And I personally would be happier reading something with the absolute minimum of Javascript except perhaps in the submission editor.
I'd go farther than that and say that if it's not possible to read and participate in discussion effectively in a text-only browser like Lynx, then the site is too encumbered with unnecessary crap. Ok, I wouldn't actually read it in Lynx; I'd use my browser du jour like I would for any other random site. But the point is, it's the discussion content that is important, and any window dressing is only acceptable to the extent that it doesn't get in the way of consuming and creating the discussion content.
If Javascript allows optional features like collapsing comment threads, then that would probably be beneficial to many contributors. But the JS needs to be optional, and the site needs to gracefully degrade to a still-usable state for any visitor who cannot or will not enable JS.
I haven't put a lot of thought into this yet, but my first impulse is to say that a new Slashdot site that was basically like Usenet of old with some form of moderation and the ability to embed URLs would be quite nice. There are probably fatal sucking chest wounds in that idea, but I'm just throwing it out there for discussion.
Does "Slashdot 2.0" even need to be a fixed web site? Could something distributed like Usenet be implemented to work well on today's Internet? Perhaps digitally signing messages would be the new delineator between non-anoymous posters vs. Anonymous Cowards, with each participant being able to choose whether they wish to view anonymous posts or not, killfile non-anoymous posters who annoy them with spam or other unwelcome postings, etc.? Again, these may be stupid ideas. I liked Usenet greatly back in the prehistoric times when I used it, though I may have forgotten a lot of shortcomings that annoyed me at the time, and it may not scale at all well to today's much larger and much more diverse online community.
Your picture pretty much sums up my opinion of what is wrong with a lot of web sites nowadays. I really loathe the cancer of 2 or more column web sites that cram all of the content down one little ribbon of space with crap and/or empty whitespace on one or both sides, and often don't even scale the content for viewers who are using much larger or smaller windows than the designer anticipated. When I set up my own Wordpress site so modernize my old static HTML web site, I found that most of the themes and templates forced a 2+ column design and usually also forced a static content width. It was hard work to put together a single-column design that made somewhat efficient use of space and scaled up and down reasonably well. I may have still gone a bit overboard on the graphic fluff.
Beta is utter crap. It will kill Slashdot.
Slashdot users are extremely unhappy with the new Slashdot Beta design. The comment section of every single post is devoted to dissatisfaction with the new design.
... ... The thing to keep in mind about community sites devoted to user generated content is that the users generate the content.
Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear.