"And the last is to make them easier to turn over to new team members who haven't been around long enough to be bored."
Or in other words, automate yourself out of your own job and get replaced by someone cheaper, using your scripts. Never make your job look easy.
The trend towards cashless troubles me because it takes a transaction between two parties and adds a third party - the bank. As we've seen in the past few decades, they're not exactly trustworthy or competent.
Retailers are already charged for every transaction made by card, which is fine for Walmart but not expensive for small traders, further biasing the market towards already huge entities. It adds a monetary cost as well as a knowledge barrier to small traders, flea market stall holders and self employed tradespeople.
Furthermore, every purchase becomes a public act with a permanent record. If there is information on you, you can bet your ass someone will pay for it - social media has made it a business model to collect it. The panopticon wasn't built around government, but advertising. This is not a hypothetical future but instead our reality, today.
Do you really wish to give up more privacy? As America lurches and burps and farts its way towards authoritarianism with King Baby at the helm, don't you think the Intelligence Services will be delighted to pour through your purchase records for signs of being an Enemy of the People?
Simply, it's another centralising trend at a time when people should be keeping well away from it. In a way, its a sign of how centralised we have become - the lie of the tech utopians was that we would rid ourselves of middle men. Instead, the middle men have become ubiquitous.
But has the entire species run out of ideas? Like fuck. People have been making that argument for centuries. They look at the world around them and don't have the imagination to think it could ever change.
I don't doubt that there's some truth in the article though. I don't have a link, but I remember reading an article suggesting a similar trend to semiconductor development occurring in medical R&D - the amount of money invested produces fewer finds year on year.
My personal opinion is that there's a few contributing factors to this too such as an obsession with next-quarter short termism in the corporate world and a chronic underfunding of public sector research in universities and at agencies like NASA.
Perhaps this is something wider. Every civilisation declines, and the western world will be no different. When it does, the malaise will be uniform. It might be that it can be restarted by a revolution of political or economic thought, or it might not. Perhaps we are living through such times, and we're hamstrung by simply being unable to imagine a radically different world.
When a child is behind their piers by a year or two it becomes almost impossible to catch up.
They end up completely out at sea.
One of the absolute core tenets of Slashdot has always been that they don't delete things (unless someone sues them for a billion dollars, and even then, only once). It's important to be able to prove it if it happens.
Indeed, which is why talk of post deletions is so important to verify. Has it really become that kind of site? Just another barely concealed attempt to exploit an actual community into providing advertising impressions?
Deleting posts would be the death knell for me. The way we use the site is important, but the ethos of it is moreso. A Slashdot that arbitrarily deletes things it deems unwanted isn't one I'd like to contribute to.
I'm sure we'll find out, one way of another.
But this doesn't actually concede anything, does it?
Main points in this statement:
1: One in four users are still being redirected to the new beta.
2: The current Slashdot layout is still disappearing, to be replaced by the beta.
3: The beta needs development.
So what's so groundbreaking about this announcement? Where's the concession? I'm supposed to be happy about this, I suppose?
This is the part that bothers me:
We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience.
So Dice wants the best of both worlds; the tech oriented, intelligent userbase contributions, and a wide audience to monetise those contributions to? It isn't going to work.
The slashdot beta!
Bet you didn't see that one coming..
This is very true. Please keep the feedback coming. The more constructive, the better.
I admire you actually coming out and posting, but I'd point out that there has been a plethora of constructive, detailed feedback on the beta already, seemingly to no avail.
But since you asked, I'd recommend:
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Since Slashdot without comments is more or less pointless, we actually are paying, it just isn't with money.
If a website is a commodity, then our user generated content and comments are likewise a commodity. On some sites this contribution is pretty marginal, but on Slashdot it's the basis of the entire business model.
Since Slashdot profits from the userbase contributions, that means those contributions have a value.
So yes, I pay, though the contributions are probably not worth a lot
Open up a story for all of this. There's been dozens of red marked stories in the firehose, and you're all going on like nothing is happening. It's your job, I can appreciate that, but as site staff you need to address this at some point.
If Dice are wanting to turn
Ask yourselves, what will the site have left if nobody contributes?
Most people will listen to your unreasonable demands, if you'll consider their unacceptable offer.
