It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when CmdrTaco confirmed that he is resigning from Slashdot, now that Slashdot market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all geek news outlets. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive geek news reading test.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Slashdot YRO is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core contributors. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot contributors only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Slashdot leader CmdrTaco states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Ask Slashdot stories are there? Let's see. The number of Ask Slashdot stories versus Slashdot posts is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ask Slashdot stories users. Slashdot book reviews (or, 'Slashvertisements') are about half of the volume of Ask Slashdot stories. Therefore there are about 700 Slashvertisments. A recent article put Slashdot Security posts at about 80 percent of the Slashdot market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts.

Due to the troubles of OSNews, abysmal sales and so on, OSNews went out of business and was taken over by Digg, another troubled geek news site. Now Digg is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geek news dilettante dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.

Fact: Slashdot is dying

Sounds perfect...erg, wait...

as others have stated, checkout lipsync, https://github.com/philcryer/lipsync in the interest of full disclosure, this is my project, but I've gotten great help and feedback from the community. while I don't have the GUI goodness of something like 'sparkleshare' I'm focusing on the backend with Linux, osx and eventually windows as client options. The issues that have arisen since we started this just bolsters my original intention, so come on, download it, try it out, and point out how bad it is! I'm all for making it better!

while likely seen as a flame by most, I have to wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Also, I built, and am currently running, a 100TB cluster running Debian Squeeze and the GlusterFS distributed filesystem, so I'm not all talk!

I have a lot of music, so far the search UI is pretty sluggish (and I've run it on the commaline so I could watch when the indexing was complete). I'm wondering if lucene would be a better choice than sqlite for building the index. Subsonic (yes, it's web based, so for streaming music, not the exact same thing - but about the same amount of data to index) uses lucene and its search functionality is very nice and fast.

Actually yes, first of all it handles communication and data transfer over SSH, so that part is covered, but right now it just mirrors the files, I want to look into using something like Truecrypt and have it mirror that to provide a true encrypted space that can be shared like Dr0pbox... need to write it up as an issue, they're piling up!

I hope this makes more people consider running their own system to handle this, lipsync is trying to provide that, it's on github https://github.com/philcryer/lipsync

Why don't you have a seat over there? ... What were you thinking?

Why don't you have a seat over there? ... What were you thinking?

I had a great time at my neighborhood record store today, which I've shopped at for 20+ years. They had bands all day, the very nice RSD exclusives to pick through, tons of records, cds to dig through and all the free PBR you could drink. When I was a kid my dad would take me to record stores, and now I take my kids. Some of the people there today are music writers that I've followed for a long time, their recommendations used to guide me (this was when there was only newspaper, not the internet to learn about new toons) and they continue to today with their picks they play. As a lifelong music fan there are few things I like better than spending a few hours browsing the stacks, the fact that today it was 10x more crowded with loud/live instore bands entertaining us, just made it that much more fun.

Right, but if they did that all the keys on all your saved systems (and files?) would need the keys rotated; how would that be handled? This is an issue I'm coming across in one of my projects, and it's a similar problem.

You win!

"Today the Wii’s biggest drawback is its diminutive hardware specs and options. There’s no high-definition playback and no significant built-in storage," This is what they were saying at launch, and it never made a difference. I still don't care that I can't play blu-ray discs, I don't have any, but I can play all the old gamecube games that the kids still love, and the Wii just has too many killer games. People laughed when the new controllers were announced back when it was called Revolution and look what has happened. I'm not concerned at all, just wondering how they're going to change things next. (hell, I remember thinking the DS was a bizzare idea that wouldn't catch on)

Yes, and then send them to a 'captive portal' when they try to access the web telling them what has happened and what they need to do to fix it - along with the ISP's contact number and maybe even a reference or case number.

You can use Nutch (http://nutch.apache.org/) to crawl your documents, then you'll have a Lucene index. Nutch also gives you a basic search page as a frontend as you go through your documents. For grouping of search results Carrot (http://project.carrot2.org/) has some very interesting algorithms for research work, and Nutch has a native plugin for Carrot that has shipped since 1.0.