Because no-one ever said it better.....

Damn - used all my mod points to promote soylentnews.org!

Anyhow - I've been burning through the entire Heinlein library on audiobook this month, so appreciated the reference. It's amazing how fresh most of his stuff feels after 50+ years, and how many times he's managed to spot a trend that is only happening now.

by emmagsachs (1024119) Alter Relationship on Sunday February 09, 2014 @12:58PM(#46205013) I have visited this website on a near-daily basis for over a decade. I have greatly benefited from its community, whether +5 Insightful or -1 Troll. It thus saddens me to watch Slashdot be changed into a bland, cookie-cutter news site, a la the present incarnations of Engadget and Digg. I am perhaps in the minority in this, but I kindly urge you to read this post, and others like it, and to consider joining the week-long Slashcott [slashcott.com] that begins on Feb 10th. I realize that posting off-topic comments such as this is disrupting the Slashdot experience for many of you, and I do apologize for it. But can you honestly say that the new Beta interface does not already disrupt Slashdot for all of us? These anti-Beta posts can quite rightly be viewed as "a series of shock slogans and mindless token tantrums", to borrow a phrase, but since we feel that we are ignored by Dice, this is the best that I, like many other slashdotters, could come up with.

What company directs 25% of its users to a partially-working, not-ready-for-production website? Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because they interfere with Dice's plans for Slashdot. Dice presents Slashdot to their advertisers as a "Social Media for B2B Technology" [slashdotmedia.com] platform. B2B - that's the reason Beta looks like a generic wordpress-based news site. To be sure, a large precentage of Slashdotters work in IT, but Slashdot is most certainly not a B2B site.

Nevertheless, Dice is desperate to make money off of Slashdot, even at the cost of losing much of its current userbase. Turning Slashdot into a social platform for IT "decision makers" is a Haily Mary attempt to recoup the failed investment Dice made in buying Slashdot. As they have revealed in a press release [diceholdingsinc.com] detailing their performance in 2013, this acquisition has not lived up to their financial expectations:

Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

The new Beta interface is not the result of a superficial makeover. Keeping in mind that Dice felt confident enough to present it as the new face of Slashdot to 25% of its visitors, it is safe to say that the new commenting and moderation system is exactly how they intended it to be. It is a new design that deliberately cripples the one thing that makes Slashdot what it is today, viz. thebest commenting and moderation system online today. From the users' perspective, there is nothing wrong with Slashdot that demands gutting its foundations and dumping the one part of Slashdot we exactly like. As others have commented, this is an attempt to monetize /. at any any cost [slashdot.org], and its users be damned. Dice views its users, the ones who create the site [slashdot.org], as a passive audience. As such, it is interchangeable with its intended B2B crowd. We, the current users of Slashdot, are an obstacle in Dice's way.

This is why they ignore the detailed feedback we have given them in the months since Beta was first revealed. This is also why they now disregard our grievances and complaints. Their claims of hearing us are a deliberate snow job. It is only pretense, since at the same time they openly admit that Classic will be cancelled soon [slashdot.org]:

"Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.

There is a reason [slashdotmedia.com] why "News for Nerds, stuff that matters" no longer appears in the header:

Slashdot Media’s brands include Slashdot and SourceForge. These technology sites provide access to tools, software and forums for enterprise IT professionals working in all industries and companies from the world’s largest to small and medium-sized firms. Slashdot and SourceForge harness the power of social that no other tech site can compete with.

Slashdot Media provides its partners with proven integrated media strategies to effectively influence technology buyers. With over 15 years experience working with the largest and most engaged professional technology communities, Slashdot Media’s expert staff continues to contribute to the success of its partners branding, demand generation, and social media marketing programs.

Don't hold your breath waiting for Dice to fix Beta. Their vision of Slashdot is a crippled shadow of the site as it is today. Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes. Dice doesn't need us. And If you do decide to boycott /. for a week, please resist the urge to visit it just to see how the boycott is doing [slashdot.org]...

This will be removed from the firehose in minutes. I know, because my similar submission lasted less than an hour.

Dunno, but I'm sure as hell keeping Beta out of my Chrome!

Wow. Who knew that once the comment thread hit about 2000 Chrome would start to have serious issues?
br Guess I'll have to find a web site where people lose interest after the first hundred posts....

