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.

Read the whole story

 

[ebbv]

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.

 

[gabbsmo]

I stopped reading Slashdot after finding Ars. Just saying.

 

[Scorp1us]

Ars could learn a few things from /.
For instance, the moderation system here is pretty subject to fanboy-ism, since there is no meta-moderation. The simple down-vote/up-vote is _very_ subject to group-think.

The other thing is you never get notification of replies to your comments.

Another thing Ars could learn is.. I don't know. That's about all I can complain about. I do believe Ars has a very vocal pro-anthropogenic global-warming bias, but that's not software related, that's people.

Edit on 12 Feb 2014 18:13: Come and see the violence inherit in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed! This comment is currently moderated as ( -8 | +1 / -9 )

Edit on 12 Feb 2014 18:13: This post is so meta, it proves my exact points.

 

[trs8]

As a long time Slashdot reader, I found the Beta terrible. The admins made comments saying the anti-beta crowd is a small minority, but I don't believe it is.

There were a number of comments discussing a boycott this week, and originally I wasn't planning on participating. However, I then had suspicions that the admins were downvoting-to-zero comments against the Beta and upvoting-to-five comments for it. While the former is arguably justifiable, the latter IMO is distasteful no matter how you slice it. So I find myself boycotting slashdot this week as well.

I'm hoping the admins drop beta entirely, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Dilbert]

>>>Extremely technical, extremely skilled, and extremely opinionated

That's me, and I have been on /. for longer than on Ars, and I don't think the redesign is that big a deal. The problem isn't people like me. The smart dude running a root DNS server somewhere, been there 20 years, wearing the same plaid shirt under coveralls with belt AND suspenders, carrying a giant hardcover Linux manual under their arm? That's /. and that's who's bitching.

 

[Scorp1us]

ebbv[/url]":1zx963dx]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.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Scorp1us[/url]":9pfhpm1e][SNIP]
The other thing is you never get notification of replies to your comments.

ucp.php > Board preferences > Edit Posting Defaults > Notify me upon replies by default.

 

[eideticex]

As bad as the new design is I have to say it's better than most websites on the internet including this one. For one simple reason: it scales up to the full width of my monitor instead of taking just the middle 50% of the screen when I maximize my browser.

 

[ghstd4303]

I like the new look, but I never participated in discuuons on /. so I can't comment on the comment breakages I've seen people complain about.

 

[DarkSkyForever]

eideticex[/url]":19x4skcv]As bad as the new design is I have to say it's better than most websites on the internet including this one. For one simple reason: it scales up to the full width of my monitor instead of taking just the middle 50% of the screen when I maximize my browser.

I use the mobile version on my desktop for that reason alone. Information to flare ratio is much better on the mobile site.

 

[Scorp1us]

Wheels Of Confusion[/url]":20306eg2]

Scorp1us[/url]":20306eg2][SNIP]
The other thing is you never get notification of replies to your comments.

ucp.php > Board preferences > Edit Posting Defaults > Notify me upon replies by default.

When I tried this last, it seemed to send me every comment posted to the article, not the ones where I was replied to. Maybe that's changed?

 

[jinjuku]

I stopped visiting /. years ago. IMO this just speeds their decline.

 

[Dandenoth]

Scorp1us[/url]":1i648in6]The simple down-vote/up-vote is _very_ subject to group-think.

Agreed. It's a change I dislike quite a bit.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I certainly don't have a UID from the Ages Before Man; but I've never seen things this bad before.

Whining about the slashcode, especially when somebody from the mysterious land of not-America wants to use one of their strange unicode glyphs, is practically a hobby; but that is always good-natured.

Beta. Not. So. Much. Response has been uniformly hostile, and spilled over into essentially every comment thread, on whatever topic, and it is deserved.

I'm very fond of Slashdot; but you don't go there for the articles (not bad; but always a day or more out of date compared to dedicated article-aggregator sites) or for the editorial summaries(Um, sometimes they avoid particularly egregious grammatical and spelling errors?). You go for the comment threads.

And, thanks to the combination of good nesting/threading (purely linear list-o'-comments presentation really doesn't scale well, Slashdot comments do much better, though stuff at the bottom still isn't quite as visible as stuff on the top) and strong tools for controlling visibility of comments based on both quality (-1 to +5) and style (you can assign personal threshold bonuses to 'funny' or 'insightful' or whatever that make them more visible to you), the comments remain remarkably readable and interesting despite having no official moderators and lots of GINAA trolls.

In addition to just being lousy style, Beta eviscerates everything that makes the comments work on classic in favor of an incompetent reskinning of the least worthwhile part of the site. That's what really has people up in arms.

If it were just the graphic design, somebody would have kicked out a bunch of greasemonkey scripts or some custom CSS that de-suckified it days ago, and the situation would have simmered down. It's not as though anybody, even Slashdot loyalists, actually accuses the current graphic design of being any good.

Totally nuking the (in my probably biased opinion, among the best among remotely mainstream sites) comment and moderation system? That strikes at the heart of what makes Slashdot Slashdot. You might as well just sell off the domain and build a 'Digg for IT nerds' site from scratch.

 

[StealthFocus]

gabbsmo[/url]":tptm9mwv]I stopped reading Slashdot after finding Ars. Just saying.

