Wikipedia has a much larger audience, and Slashdot is a community.

You need to figure out how to monetize it to an extent that it at least supports itself and does so in a way without offending anyone.

Good luck. I would love to see such a site get created.

Yes, but he does have a point. Slashdot is being ruined far more by the complaints than the Beta (fucking POS). So whatever damage is being done at this point is "your" fault. I put that in quotes as I don't know the extent of your involvement in the revolt.

It's very effective, but is also exactly what terrorists do. Make it so bad for the innocent bystanders that they have no option but to listen to you. I'm not the only one that senses an undercurrent of spoiled entitlement in the messages and actions either.

You guys can flame away on me as much as you want and claim I'm a corporate apologist, but that would just be reactionary, emotional, and illogical.

I'm with all of you on this. Slashdot is being ruined by corporate greed and shortsighted decisions by executives, and they are all worthless wastes of skins based solely on their actions . I have to block 9 trackers, beacons, and widgets on this site, and this site, above all others, should NOT be violating our privacy with 3rd party corporations known to be raping us in cyberspace.

However, while we voice our displeasure with what has happened to our beloved community let us not attack those who are not our "enemies", but those that have valid complaints about how we are reacting to it.

Fuck Beta is annoying from all angles.

Let's just leave and come back the Tuesday after next and see what happens.

I don't think it's possible to make a site unsupported by advertisements. Where you do plan on getting the money for hosting from? Private donors?

I might give you 20-40 a year. I think I may have given Slashdot like 60 bucks before the economy went into the shitter.

Why on earth would Adobe flash be required for anything? Every time I see Flash on the page I just come to the conclusion they had poor website designers. Seriously. Who chooses that complete waste of a corporation now? If they didn't have Photoshop I would not use a single program by their ridiculously abhorrent corporation, and I only use Photoshop because I don't consider GIMP to be an alternative that is there just yet. Getting there, but not yet.

Kudos on getting rid of the trackers, beacons, and widgets though. We would be blocking them anyways, so there is no point for anything outside of internal analytics.

That's simplistic.

It's also used to warn that there might be a "g" missin' and it was intentional

You just gave the exact reason why I wait for somebody to cap the whole thing (just like it is their job), remove all highly objectionable corporate content and political bullshit, and package it up and send it out as a torrent.

They can try as hard as they want to, and will never defeat that.

With memberships at closed private tracker sites I sit comfortable in the knowledge that I can tell them to fuck off anytime I want to and watch that content on MY terms.

The harder they try for control, the more they push people like me away. If they calmed down for one second, I might seriously consider paying 30-50 bucks for Olympic coverage sans commercials.

Since they're stupid and greedy (wonderful combination) I just get the content for free instead.

That goes for a large number of other things as well. I loved some shows so much that I would happily pay $10 a month per show to receive it streamed without commercial content. While I pirated the crap out of the shows while they ran, I also rented every DVD on Netflix and returned it, and purchased DVD box sets, and received DVD box sets as gifts.

I'm paying for content, just not as much as they demand, and I'm not letting them rape my eyeballs with such intellectual poison that commercials have turned into.

The reason you are forced to have a cable subscription to watch content is the same exact reason why car manufacturers tried to make it illegal for you to make after market purchases and modifications to the vehicles (which failed).

Old men with old business models that don't feel they have to compete fairly for one second.

Television is just information, and information is just bandwidth usage, and we already created an incredibly robust way to transfer huge amounts of information.

They're upset that the Internet killed their cash cow, and instead of innovating and trying to create new markets and new business models, they resort to highly unethical and abhorrent attempts to force the subsidization of their aging business models at all costs.

You have to look at another fact as well. We only have so much disposable income, and corporate greed demands continuous growth. ESPN seems to think it's possible to continually increase their costs beyond inflation to satisfy the shareholders. The idea that the shareholder must be satisfied at all costs is what creates shortsighted decisions with long term consequences.

We already have everything we need. It should never cost more than $100 (adjustments for inflation are fine) to purchase bandwidth. In fact, it can really costs a whole heck of a lot less than that even.

It reminds me of when aluminum used to be worth more than gold and a single invention killed it. Well I don't seem to recall that when we buy gold that we are also forced to buy aluminum at the same price in the same transaction lest we have no access to gold. Do you?

Yes, the Olympics should just be renamed Corporate Greed & Corruption Incorporated

It's very telling that an event that was supposed to bring us all together as one people (planet wide) to participate in a friendly sports competition, that is thousands of years old, has been turned into nothing but a political money grab to roam around the planet and make rich men richer while denying access to this humanitarian event unless you are regularly paying a corporation to sell your eyeballs to other corporations to drown you in inane intellectually offensive material to convince you that you need some worthless shit you never knew you needed.

That's why I don't watch the Olympics, and I don't give two shits about who has gold or silver what. Never have.

Call me back when it actually means something, and I will get excited over it.

Apparently, you have not met the *new* Corporate America. That's EXACTLY what they did with the bailouts for Wall Street, and pretty much defines a large part of capitalism now.

If you're big enough, you don't have to suffer any consequences anymore.

If you're a regular person, then shut up. You don't say anything because you clearly understand nothing of economics, that's just the way it is, get a haircut you fucking hippie, pay taxes, and die with individually mandated health insurance, and no, we won't actually fix medicine or any of the cronyism and nepotism you continue to claim are present... what's wrong with you? Fucking Communist.

