Comment Re:"...as we migrate our audience..." (Score 3, Interesting) 232
The whole point of the beta is to get feedback from the community. If we were ignoring you, we would have just flipped the switch and not looked back.
Soul, I know you are in a difficult position, having been told to do spin control for a furious userbase. But you don't have to insult our intelligence. Redirects to beta were going on well before this, and the sentiment hasn't changed. It's been negative from the moment people started getting redirected. Management has been ignoring the users from day one under the notion that they'll like it once they get used to it, and hey, look at how Facebook changes things and people complain, but keep using Facebook.
But your seniors don't seem to understand that this isn't Facebook. This isn't a site for the general population, and it's not irreplaceable nor without intense competition. There are thousands of internet forum sites out there, many of whom have the same target audience. I do not buy the argument for one second that management was ignorant of the poor opinion held of it's new "beta".
I get that they bought the house and now they want to repaint it so it's "theirs", but they've gone too far. Very far too far. They have failed to understand their target audience completely, believing that we're just like any other of the dozens of assets they hold in their portfolio, and it'll homogenize with the rest if they just stay the course.
It won't. They're going to tank their investment and once the users bail, they won't come back. They'll be like the MySpace of the IT world: It was popular at one time, but now it's a ghost website nobody cares about, just another content aggregation website, and not even a particularly valuable one. Nobody wants to see this happen... apparently, except for the senior management. We've spoken clearly, and unequivocably, in every possible way, that this is a bad decision. We've been doing this for days, and have received no indications from these people that they've even noticed.
Do we have to set fire to the facilities they live in? DDoS all their sites? I mean, really, Soulskill... we've exhausted every avenue to let these people know "Hey dudes, train coming. Train. Big train. Honk honk. Motherfucking train, on the mother fucking tracks, coming your way. TRAIN."
If this is how it has to be, fine. But at least tell us that if Slashdot goes tits up someone on the Dice board of directors is getting shit-canned... because otherwise, the nerd rage that has built up here is going to find other, less pleasant, ways of extracting their pound of flesh from Dice. If you think the Slashdot Effect on other websites is bad... wait until a hundred thousand pissed off IT people each sitting on massive bandwidth pipes, decide to ping the SS Dice Fail Boat. It will not be pretty.