting costs went up as well?
>Let us know that we're being charged this because of need, and not because
>of the avarice of a few businessmen over at VA.
Let us not forget the other thing - based on everything I have read, there will never be a *need* to pay the subscription fee. It is a choice.
I am happy to pay for slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the net has a anti-payment mentality which unfortunately breeds the kind of annoying business model which we all detest. A few bucks isn't going to kill anyone and still allow this site to be a nice place to read.
You guys are doing a great job and it is appreciated.
Thanks
Happy Person
Now really, (Score:2, Interesting)
If even the 1% of hardcore slashdotters payed for a subscription, it'd be more money than one could ever generate through ad banners.
If there's anything about the open source geek community, it's the adhesive-like properties it shows, especially for people who routinely give so much for so little. So I think if Slashdot did such a thing, its financial troubles would most likely be indefinately alleviated.
Go Slashdot, I support you wholly.
The AC Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Make it so you can post anonymously, but must be logged in. Ie, (like on half-empty) your karma is still affected and there is still an internal link to your post with your account, but nobody knows who you are.
2) Make it so there's an interface in slashcode to contact anonymous individuals (perhaps anonymously as well?
This way ACs who are posting crap will eventually bottom out in karma and post at -1 and have the potential to be flamed on the
Contridiction? (Score:4, Interesting)
"I don't like it any more then many of you, so if you log in, there is an option to disable it."
Then:
"nobody is forcing us to make these changes: The navbar. The new ad formats. The subscription system. I could just say 'No' to changes like these"
If you COULD have said no, and you HATED the changes, why did you say YES?
If Slash wants to stay profitable.. (Score:3, Interesting)
1. The only annoying advertising is a thin banner ad, no popups, and if you scroll down it doesn't stay there. i.e. CLEAN INTERFACE
2. Katz can be filtered through the user preferences.
3. CmdrTaco and friends do a decent job of highlighting a wide variety of tech/geek news sources, not just what the parent company shoves down their throat.
Hey, advertising revenues are down. Deal with it. You have a company that turns a profit. Don't get greedy and it will stay that way. If you need to shell out for more hardware and bandwidth for ISP support do so, but don't let that lead to bloat. Slashcode could be always be tweaked to save computing resources, but it is mature and doesn't need more bells and whistles.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be interesting to see some stats about how many /.er's have the toolbar on after 'x' days -- in fact it would be interesting to have a compilation of stats in general:
The Ads on ZDnet won't work here. (Score:2, Interesting)
Considering how many *nix geeks are on this board, along with how many run Lynx, etc., how effective will those ads be, really? Yes, I will pay to get the hell rid of them, but I think that plan might backfire.
Re:Donations? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have a donation drive like twice a year, like a telethon, only the crippled kids are the servers, and the old guys tapdancing are rob and jeff, i think it would go over great. Why? Because with a donation system, you're not REQUIRED to pay. You can slack and not pay. But since its voluntary, i think you'll get more generous response. Only people who want to pay for it will pay for it, but they'll pay for themselves and others on principle. AND they'll kind of have this inner satisfaction that they are helping save slashdot. If its not the monthy bill, instead a donation, it makes it seem so much more noble, and even the geeks here can appreciate that.
In general though, if it has to be a subscription, i won't pay it if its month to month. I want to pay once a year, like $50 or whatever. Get it all out of the way at once, so i only bitch about it once, and then forget it for the other 11 1/2 months.
Also, if i'm required to pay for it, i want to make sure i can be logged in at all times. It's been happening lately that i can't log in, i try and it just redirects me to the home page, and then i have no ability to change the threashold on the comments.
But, see? I've just proved my point. People who pay a fee that are required to pay it are in a position to make demands, they want higher quality service and more privilages. People that donate, they just feel content that they've helped keep it alive.
For instance: If we were required to pay for the Jerry Lewis telethon, if it was required for citizenship, then we'd all start to wonder where the hell the cure was for these kids was, even if we only paid $2 a year. Since its a donation basis, we just go and pay our $10, and say "i'm helping out, and that feels good. Poor kids."
subscription is the fastest way to get a demanding and critical audience that actually has the power they threaten they have.
