If an employee didn't ask every customer about a cell phone AND a satellite dish they were fired. Even before that turnover was like a fast food place.
And no, I don't want to buy an extended service plan for the audio patch cord that I'm going to cut one end off of and mount a different connector on as soon as I get home, thank you very much. No, really, I'm positive.
Their components are substandard manufacturer rejects (best I can tell) that they package in small quantities and sell for 10X the price.
In my opinion and experience, that was true back in the 1980s, too. I bought components there at the time because I didn't know of any better option near me, and I didn't even know that I should be searching for a better option. It's not like I could order parts online from Digi-Key. I didn't know that it's possible to buy hookup wire whose crappy insulation doesn't flee in terror from an approaching soldering iron. I didn't know about ring lugs whose plastic insulation is tough enough to survive crimping without breaking off. I had one of the cool TI sound generator chips they carried, but one of the functional blocks never worked right. I thought that the way to buy capacitors was in a bulk pack of 50 random values.
They did have some excellent products like the set of Minimus 7 speakers that I still have, and my first exposure to computers and programming was my TRS-80 Color Computer. Radio Shack played an important part in my earliest experiences with electronics and computers, but I began looking elsewhere for most electronic components and supplies once I learned how to find higher-quality parts. Now I only shop for components there when I want something Right Now.
A community is a group that holds common values. If you want to propose that slashdot viewers are a community, what are the common values that bind all of the viewers?
Bitching. Bitching is the common value that unites us.
I think we should mark yesterday, February 6, 2014, as the day that Slashdot died.
Yesterday may be the day that the coroner declared the victim to be dead, but the fatal disease was contracted when Dice.com bought Slashdot. Slashdot is a vibrant community built around a tainted well, and Dice.com is the entity that poisoned that well.
*from Dice Inc. "Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero. "
Also if you were curious why the redesign looks like it does, check out the other dice sites. It appears they are going for a bland unified style across sites. http://news.dice.com/ is especially telling of what the future of
Thank you for sharing that quote from Dice.com. That makes it clear that Dice.com really does just think of Slashdot participants as an audience. Their motivations with respect to Slashdot are just to get ad revenue and to use us to lure eyeballs to Dice.com. We are not a community to them; we are a tool to be exploited to further their goals.
It is now clear to me that the problem is not that the folks running Slashdot aren't listening. The problem is that they don't care. Or at least, their bosses don't care. They aren't going to "see the light" and abort the Beta travesty because they want us gone. The folks who are outraged by Beta breaking what brings us to Slashdot are not the passive viewers that Dice.com wants. We are not relevant to Dice.com's goals. We don't come here to view ads. We don't even come here to read the posted stories, except as triggers for the discussion that follows. Dice.com does not want the core Slashdot participants; they want to use the Slashdot name to lure the cloud of passive Slashdot viewers to suckle at their corporate teat.
This suggests to me that Slashdot as we know it is already dead. It is a community built around a tainted well. The well became tainted when Dice.com came along and shat in it, and I don't see how the well can be purified other than by Dice.com leaving and taking their shit with them.
Boycotting Slashdot isn't going to change Dice.com's mind about these Beta changes. It's time to leave Slashdot and move to a new place.
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.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
