Slashdot’s new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant

Flashy revamp seeks to draw new faces to the community—at the cost of the old.

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Scorp1us[/url]":2fp9uezc]

ebbv[/url]":2fp9uezc]The fact that the Slashdot staff would consider a change this drastic shows they don't know their user base. The people I know who still visit Slashdot regularly are the kind of people who hate any web site designed with modern aesthetics.

I'm sure that their traffic has been shrinking over time, and it's understandable to want to reverse that trend. But when you have such an entrenched, opinionated, and frankly IMHO, backwards thinking user base you have to realize that it's not really much of an option. Their best bet is to start something new if they want to pursue new readers.

And I say this as #34786.

#235,526 here and I don't agree. I think the editors know their base pretty well, but it's the corporation that bought them is finding the tech-savvy user base as limiting appeal to a wider ad-revenue market. I think that's what bets is about - a more conventional blog format. But old hats like us like the information density and nostalgia of old.

#97139 here - I feel like the original design goals of the founders have been lost. The goal was to create a community of like-minded geeks.

Communities need to be nurtured, not be treated as a consumer base to be exploited. The greater the push for revenue, the more you will treat everyone as consumers and not a community. At some point, almost every community controlled by a for-profit (or marginally for-profit) organization ends up on the "consumer" side of the line, and the community evaporates. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

Slashdot has been more resilient than most in this regard, but the beta is now showing where the current balance in thinking is. I feel that's the part that is engendering the rage - everything else is a symptom.

 

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KnightRT[/url]":6scttoza]Site redesigns like this surprise me. When you have no time pressure, why wouldn't you build something at least as capable as what you're replacing? Why should your users have to bear with you as you evolve it into something less terrible? This is web design. We've been doing it for twenty years. There's no excuse for so thoroughly misunderstanding what the users want, or worse, knowing and not bothering to implement it.

They understand perfectly what their target audience wants. The problem is that the audience they want is NOT the community that currently exists.

 

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DrPizza[/url]":2cvp33f0]The new UI is a vast improvement.

I agree that certain portions of it are an improvement, and certain portions are a disappointment but functionally OK. Then there are the feature removals that gut the core of what their current community does (comments are a huge part of that).

 

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VulcanTourist[/url]":1mz0f9lm]Lee, you're a very sneaky guy; I see what you did here. I'm twiddling my thumbs now, waiting to see how long it takes for this article to hit Slashdot's front page... or will the editors give every submission of it a smackdown? Let the fun ensue.

Give it a couple days. They usually have a 48 hour backlog of news.

 

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wvmikep[/url]":36u3lwp9]Eventually, you run out of the old guard. Slashdot was running the risk of turning into one of those restaurants that only old people go to and which closes because they started running out of old people.

More like they remodelled a small-town cafe into a hip new trendy club with a concentration on bar business, and half the people stop coming because that's not what they wanted - they liked the old way. They also don't get the hipster crowd because it's not in the city, and besides, there's old people there. So they lose 50% of their revenue and close up within a few months.