~z
Re:How much? (Score:2, Interesting)
Please, please, please. No pop up ads.
Why I used to post AC (Score:2, Interesting)
I think that it is a shame that many useful posts get missed just because someone was either too lazy to log in, had forgotten their password, was on another machine, or (like me) lacked enough imagination to come up with a cool nickname.
ACs should post at 0. If a comment gets modded up or down it should be because of it's content, not because someone is anonymous.
(Actually, Slashdot was anoying there for a while because the defaults were ACs post at -1 but read at 0... I couldn't read my own posts.)
Use popup when moderating (Score:4, Interesting)
When I am a moderator, I find the pull-down mod system terrible. I like modding, but I don't want to spend all day on it. What sux is this: I view a story, see a good post and change the pull-down to "interesting". However, I don't want to go aaaaall the way down to click "moderate", because it takes 2-3 seconds of my life for the page to reload - and then I can't find where I got in the text. So I keep reading, just in case I spot another mod worthy post. If I see a sub-thread which isn't expanded, I can't go in there, cuz then the uncached page would forget the post I wanted to mod when I go back. Too often I end up going on a mod rampage, and just mod down trolls, but I would really prefer just to immidiatly vote for a post I saw, without getting disrupted.
Any solutions? You bet! If you check out half-empty [half-empty.org], the solution chosen there is simply a small button or link for every vote option. Click on any of them and a little window opens in the background, which handles the modding. It's beautifully simple and solves all the problems mentioned here. It even stimulates modding.
a few comments... (Score:3, Interesting)
- AFAIK it's true that most sites with significant traffic have a hard time selling even 10% of their ad space
- it makes no sense to drown your users in banners that aren't even paid - just show an empty banner code so that they don't need to use WebWasher etc. on your site if they don't mind 5% or 10% of the pages having banners
- click-through rates can be 5% with Google's system - it's important to learn from this: low cost, cost-effective, very targeted - that's the future. Try to offer a system for your customers that can be effective with a very low initial cost (e.g. a simple system to buy ad space only on pages in the Apache section). Offer text-based ads the greedy, short-sighted users who want everything for free and no ads too can't remove easily.
- before you do it secretly, offer it as a service: "advertorials", paid news items for selected customers. Don't accept just anything, but new hardware etc. released by some companies can just as well be announced in a manner that earns slashdot a few dollars. It's not as if users didn't suspect the slashdot staff getting paid for some of the articles anyway.
- subscriptions are what everyone who operates a large web site wants
, but don't do it alone. Get a few other interesting sites for the same audience together and offer a "premium" package with some extra content first (web mail, notification service, no ads, whatever).
- don't laugh: advertisers still have an obscure obsession with paper, so if you can provide content that can be printed without looking too silly, do it. Slashdot could have a monthly issue printed with the submitted articles and a few links and sell it together with a CD containing all the comments for that month and a few goodies (the latest Mozilla, updated Debian packages, security announcements, whatever). It's not a big investment (keep it that way!).
And, do it at your own risk.Re:Paying for _community_ content? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't go to the coffee shop to drink coffee, I go to have a natter with some pals. I find their company more valuable than the environs, but WITHOUT the environs we would be unable to meet up during the day as there would be nowhere to go.
In order to make use of the facility we buy coffee. Or beer in a Pub. We also choose the nicest available place to have coffee, and sometimes pay extra to sit there - but thats cool - thats a free market!
Now, maybe my analogy sucks - but thats how I see the web. ALL of my favoured sites operate on community originated content. But some sucker has to provide the coffee shop for us to meet in. Why shouldn't the Gunters of this world make a bean or two.
Personally, I don't mind if Taco etc make a good whack of cash, so long as they make sure this thing stays good. But then, if they don't we all bugger off and their back to being sad lonely spods!
Avantslash - a plug (Score:3, Interesting)
AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot [slashdot.org] on your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo [avantgo.com].