Pretty much. I didn't even think about it until this article just mentioned it, and I had to think back to the days when subsumed /. with Digg when it just came out. God I'm old.

 

[Deleted member 14629]

Wow, this sounds a lot like what killed Digg. I hope they get things sorted. I'm not much of a /. reader anymore, but I definitely value its place on the internet.

 

[Snowraver1]

Beta is shit!

Slashdot has/had far better comments and a way better discusstion system than Ars. Slashdot needs to understand that the people that use it are almost 100% function over form people. (eg. It can look like crap, but if it works great, then it's perfect.)

If slahdot changed to a 100% CLI driven interface, it would be way better accepted than the beta:

> Load stories
-Story 1
-Story 2
-Story 3
> Read Story 1
- blah blah blah
> Read Story 1 -Comments -threshold=-1


Remember to slashcott this week!

 

[achbed]

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.

 

[T.N.Toluene]

Slashdot is dead. Netcraft confirms it.

 

[KnightRT]

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.

 

[melgross]

While I used to be on Slashdot a lot, in the old days, I doubt that it's relevant anymore, if indeed, it ever was.

It always seemed to me to be people shouting past each other.

 

[JTD121]

eideticex[/url]":12aa1wzs]As bad as the new design is I have to say it's better than most websites on the internet including this one. For one simple reason: it scales up to the full width of my monitor instead of taking just the middle 50% of the screen when I maximize my browser.

So much this.

Also, I haven't really visited Slashdot regularly since sometime late last year. I rarely commented, as well.

But I do agree with posters saying this is about better appealing the site to new users for the ad revenue. I just wish they'd keep the information density as an option, but it looks like it doesn't matter much what their community (not audience, as pointed out) thinks of their plans.

 

[philibusted]

Love the "Ulysses" reference.

 

[achbed]

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.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

ebbv[/url]":1qfs703e]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.

I'd argue that it isn't the aesthetics that are causing the blowback (anybody who is full-metal-neckbeard enough to trust nothing that was designed after 1990 unless generated by GNU Troff could have hacked out some custom stylesheets and reskinned in less time than they've spent whining); but the massacre that is the new comments display.

If anybody at Slashdot thinks that members come for the articles or the editorial brilliance, they are nuts. Slashdot is perpetually a day behind, and sites like Ars(among others) blow the little editor snippets out of the water. Even a site design of surpassing elegance and sublime beauty, that makes grown men weep at its majesty, is worthless if those elements are going to be the centerpiece. They just aren't any good.

Slashdot comments, though, are very, very, solid (amazingly so given nonexistence of standard moderators and active troll population), and they got the shove in the redesign.

If they just wanted to clean things up a bit, they'd see some grumbling; but nothing serious. Apathy is ever a friend of he who would make changes. Trying to turn a comment/dialog-driven site into a news aggregator, when your news aggregation is notoriously mediocre? Just not going to work out.

 

[marcoskirsch]

> Slashdot’s new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant

Huh, the news to me here is that Slashdot was still relevant. I used to follow it very closely, but got tired of their opinionated and biased posts and comments and stopped reading. Excellent sites like Ars Technica and AnandTech provide much much much more value to me.

 

[achbed]

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).

 

[plutocrat]

Oh, /.

If I ever wanted and cast off my so-well-designed-it-could-cut-you Apple livery and reconnect to my neckbeard roots, /. is the place. Was the place?

I understand that they need to make money, that they need to show growth. But what makes /. /. is that it is just simply against that kind of thing. Unix nerds are like that. Burn that out, and you've just got another Digg / reddit thing, trying to slurp up a few dollars.

signed,

81430

 

[Xaemyl]

I've been on d1 since I signed up back in ... 98? 99? (5 digit uid: 88001), and I gotta say, if they go though with the beta and kill d1 (or even d2), then I'll never go back (kind of a useless post here, but one more voice I guess). All they have to do is keep the old option(s) for the old timers.

edited: forgot to add uid.

 

[Black_Obsidian]

I'm torn because I consider the "old" UI (and thus UX) to be fucking horrific, but then the content has rarely impressed me, and the comments have their own special UI/UX hell, with a bonus that they're seemingly overflowing with garbage anyway.

Because of that, I've probably visited Slashdot six times in the past decade, so I'm obviously not a user, and I don't have any "skin in the game" as far as redesigns go. The reason I'm torn is because a less-shitty UI might actually incline me to visit the site more often, but if it drives away the very people creating the content, then what's the point of drawing new visitors?

 

[fitten]

The new look makes it indistinguishable in a sea of similar offerings. The comment system was what kept the base around. Good luck to them, I guess.

 

[Demonantis]

It isn't a coat of paint. They made the comment system unusable. No one rtfs. Everyone knows the story well before that. They come for the community discussion.

 

[VirtualCtor]

DrPizza[/url]":7zheghcz]The new UI is a vast improvement.

Ah, I see you are trying for the rare (+5, Troll) moderation.

 

[strohminator]

Slashdot is going away. Few new users spend significant time on the site, and over time the old users are disappearing. So they have a choice:
1) Continue the slide into oblivion
2) Try something new

They could do #2 better (heh heh), but it's not realistic to expect them to chose #1.