The Future of Slashdot (Very Important!)

These last few months Slashdot has been growing at an amazing rate. We've been getting 20-25k hits a day recently. As the site grows, I begin to think more and more about the site, its future, and myself. Recently I've been approached by several companies and people who see great Potential in the site. At the same, I am torn apart by my desire to continue maintaining the site as a hobby. Follow the link below to read my opinions and some options about the future of the site.

First off, here the problem's affecting the site.

As Slashdot Grows, Server Overloads Badly

• The server is pretty bogged down these days. It's an older machine supporting a few mailing lists, Slashdot, a lot of email, some FTP, and a few other smaller HTTP things. Simply put, if Slashdot grows much more, this server will die.

My Time

• I currently spend at least an hour every day reading nothing but email to slashdot, and then posting articles. I am getting 50-100 Slashdot email's each day, and this consumes a minimum of 10 hours a week. That's more than many college students spend on their part time jobs! And this doesn't even count adding new features, making images, reworking bits of HTML and CGI.

• If I was able to consider Slashdot a part time job, I could financially justify spending more time on Slashdot. I recieve a steady stream of ideas from you guys mentioning awesome features that I would love to implement. If the site was a part time job of some form I could code these features. I could write more editorials. We could spell check and grammar check our articles.

  And this is just my time. This doesn't even take into account the time spent by the other 5 members of the Slashdot staff. The site you see before you probably represents 20-30 hours of work each week from me and the rest of the staff.

So What Can We Do About It?

Option 1:Do Nothing

• We will probably continue to grow. The server will grow more unstable as our hits continue to rise. I probably will reduce the number of articles I post since there are only so many hours in a day and I can't afford to spend most of them maintaining the web site and still work enough to buy groceries, beer, tuition etc. I could possibly move the site to another ISP with a faster server, or get more regular authors and offload more work to them, but I would really like to see the site continue to grow.

Option 2:Donations

• We could have people mail in parts or even cash to the cause. This might work short term- we have thousands of readers. If everyone sent a buck, we could get a fast new server. But in 6mos if we need a bigger hard drive or something, I don't want to have to post another beg session. PBS Telethons are annoying as heck, and I don't want Slashdot to be like that.

Option 3:Banner Ads

• I'm sure advertisers would like the idea of advertising on a site that has 25,000 hits/day, most of which are nerds. We are a very targetted audience here. I've been contacted by a few people asking about this very thing. If you are company that would be interested in this, drop me a line. All of you who really detest banner ads could use junkbusters. One thing for sure is I would have to be careful about many things: size of the banners, placement of the banners and even the content of the banners. Slashdot's existing banners plug neat stuff, (Bovine, Linux, and my Employer) ideally our sponsor ads are within the same parameters:Nerdy stuff like ISPs, Software,

• If we do them, we'll be as respectful to you as we possibly can. I hate ads just as much as everyone else, but remember if we have banner ads, we're doing it for the forces of good.

Option 4:T-Shirts

• We could sell merchandise. Slashdot T-Shirts? Linux T-Shirts? Hats? Stickers? I don't know. The income here is very unstable though- according to the poll we could sell several hundred t-shirts. That could generate several hundred dollars, but what does that give us next month when we need a bigger hard drive or something? It seems to be just another way of donations.

• I think this is a nice way to get some cash, and best of all, to get cool t-shirts, but I suspect that this won't provide steady income.

  We will be doing some merchandise type stuff. But if I design a new Linux T-Shirt, I'd rather donate the profits to the FSF than snarf it up for Slashdot.

Option 5:Subscriptions

• We could do this many ways-a penny a page? A buck a month? I don't know. And frankly I don't want to know. If we can't make this free to you, it's just not worth doing.

Conclusions

• I really enjoy maintaining Slashdot. I love reading the comments everyone posts and I love sharing stuff that I find interesting. If this site does take on some sort of sponsorship I will be able to do all the things that I want to do to make this site the absolute best it can be. But no matter what happens, I promise to retain complete control over all the important aspects of the site (look, content, functionality) so the site will continue to provide everyone with the info they want.

• I really want to know what you guys think about this. I would appreciate email if you have something constructive to say, You are welcome to post to the comments here as well. Please think about what you say, as this is very important and will affect what you find on these pages in the upcoming months. Don't just say "I hate banner ads" and start flaming. Think honestly if you could tolerate a banner ad if it meant that Slashdot could grow and be cooler or faster. If the site improves, would it be worth 600x40 pixels of "Buy From JoeBob's PC Warehouse" along with your "Bill Gates Found in Bed with Steve Jobs" and "Linus Elected President in landslide win over Gore" each morning?