You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at http://www.slashdot.org/palm [slashdot.org] but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali [tringali.org] had to say about it on kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org]:
First of all, this [slashdot.org] is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.
/. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too
many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the
advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the
comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune"
sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be
gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it
fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.
If you're interesting in downloading avantslash or can provide a public URL for others to use, please check out http://www.custard.org/~richard/avantslash [custard.org]Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!
Finally, using
Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash [custard.org] takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.
Thanks for listening.
Subscription Service (Score:2, Interesting)
Business websites are VERY expensive to run - ask anyone who has been in the IT business for long enough - and slashdot is part of a company, like it or not, and there is no way on gods earth Slashdot makes any money.
If Slashdot needs larger ads, big deal - its still free so stop complaining. If you REALLY don't like it, then go and start your own Slashdot.
However if you want to start charging for a subscription, you have to then offer some kind of content which is UNIQUE to paying subscribers, and that means authoring your own content. Otherwise, whats the point of paying to see re-hashed material ?
Re:Avantslash - a plug (Score:3, Interesting)
We're always interested in making our site more readable on different platforms. There's some good criticisms in the above comment. We need the suggestions to be more specific if we're going to address the issue.
Better yet, send us patches -- this code is open-source [slashcode.com] you know. Normally, we'd take a look at how popular those pages are, decide where it goes on our priority list, and when we get to it we'll get to it. But if someone sends us well-commented patches and explains why they're an improvement so even our mostly-non-Palm-using little brains can understand, this'll get bumped a lot higher on our priority list.
Let's fork Slashdot! (Score:2, Interesting)
We fork it!
Someone register www.freeslashdot.org before someone at
graspee
Submitted Story refusal. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've submitted about a dozen stories/links over the last year, most have been [IMHO] good quality, and some have been 'Bang On Target', yet I've only had one accepted. e.g.
2000-10-24 09:13:06 UK Employers gain e-snoop powers today (articles,news) (accepted) .NET (developers,news) (rejected)
2001-01-24 11:09:08 Interactive Digital Television casestudy. (articles,tv) (rejected)
2001-02-28 15:22:44 nCube doubles size of worlds largest VOD System. (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-03-08 22:15:04 Amazon Security hole (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-04-09 13:17:24 PS2 & STB Convergence (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-04-09 13:22:41 Update: PS2/STB Convergence (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-05-04 13:02:10 'Tractor beam' technology advances (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-08-24 16:59:15 J2EE vs'
2001-10-11 12:38:02 Microsoft astro-turf EU investigation. (articles,news) (rejected)
In too many cases (all above) I've also seen a similar story posted within days. So it's not the stories themselves, so why are they being rejected? I think if we've gone to the effort of contributing we deserve at least a basic explaination.
Inevitable (Score:2, Interesting)
The cost of hosting and running something like Slashdot.org is way more than a lot of people are willing to admit to. Banner advertising might work, but from personal experience, I can tell you it ain't always enough. Worse, it can lead to tempatations from what I've seen.
Let's just say that it's time we grew up. Those of us who grew up without the web remember getting two types of magazines -- Free ones (trade rags) and subscription ones (going the route of the dinosaur). The really expensive ones were sometimes the best. The trade rags -- do I need to remind people what kind of dross was found in them?!? Crappy reviews and huge payola were often the norm. A rare voice like Nicholas Petreley could be found from time to time.
Why do a lot of people fail to realize that some things are going to be worth paying for? We like to think that advertising will just do it, but the God's honest truth is that it's just not doing it. It might be different if web advertising were more intrusive (like TV advertising, for example) -- but it's _not_ -- it's one of the things that makes surfing the web a pleasurable experience. If we had to watch (even catchy) flash movies every time we tuned into a web site, we'd freak.
CmdrTaco, Hemos -- I applaud your bravery, and I'll consider the cost of your ad-removal. Oh, and thanks for Slashdot.Org and your hard work.
--Paul Ferris
Bring on the flames... (Score:2, Interesting)