Nice UID! I got mine while trying to get the fabled UID=1,000,000. Not sure who ended up getting that prize.

Just a reminder, comp.misc on Usenet is being used as a temporary discussion forum. Usenet access is available through eternal-sepetember.org

Let's hope Dice reverse their decision and cancel plans for Beta. If they don't, though, this is as good a time as any for people to break away from slashdot as a group. Good luck to everyone in the slashcott.

A lot of trust has been lost between users and management. And the first problem with a discussion site staying successful is keeping enough users. So, the question as to whether technocrat.net will succeed hinges on whether enough trust has been lost at slashdot to prompt enough people to move.

Assuming enough users do move, the second problem will be running the site. Editorship at slashdot, jokes aside, is a full-time job. So, another question is, will there be enough editor-hours to keep the machine running.

Will enough slashdot readers leave? I'm really not sure. There are a lot of upset readers, but the one thing that will really cause a big exodus, a forced switch to the new interface, won't happen for months. So, users who leave would have to leave a slashdot that is still, on the surface at least, passably acceptable.

Personally, I would like to see a few-month trial of technocrat.net. If things get moving, good; if not, then there will still be some time before slashdot becomes unusuable, and so some time to work with.

Either way, thank you for looking into this.

Regards

A few points.

- What exactly do you mean by 'make content more sharaeble'? I can already link to individual comments; there's even a 'share' link below each comment. I've never used it, but surely that would be the place to start if your goal is to make content more shareable.
- If your goal was to make content more shareable, then why, at this late stage in the game, is it still impossible to link to single comments in Beta?
- Nothing is stopping you from experimenting with the current layout

Incremental change is how the current slashdot was built. Taco, Hemos, et al slowly added pieces and tweaks together, according to the needs of the day, to create what we now know as the moderation system and the classic comment layout. Over fifteen years of design thought have gone into the current system.

You can accomplish all the goals you have laid out by continuing in the same, incremental-improvement spirit. Throwing out all of that work and starting fresh is unnecessary, wasteful, and pretty much bound to fail.