I would argue that we are owed access to the content in a reasonable manner without monopolies and undue restrictions.

It's not an issue of entitlement, but discrimination.

I openly admit to pirating the living shit out of Disney because they are doing their best to sequester the content and not allow access. I'm talking about stuff well over 20 years old, so I refuse to respect the copyright on a fucking mouse created in the 30's with the daughter of the creator dying at old age already.

If NBC refuses to make a deal with me individually, and demands that I possess an existing contract with another corporation for thousands of dollars per year, then they can lick balls.

They're not offering the content in any way that I can compensate them for the production.

Therefore, it's Public Domain instantaneously since it's being kept from people. At no time do I ever respect ownership of ideas and expressions. I respect, support, and encourage artists and I'm willing to do that with money, but only if they are willing to act in good faith and allow me peaceful enjoyment and reasonable compensation.

So NBC can say hello to "piracy". At least from this individual...

They're most likely never going to get it right, precisely because of what you just pointed out:

Audience vs. Community

It's abundantly clear that Slashdot is run by corporate masters and marketing suckheads. Those people are ALWAYS about an audience, as advertising and shill articles make money for those execs, which translates into more money/resources allocated for the marketers.

They don't have any incentive to treat us as a community as long as treating us like an audience is making them money.

I think you nailed it, and I think it's time for must of us to exit Slashdot and find a place that gives news that matters for nerds in a community oriented atmosphere with information dense interfaces that aren't purely about the shiny.

So the better alternative to Slashdot and possibly Groklaw (Technocrat.net) all comes down to a single decision by your wife? Man. I've heard of wives influencing the guy's good times, but that's next level ;)

Well Slashdot has gone to major suckage lately. I've had a terribly hard time just coming back to posts and finding comments that I wrote, let alone finding a comment that I was looking at right before I closed the tab accidentally. That was after the last great "improvements" in the comment system. It's become *less* functional and enjoyable to me since I joined, and that's not a good thing for any website.

There are reasons that I think Technocrat.net can work:

1) While I disagree that javascript is terrible, it's good at what it does do. Primarily ajax calls to post without leaving the page. That's nice. I'm sure there really are only a few things that benefit that much from javascript and you could cut the rest out to considerably slim down the pages. That should appease the people that are determined to disable javascript on everything, while preserving major site functionality without it which leads to the most important thing I think everybody agrees with....

2) Clean and simple. Another poster here said it very well. The Beta is all about cashing in on new pseudo-touch design fads that waste space and have no real purpose other than being shiny. I'm sure you and others you work with are more than capable of creating an information dense site designed to service the core business of Slashdot. That core business is just articles, posts, and comments. Most Slashdot readers could not care less about the shiny. We love function over form.

3) I'm guessing that you won't have corporate wastes of human skin breathing down your neck with advice from fancy marketing firms demanding you "fix" something that is not broken just to play buzzword bingo. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but I have my own experience with PHB's making inane/insane demands that are straight out of a Dilbert strip.

4) As another poster said, Slashdot has been pulling this crap for awhile and been going downhill in overall quality across the board. Perhaps, this time if you build it they really will come. I don't see Slashdot with its corporate masters allowing us to go back to clean and simple ever again. ( I really do think you can do clean and simple with minimum javascript too, so flame away guys)

5) Technocrat.net could start right off the bat with a few policies that could stop spammers and trolls right in their tracks instead of just allowing a Wild West mentality. I support freedom as much as anybody, but there have been instances in which Slashdot has outright refused to even protect itself in ways that everyone would find reasonable. Not an easy thing to do, but you don't also have all the restrictions that Slashdot has, and your not mired down in it's viewpoints, processes, and methods. You could start from scratch, which is something Slashdot is not capable of clearly.

6) If you're involved I'm sure that many, such as myself, would give our patronage (I've subscribed to Slashdot a few times) to a site that would mostly likely support the concepts and ideas of Open Source.

If you make another site I promise that I would join and at least submit a couple of articles a month that I find elsewhere. I don't have many approved submissions here, but I do have a few. I also comment prolifically and I'm only slightly trollish.

I came here to read news for nerds that matters and post comments. Let's face it, Slashdot hasn't been getting it done, and the last few days people have revolted and we don't even discuss the news anymore. Maybe this is the time to make a change?

3-digit is impressive, but I've single double digits around here once or twice ;)

I don't see a reason for the change for one.

I'm on classic at the moment and I can't see just what is so great about the new one at all, other than a site layout change and aesthetics. Mostly aesthetics, which is not a reason to change something that works.

As someone who has subscribed a few times to support Slashdot, I would be sad to leave. All things change though and I'm sure I could live without Slashdot and find other competitors that deliver tech news I want to hear.

So if they really are listening, clean up all the *crap* code and fire whoever is doing it. May sound harsh, but seriously, how can a development team release a Beta that was pre-Alpha at best with quality? Were they drunk? "Feature Parity" should have been something 100% resolved before the Beta.

Information density is interesting as a concept and I understand what others are saying, but you never even made it to the point where you could have the luxury of such decisions.

Just make it work. That's it. Have all the same features and the *exact* same ability to write comments, especially the line spacing and markups. The beta was absolutely horrible to get anything done that classic did without a problem. It's an unmitigated disaster.