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Journal: slashdot falling behind the competition

Journal by thelost

I don't care about Taco's attitude towards competition, it seems that he intent on ignoring how dramatically slashdot has fallen behind the competition. This is emphasized by the latest idea from the /. team, firehose.

Firehose is a crappy digg knock off that attempts a spin on the digg idea, while still ultimately leaving the final judgement over what gets plumped on the front page up to the editors. It kinda misses the point of modern collaborative democratized communities. It's as useful as the tagging system, and twice as fugly.

I will compare slashdot to digg because they are the two most directly comparable sites. I used to love slashdot, but it's like a tired weezing old dog these days and more and more in my mind it seems the only solution is to take him out back and shoot him.

I guess the rumblings really came with the slashdot 2.0 design competition. So fixated were the editors over the slashdot 'image' that the winning entry ended up looking like someone had opened the slashdot logo in photoshop and web2.0ed it. None of the consistent problems with design, functionality and pure aesthetics were addressed. It almost seems like it's a badge or honour to look like some geek puked up over his keyboard.

People will say so what, they love slashdot and they don't care. Well that kind of cronyism isn't useful, because as hard as it is for you to admit it you know that geeks in their droves have been departed from the pages of /. in their droves. I remember the average number of comments for an average story on the front page rocketing, these days they hardly even make it to the 100s.

Slashdot was my introduction to the Internet, Geekery and intelligent conversation and I'm extremely disappointed with the way it is going. Isn't it time you chaps did something about it?
