Slashdot is Dead Monday, Mar 23 2009
technology 11:57 pm
Every so often, I run into someone who thinks that Slashdot still matters. Just FYI, Digg overtook Slashdot over three years ago, and for Slashdot, it’s been downhill from there. Look at the current picture on Alexa:
From the perspective of sites like Digg, Slashdot barely exists. It’s so bad that in January, this very website practically surpassed the traffic of Slashdot, at least according to Alexa. And you can’t get much more pathetic than that.
(Update: a commenter points out what’s already been pointed out many times, which is that Alexa isn’t perfect, then tries to defend Slashdot on that basis, which is like a flashback to 2006. But the alternate tracking service he cites, Compete, still demonstrates that Digg is more than 40 times more popular than Slashdot, which proves my point that Slashdot is dead, and has been for a long time.)
A couple of years ago I used to frequently visit Slashdot, but after Digg became more popular and most of the interesting Slashdot posts got digged anyway where was not much need to visit it `just to check for updates’.
Although Google trends show that your name isn’t very known yet (http://www.google.com/trends?q=accelerating+future%2C+digg%2C+slashdot&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0), I suppose most of your traffic is directly from other sites.
Ps. This is actually my first reply here, but I have been following your blog for quite a long time now and I still find it interesting to read, even though I tend to disagree with your opinion.
Anyway, it is a pleasure to read your blog!
That data shows nothing except how poor Alexa’s methodology is. Technically savvy slashdot users do not install crappy browser toolbars. And they’re smaller than Digg, sure. Their audience is probably an average of 20 or 30 IQ points above Digg’s. Smaller market, higher quality, this is news to you?
According to Compete, whose metrics are quite a bit better (although still flawed), slashdot is fairly stable at just under a million uniques a month. You average around 30,000, a little more than my personal blog, upon which I post the occasional programming-related rant, or maybe pictures of a cute girl. So, “pathetic”, you were saying?
I’m not even that much of a Slashdot fan, but cherry picking known-flawed metrics like this is pretty sad, and calls your judgement into question generally, IMO.
Slashdot is like Wikipedia. It can’t be much better than it already is. The best contributors aren’t THAT good and a better one can’t establish herself there. She can’t even survive among (cynical) Slashdoters, as a poster or a contributor.
Anissimov blog either, can’t be much better than the principal contributor (Michael A.) is.
Except, that this blog is VERY good. If not the best of them all. Only about 10 mistake so far and hundreds of brilliant contributions.
Nice piece of flame bait.
Declaring anything “dead” that was not a living organism is “dead”.
Now really, who cares what the traffic is? I check out Digg occasionally, but there are very few entries that seem relevant or interesting to me. Slashdot, OTOH, has a high percentage of articles worth exploring… not what it was in the glory days of 97-99 to be sure, but pretty damn good content-wise compared to Digg!
As far as I am concerned, both Slashdot and Digg are pretty much irrelevant if you use RSS feeds.
I do track Digg and Slashdot via RSS, but more often than not by the time I see something of interest to me appear on Digg or Slashdot, I have already read it.
This.
Comparing Slashdot and Digg is a little ridiculous these days. Slashdot is primarily a tech news site wile Digg has a far more general audience.
arstechnica and gizmodo and engadget all have more traffic/readers than slashdot
As do stumbleupon, reddit
By that logic, trans-humanists are pathetic worms and they should not be taken seriously because they constitute only a very small part of the society.
Saying that a website hits has dropped is one thing. Saying that something does not matter, is not important, is pathetic, is a completely another thing.
I’m by no means a slashdot fan, they can disappear to oblivion for all I care. But if we will take popularity as a measure, then we will be sayin Britney Spears posess far more musical talent then Franz Haydn.
Go back reading about lolcats at Digg and save those thoughts for yourself.
oh BTW, unsubscribe *click*
Hey, it’s not my fault that Slashdot failed. Blame the editors.
Why do you guys have to lie? It’s obvious you have a huge thing for the site.
It’s only a matter of time until Slashdot shuts down.
Learn how to move on to new sites when old ones die.
Slashdot was awesome back around 1999-2001 but it slowly died for three reasons:
1. Slashdot cleaned out the trolls. As stupid as it sounds, the original Slashdot trolling community gave the site a much need sense of character, humor and made the whole place seem fun, wild and chaotic. When the trolls got cleaned out, Slashdot lost much of its character.
2. Sites like Reddit and Digg appeared and were superior from a user standpoint. They make Slashdot seem archaic. Slashdots attempts to modernize have just made the site worse.
3. The rise in popularity of easy to use Linux distros brought an influx of know-it-all newbies who really lowered the level of technical discussion and caused lots of the old guard to leave.
I noticed that this is not the first time you write about this topic. Why have you chosen it again?
Hey…thanks for that. Fantastic post. I’ll be coming back when I can for more news. Great!
That’s great. I’m from Anchorage and see the same result. Anyway, I will be back tomorrow.
Cool! But you ought to check your comments more often. You seem to be getting hit some spam comments. I had a similar issue myself. So now I look at everything as carefully as I can.
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