I'm SO sick of this 'Fuck Beta' crap.
YOU the /. community are one of most technically-able groups of users on the internet. Therefore, instead of whining about a FREE service that you no longer enjoy, why not group together and build something better? If it's better than /. (not hard...) then your user base will come. A handful of you could throw up a simple blogging system in a few hours, whilst you work on something permanent...
So instead of bitching about it to corporate owners who do not care, get off your arses and build something better.
http://altslashdot.org/ seems to be offline at the time of writing - a good effort but when I did look at it yesterday it seems to be 90% ideas, and sod all development. The best sites on the net, didn't spring into life fully formed, they evolved. The important thing is to just get something up and working as fast as possible.
(Why am I not joining the effort? I'm a Windows guy, my linux foo is simply not good enough else I would.)
-Jar