It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered fat nerds talking about Linux community when IDC confirmed that Slashdot's market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all message boards that normal people don't care about. 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 Richard Stallman-lookalike contest.
You don't need to be a 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 Sashdot 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.
Cowboy Neal is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of recent polls. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time article developers CmdrTaco and Jon Katz 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.
Kuro5shin leader Rusty states that there are 7000 users of his crappy site. How many users of Ars Technica are there? Let's see. The number of fat losers at comic book shops versus people using the expression "Micro$oft" on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore, there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ars Technica users. Open Source posts on Usenet are
about half of the volume of posts about people eating diswasher soap. Therefore there are about 700 users of Bitcoin. A recent article put Tolkein fans 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 people buying Real Dolls.
Due to the troubles out of Andover, abysmal sales and so on, NewsForge went out of business and was taken over by OSDI who sell another troubled software development model. Now Feed.com is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdothas 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 Cheeto-staind t-shirt wearers. 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
"open source software along with computers and technology as a whole has gone from the sidelines to a prevalent position in the lives of modern consumers."
And stupid me though that the final goal of open source were to empower us by making us more than mere consumer. I tough that open source was about making us freeer human beings.
irving47 had a similar view yesterday. I think both of your objections are valid. In irving47's case, it's clear tresspassing and in your case it looks a lot like harassment. We need to find a middle ground where events like the one in tfa don't happen but people's privacy isn't compromised.
Deputy Chief Jennifer Morrison helped design and implement Valcour. She cops to having 'zero' experience designing software, but says the genius of Valcour is its simplicity. At any given time, an officer or dispatcher can log into the system and see a dashboard showing everything that’s happening in the city — and neighboring jurisdictions — including every officer on duty, every call for service, who’s involved and what’s occurring. "
The article also describes how much money the police department is saving by having replaced the proprietary software it used to use — the savings can buy a lot of donuts.
"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_