I hear this whole thing started because of disastrous AMA with Jesse Jackson. Even while that bit is controversial, it's much less controversial than the whole FPH issue. What makes it interesting is that a lot of this is being driven by the mods who feel fed up with how hands off and uncommunicative the admins are. As I said in the other thread the Quatrarius posted, this is what happens when you sell out. You're so focused on what you hope to become, you quickly forget that what you were and what you already have is what made you great.
That was a small event that lead into, but didn't necessarily cause, the firing of the admin, Victoria. Which was the straw the broke the camel's back for reddit users, because it effectively put /r/iAmA at a standstill in her absence. This cascaded and released a bunch of tension between mods->admins and users->admins. People are tired of admin negligence and shady practices. Kind of a WW1 Franz Ferdinand type deal.I hear this whole thing started because of disastrous AMA with Jesse Jackson.
People were angry because they felt Reddit had betrayed their whole 'free speech' philosophy. Reddit's a place where people can make a community about anything, as long as it's legal. So, when their legal subreddit about hating fat people got banned, they cried out about censorship, hypocrisy, and lies. From my understanding, the admins' justification as to why they banned /r/fatpeoplehate was that its users were actively harassing other subreddits and communities - and they were banning behavior, not ideas or free speech. Some people didn't accept that, and still believed it was straight censorship. Others believed that banning an entire subreddit for the actions of a few users was wrong. It just keeps going from there. Ultimately, Reddit can do whatever they want, including bending their own rules and philosophies - but they'll anger the community doing so, understandably. Many were okay with the whole deal because /r/fatpeoplehate is widely considered to be a cesspool. But a lot of people weren't okay with it, regardless of their opinion on the specific subreddits involved.
That's one of the best summaries I've read. Thank you for giving a fairly unbiased report.
Well said. As fickle as it seems to jump off reddit for something I was a third party to, I understand the frustrations. This site is new enough for me to WANT to contribute. Not just lurk so I can help where I can. Making this more a more symbiotic rship
Im totally out of the loop here, what was so disasterous about Jesse Jacksons AMA?
I think the issue is "smaller", but I think this is a significantly more serious response. If most of the defaults are offline for more than a few days, I think it would take reddit a long time to recover from the user losses. The masses are fickle. they'll get their memes served up hot and fresh somewhere else.
The people who are still using Slashdot are the people like me who cannot overcome the "sunk Cost Fallacy" and move elsewhere. There is maybe, MAYBE one or two articles a week now that are worth my time on Slashdot. The tech board on 8chan is more lively and interesting. And there are some people there who do just about everything in tech from finding virus vectors to virtual engineering to building gamming PCs. The meme people will flood Imgur and deal with that bad website (Twitter with pictures IMO and I FUCKING HATE twitter). The thing I miss about Reddit are the niche gaming subreddits like for EU4 and Crusader Kings and even Elite Dangerous. The Kerbal Space Program subreddit was the best place in all of Reddit, again in my opinion. People will leave and form communities and those communities will gain a reputation just like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, SlackNews, 4chan Neogaff etc did before them. Hubski may be small, but the signal to noise level here is amazing. I'm here for the long haul.
yeah, but what's slashdot's percentage of the market in comparison to reddit (I actually have no idea)? the site will still function, I'm sure - with the amount of websites that rely solely on it for content it's almost in a "too big to fail" caliber - but I can see a lot of user base moving off of reddit to find their next fix awfully quickly. And I don't say that to disparage those people (it probably sounds like I am), it's just that humans act very differently as a mob than they do as individuals.
Natalie Portman and oatmeal are dead, Netcraft confirms it. Slashdot fails as a news site because it's slower than everyone else, the best comments are redundant because everyone reading slashdot is also reading reddit and hackernews and LtU and ..., and because Slashdot is the last to post the interesting comments have already been made. Even its memes are stale. CmdrTaco himself gave up on it after the OMG Ponies! april fools thing. The moderation system is clever, but the community just kind of froze somewhere between 1999 and 2006. It's sort of comforting, because geek culture has gotten a lot less fun in the mean time if it's still even a thing outside of marketing, and Slashdot is a sort of unliving Pompeii that's a lot like the good old days except with more dust and ambulatory corpses, but it's not "stuff that matters" anymore.
And really, all of this is compounded with the current ownership structure at Slashdot. Dice has been destroying a lot of good faith with their moves at SourceForge, and ThinkGeek's sale to Gamestop. Slashdot is pretty much living on borrowed time.
About a year ago, the issues at Slashdot came to a head with the botched rollout of the new "beta" interface. The redesign reflected a complete disconnect from the community, and prompted a large scale "slashcott" boycott/revolt. This ended up resulting in the creation of SoylentNews, and the migration of a chunk of the community. Dice has continued to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding and simply rolls forward with more additions of sponsored content, video content that no one asked for, and most recently, outright replacing the "Read the [n] comments" link with a social media "share" button. I see a LOT of parallels with the situation at Reddit.