Nic and I were talking over the weekend about a number of things, one of them being Slashdot. I don’t remember how it got started but I was saying that it really had seemed that Slashdot has jumped the shark. I’m not sure when it happened, but it sure seems like it has. They are often a couple of days behind the news, they carry a lot of stories that are silly or just throw away, you have to read comments on +5 now just to read anything interesting, slashcode is getting long in the tooth, it bans you when accessing RSS feeds too often.. etc, etc.
There was some talk about cmdrtaco rolling around in piles of money and roblimo rolling his little mustaches between this thumb and forefinger whilst chuckling in the back of a limo. While Slashdot still brings sites to their knees when posting its articles, there’s no doubt that in a web of blogging, Slashdot’s relevance is declining. It feels like it’s been set adrift while it’s creators work on other things.
What can they do? Update slashcode, fix the RSS feeds and offer comments feeds, deal with story submissions quicker, revamp the comment moderation, refocus on your market. Spend some time on it.
I really used to love Slashdot. Now I find that all the news they publish is days old, and I’ve already read about it from 30 different sources. It used to be that was okay, because the really smart people who read slashdot were offering really great insights in the comments. Now the comments are clogged so full of crap that the moderation system can’t keep up with it. Maybe they need a Beowulf cluster.