Why Slashdot Idle will become very important in your life

Slashdot.org (the original) is losing visitors. They have roughly 25% less visitors now compared to a year ago.
The five largest based on website visitors (sorted, largest first): Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Slashdot.org, Propeller.com and Fark.com. (Reddit.com is in 6th place, and is about to overtake Fark.)

http://www.centernetworks.com/social-news-traffic

This journal post is not an essay.

It's a simple observation: most "social news sites" (or news aggregators) are LOLCAT fodder. They like silly articles, stupid pictures, dumb videos, moronic parodies and any article that implies revenge on people smarter than them.

Slashdot, for all of the problems you can list, is a notch above this. That's all I'm claiming right now: a notch above.

Slashdot's focus has always been science, which is closer to reality than LOLCAT land.

Idle.slashdot.org has the potential to be a news aggregator for all of the non-explicitly-science stuff, and could help edge out the LOLCAT morons who we would have called "AOL users" generically in 1996.

I now understand the importance of Idle: it's a better option than other social news sites.