Journal sllort's Journal: Slashdot Blackout Conclusions 5
Update : Starship Trooper has an easy-to-read version of the final stats here.
You'll want to read the raw data I published on comment posting percentages during the Slashdot blackout. They are far from final, but they are representative of the first five days. It would be far more accurate to get real average data on comments posted per-day, as well as the standard deviation. I don't have that kind of time, and for reasons I'll explain later, I don't think we need to be that accurate to reach a conclusion. To summarize the data, total posts and posts at threshold +2 have dropped approximately 10% during the "Great Slashdot Blackout".
I could go on all day about whether or not 10% matters, but consider this: Taco needs about two pages of "Insightful" comments for normal Slashdot readers to view, per page, in order for Slashdot to continue to have a "stories and comments" format that people come here to read. For any kind of blackout to cut into this, you'd need over a 99% reduction in comments. In short, maybe 10% of Slashdot posters stopped posting this week. It doesn't fucking matter. No individual users or even a large group of motivated users is going to change the course of this web site. Taco has a history of ignoring his userbase, and I don't blame him. His programmers are trained to reject nearly every piece of code submitted to them with the rubber-stamp "it doesn't scale" - trying to contribute to Slash if you're not a personal friend of Slashteam is a futile exercise that I've remained wise enough to stay away from.
In short, while I admire rho & company's effort to create a reasonable and heartfelt protest, it was doomed to fail. Sorry guys.
The only thing that has ever effectively prompted change at Slashdot is publicly embarrasing Slashteam. To my knowledge, every heartfelt polite request ever has been patiently ignored. Feel free to prove me wrong, but I believe history is on my side. If being civil or contributing code had any chance of succeeding, I would have tried it by now.
You may think I'm being a little hard on the folks at Slashdot. You're right. Considering that their subscription system has generated about three grand in revenue, they've got much bigger problems to worry about. Like how they're going to pay for food. Or why the subscription system and business model at fark makes so much more sense than theirs.
So for now, I'm content to declare the "Blackout" a failure, and let it be. I've got better things to worry about, and I bet you all do too.
Re:Link wrong (Score:1)
Nice summary! (Score:1)
I like what you did. The analysis is interesting (it's still in the "waste of time" category, but it's entertaining).
I never liked the blackout idea and always thought it's stupid, and I'm very glad that it didn't have any notable effect. I also think you should post the raw data (in the previous journal entry) to your Geocities space.
While it's not as good as a real HTML table (Score:2)