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." ... And they seem to be content to just lay there like some drunk and wait for it to run them over.

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.

There was nothing wrong with the Edsel car either. I mean, it had four wheels and it got you from point A to point B. Fun fact: Aesthetics matter too.

Well, it was clearly designed by some kind of weapons grade stupid. This could be the prototype for it... it just failed to deploy as intended and so we're stuck with this digital Exxon Valdeez puking up mangled content and terrible design all along the shores of our global networks as it's drunken pilots sing "We're gonna beeeeee rich! da da do do de daaaa...."

Does Battlefield look like it was gangbanged by a team of toddlers with pastel construction paper and cut-outs of magazine advertisements? Well then, there's your answer: No. Battlefield still looks like something cool, designed by adults, not middle managers who rode the short bus and still have to use the safety scissors.

1. Military electronics
2. Dice Holdings, Inc.'s bottom line.

That's pretty much the sentiment. But here's an idea: Rob Malda (may God bless him in our time of ultimate need) gave us a tool to fight off our oppressors: The source code that powers classic slashdot. The kryptonite of the Overlords. Let us come together now with a kickstarter project, crowdsource our way into the amazon cloud, and free ourselves of these idiot fucktard web 2.0 morons. We have the technology! We can build it faster. Better. Stronger.

And free of Dic--Derp Holdings. Discuss.

We'd rather we keep our old hangout, but if necessary, we have the slashcode, and it's not like AWS is expensive. We'll just take the open sourced code, raise the black flag, and then ram Slashdot... and it shall sink, and Dice shall drown, and shiver me timbers, we'll have our Slashdot 2.0... it just won't suck.

Yes, and in that briefest of moments, they epitomized everything wrong with society today. While we all talk about individuality and uniqueness, our economy is built on one-size-fits-all and making carbon copies of everything. Our houses, furniture, cars... pretty much everything we own comes off an assembly line. And the kicker? It's still more diversity than we're seeing on newly launched websites. Invariably, it's pastels, square blocks, and while it's pretty to look at, it's functionally about as useful as a flat tire on the interstate. Which is to say, you can move the car.. but you're not going to enjoy it.

The internet's standards and protocols were built to allow for a nearly limitless selection of design, every kind of spoken and written language, multimedia... it's all there. So why then, do the couple hundred people that hold all the money in the world seem to have homogenized into a single herd... charging like lemmings over cliffs while screaming "You're gonna follow us or else!?" Is it some kind of power trip? Some kind of collective psychosis?

I mean, how loudly do we have to say it before they get the message? Do we have to literally burn down their offices around them before they can see the people outside holding the signs that say "You had a good thing going. Then you fucked it up so bad nobody wants it anymore. TAKE THE HINT." ?! I am geniunely curious as to how this kind of disconnect becomes so severe without any warning indicators appearing. It's not like we haven't been telling them it sucks from day one. Do they not have focus groups? Did they not check their e-mail for the past, uhh... six months? Or is this an institutionalized case of confirmation bias and arrogance taken to a level in excess of that even seen in government?

I really do want to know how a load of fail this big happens. It's an excellent marketing study on how not to do it. We should teach this shit in classrooms.

New Beta Sucks. Overlords gone profit mad! Dogs and cats, laying together! Even the Ghostbusters can't help us!

That's pretty much the sentiment. But here's an idea: Rob Malda (may God bless him in our time of ultimate need) gave us a tool to fight off our oppressors: The source code that powers classic slashdot. The kryptonite of the Overlords. Let us come together now with a kickstarter project, crowdsource our way into the amazon cloud, and free ourselves of these idiot fucktard web 2.0 morons. We have the technology! We can build it faster. Better. Stronger.

And free of Dic--Derp Holdings. Discuss.

I think nothing less than having similar comments as the top-rated for each story will convince them of that. Let us start here. Spread the word: Our dice overlords must hear of the nerdy wrath!

Upmod if you agree: Beta is shit. Keep it the way it is.

I think you've confused middle management with lovecraftian horror beasts. It's okay though, the differences are subtle. Middle management consists of risk-averse middle-aged people who wouldn't know a good idea if it fell on their left foot. Lovecraftian horror beasts, on the other hand, are intelligent hunting critters that know their head from their ass.

You really have no idea what logic is, do you. You've confused micro for macro and can't even see it in yourself. Yet for anyone who has studied economics, it's clear that the opportunity cost of everything is all the other opportunities that the same could have purchased. In other words, the price of building a new bridge is all the other options, like resurfacing the roads, building a school, or adding an extra lane to a well-travelled highway.

When we say there was a lost opportunity in economics, it doesn't mean anything like what you seem to believe.

I love this asshole. Yes, please give up one of the few things left to Americans; their pitifully short number of vacation days. Instead, stay at home. Like we don't work hard enough already. Wanna know what most people fly to? Not to have fun, but to go see family. They do it to go see the people they love. That's what Americans do on their rare time off. And this asshole says "Americans are sheep".

Yeah. Sure. Okay. Maybe they're just working themselves to death trying to live paycheck to paycheck because 85 people in the world control more wealth than the next 3.5 billion: And guess where over half of those 85 people live? Go on, guess.

You don't blame the people at the bottom for the excesses of those at the top; That's called being a douchebag. Put the blame right where it belongs: At the top.

The military will deny that the misconduct in any way affected the ability of the military to maintain or operate the missiles.
Thus...
Why are officers having to cheat on an exam if it's already been demonstrated they are competent?
Conclusion:
The tests were probably irrelevant and/or too difficult relative to the task they were assigned. In other words, the test was defective, not the soldiers.

Sir, my point was that when we deny someone an opportunity, a door is closed. We'll never know for sure what the damage is, it's incalculable. But we can be assured that by doing something they don't love, they'll be less motivated and contribute less. They produce less, and thus society derives less benefit. When you multiply this by millions of people who are discriminated against, you can see that there's a significant loss of productivity. The example of a cure for cancer or a better CPU architecture was just that, an example. We'll never know, for example, how much more technology and scientific advancement we would have gotten out of Niccoli Tesla if he hadn't been hunted by the government and pursued by the giant douchebag known as Thomas Edison, but we can be sure we missed out on things.