jd's Journal: No good April Fools jokes this year

This has been the dullest April 1st Slashdot has ever had. Has its funny bone been surgically removed? For those who miss the days of OMG!!! PONIES!!!, I think I've found the only site that comes close in being very very strange.....

Looks to me like /. is dying

[shanen]

However, since no one will show up for the funeral, it scarcely seems to matter, does it? You're ID says you're a veteran, so you should be able to assess the trends better than I, but I'm supposedly trained as a sociologist... My observations of the society that is /. make me believe the main killer was abuse of anonymity.

I made a number of suggestion over the years, but to the best of my knowledge none of them were ever adopted. Ditto my employer. In contrast, I think Google has adopted a couple... Can't

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[shanen]

Whoops.

c/you're/your/

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[jd]

Anonymous posting has been a sore point with me, as have those who sought to attack others via moderation. But take K5 in comparison. Even the ghosts have left home. Technocrat? Since moving from Squishdot to their current system, they've lost a lot of readers, but I cannot in honesty blame the system. So what is happening?

To a degree, there's been a shift in audience. Cute Overload and I Can Haz Cheezeburger are doing blazingly well. CO lists something like two dozen sister sites. Slashdot had that once.

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[jd]

Google Trends shows Slashdot peaked in 2005 [google.com] and has been on a sharp decline since then. It is interesting that the slump started almost immediately on the announcement of OpenSolaris [google.com], but I can't think of any obvious correlation.

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[shanen]

Thanks for the thoughtful replies. Worth public discussion--but not likely in the small and narrow-minded pond that /. has become.

With regards to the Google Trends link, they are fishing for correlations there. It's obvious that they are both technical items, but I am hard pressed to imagine what inflection points might have caused Google to link them that way. I'd expect the actual causes to be things specifically within /., perhaps administrative changes or something that made the system much less respons

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[smittyoneeach]

I think /. jumped the shark around the time MS bought ad space.

You noticed that too?

[drachenstern]

I figured surely I was the only one ;)

I did at least expect a little something this year... Reckon Corporate's a bear?

People^WCATS are strange, when you're a stranger

[Simon Brooke]

I think I've found the only site that comes close in being very very strange..... [spatch.net]

That is indeed very strange!