Although - and I wish I was making this up - several CBC Radio news podcasts are not available for two weeks because the newscasts would have Sochi content, and presumably someone else has Sochi content podcast rights ....

I can't for the life of me see why anyone would consider two weeks of McDonalds and Pepsi sponsored multinational corporate sporty entertainment should be a basic human right. Sochi has nothing to do with sport, or the sort of high ideals that we claim that sports represents.

It's strictly a great way for lots of particularity nasty people to make a lot of money - much of it out of taxpayer pockets.

Oh - and this just in from the Vancouver O-Games: all of those claims about a bright economic outlook coming from the Games: Pure and utter bullshit.

OK, I skipped the last 150 comments, so maybe this has been said already.

I grew up reading text on paper. That's how I can intake and process information most efficiently. And that's why the web sites that I read regularly, and in which I participate, present information in much the same way as a printed page.

• - Big swathes of white space means less text means less actual information.
• - Pictures almost never add as much information as they take away - big pictures equal less actual information
• - A video almost never is the most efficient way to get information across. You can take what you include in a 3 minute video and usually say as much in one paragraph.

Aside from these basic and to my mind blindingly obvious design concerns, I'll add a couple of things. I haven't spent more than five minutes with the beta because it was so immediately not what I need or want, but I have been reading the comments here.

• - I really, really, really like the Slashdot commenting systems, the ability to set and change the levels of comments; and the moderation and meta-moderation. Without these I probably wouldn't be here. Anything that alters how they work will almost certainly be a bad thing.
• - I'll say that the the overall quality of the comments on Slashdot is better than pretty much any site that I know. That's because there are a lot of long time users, with a lot of long time experience and knowledge, and because you can easily filter out the garbage and just see the stuff that matters. I don't know of another site with such far ranging interests that offers so much good information.
• - Slashdot and The Register are the two tech sites that I read pretty much every day. When I visit other (Tom's Hardware, Ars Technica etc) it's usually because someone pointed me there from here.
• - The honest to god truth is that I find that most tech sites offer a really low amount of solid and useful information, or bury it in a sea of advertising and other crap. My time is worth enough to me that I just won't bother.

Finally, I'll remind people that there was a time when Byte was THE magazine for anyone involved in computers. It became Byte the web site, but carried over a lot of the same content and contributors.

Then, in the misguided quest for the almighty dollar the owners managed to kill it off entirely. It was a great loss.

Dice would be very foolish if they think that they can't manage to do the same to Slashdot.

Just to save time, let's all agree that solar power could never, ever, ever work in North America. Or wind. Obviously the blah blah blah mumble mumble obfuscate is so different here that it would be impossible.

Also, the North American sun is like TOTALLY different from the Indian sun.

Until they get AdBlock for TV I'll continue to download the Superbowl from Pirate Bay so that I don't have to watch the ads.

When I look at all of the major variants mentioned - Gnome, KDE, Windows, Apple - I honestly don't see any great difference.

All of them offer:
- A desktop
- some kind of task bar (top, bottom, left, right - doesn't really matter)
- some form of menus for getting to stuff
- some kind of file manager application

There may be some things that are very different from one to the other (Lord knows that when I switched to a Mac I found some of their choices thoroughly obscure) but in the big picture most desktop systems are similar enough that Joe User can go to one or the other and figure out how to check his Yahoo mail account without problems.

As for why the GNOME variations seem to be prevalent? It's because some form of GNOME desktop was included as the default for the first widely popular "works out of the box" distros - Ubuntu, and Mint. the Son of Ubuntu.

People didn't install Ubuntu/Mint because of GNOME; they installed GNOME because it came along with Ubuntu/Mint. And 95% of those Linux users won't muck about and try different desktop systems because what they have just works.

Highly recommenced a pretty cool movie based on the same story: Devil's Pass. Netflix has it, plus the other usual places.

Then again, the US is unique is having thousands of over the air radio and television stations living in mortal fear of anyone, anywhere saying "fuck" on the air for fear of massive fines from the FCC.

You do realize that the rest of the western world kind of snickers whenever you do some dumb-ass thing like freak out over the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction?"

Seriously. Use the on board radar to spot idiotic behaviour and let 'er blast!