Hi All,
I'm glad we have some new Slashdot overlords! I would like to make an important suggestion. In 2010 I created a business DivinIT.com for IT training built on the insights I gained from the Slashdot community since 1999 (and through experience). Yes I was a long time lurker. I used to spend hours a day on the site and the comments were amazing. When I submitted a thread (like you have done) about what the community wanted my company to be like, it was lost in the flood of submissions, because there was no editor to pick it out from the cruft.
Why is this important? This community wants more responsibility from companies and more engagement and for their feelings to be heard and cared about as well as their epic knowledge and logic. That opportunity came and was ignored. We created more than 300 jobs and were setting new standards for training and IT services. We closed down now for many reasons. Partly because there was lots of negative forum posts in other forums who just hated and trolled away our customers. I feel if the Slashdot community even knew what we were trying to do, some of them might have helped against 700+ unfounded trolls. It's history now.
So what I'm saying in a general sense, is can we use the strength of our community to advise, defend, share and CREATE new businesses and organisations? Slashdot walked hand-in-hand with Open Source and we could just as easily have open source businesses.
I think this can be a "killer app" that helps make slashdot great again.
Thanks for trying to save Slashdot :)