FortKnox's Journal: Slashdot hands out the big F-YOU.

This is almost funny.
The "free site", with "open source" engine costs money if you don't want to be annoyed (he said they'll be adding bigger ads, prolly within the stories).

You know, the site where the users submit the stories, and the admin's job is to select the best ones? Yeah, money to not be annoyed.

What about the users that put a lot of time and effort and are consistant submitters (jeffy124 knows what I'm talking about)? Jack crap, pay like the rest of them!

You post a lot of messages to help out the conversation at slashdot, whatcha get? Well, a "Get a Life" from michael, then pay to not be annoyed.

You won't be seeing me submitting news to slashdot anymore. What credit do I get? A little HOF entry, whoop-de-do.

hey...

[jeffy124]

dont forget those Anonymous Cowards [slashdot.org] :-)

Re:hey...

[FortKnox]

LOL! Yeah, good luck beating those guys ;-)

Re: ads

[norwoodites]

You have to use a browser that blocks ads like OmniWeb [omnigroup.com], I have not seen an ad for over a year now. I block sites which serve the ads (really the URL address).

Re: ads

[daeley]

I'm using OmniWeb at the moment, too. Pretty spiffy. I also like being able to turn off popups without having to disable JavaScript completely.

Blech.

[glh]

I hear ya J. I think this is uterrly ridiculous. If they've managed to run slashdot this long free, why start charging now?

Oh well, I saw it coming. Hey, all the more reason to visit marotti.com eh? :)

Well, my suggestion is:

[cavemanf16]

I like Marotti.com [marotti.com]. It's clean and simple, and there's no qualms there about permanently kicking and deleting crapflooders. Open discussion in a civilized manner seems to be encouraged, and childish actions frowned upon sternly. So while it may be against Slashdot's rules for anyone to use an automated script to rip headlines, I still have two eyes and fingers to "copy" to marotti.com the interesting (not the overplayed and repetative) stories found on slashdot.

But Josh, with this recent revelation from the slashdot janitors, what happens if your site gets overwhelmed with massive page hits?

Re:Well, my suggestion is:

[FortKnox]

I dunno?

If something like that happened, I could sell banner ads, and maybe put the site up somewhere else that could support the bandwidth.

I don't anticipate it being that bad, but I have two friends that run webserver businesses on a T3 that I could probably use for cheap.

Get over yourselves

[Shelrem]

While i agree that because the material is submitted by the general public, it seems odd at first to ask money for it, but:

a) Editing is important. Editing creates information. Without editing, you just have raw data. Now, maybe the Slashdot editors don't always do the best job, but the point is that they are doing a job.

b) Bandwidth costs money, and given that many other sites go down when the fraction of of Slashdotters that actually follows story links hits their servers, Slashdot's bandwidth costs are most likely significant.

And while we all want to feel special, I would have to agree that giving discounts to people who post a lot, or even just to those with high-karma would be a bad idea. It would encourage karma whoring even more (since it would be a monetary issue, as well as the karma game), and general excess messages. The one thing I can see giving discounts for would be story submissions that are actually used, but even that might increase the noise news submission bin without increasing the signal.

Of course, many of these problems don't exist on kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org], but bandwidth is still an issue, even there, and it's an issue that the entire net is trying to address.

ben.c

A simple idea

[daeley]

I wonder how much bandwidth they could save by optimizing the HTML tht the server is spitting out. Getting rid of the ridiculous table nesting would be a good start. Pages would load faster and bandwidth/page would go down dramatically.

Another simple idea

[glh]

Something I think would be nice to see on slashdot (that I might be willing to pay for) would be some sort of web service. I could set up a web server that subscribes to slashdots web service, and create my own HTML client (advertisement free).

The web server could implement some sort of caching mechanism that perhaps goes back to the slashdot web service a configurable time (such as every 5 minutes) to get the latest comments for all stories. Users could still post to slashdot through my web server, and the comments would be be sent in live/real time.

If nothing else, it would help distribute the load on slashdot. It's basically reselling slashdots content which benefits everyone, yet keeping everything centralized on slashdot. I don't think it would be difficult at all to do such a thing (on the slashdot end or otherwise)

Its not that bad, is it?

[Pinball Wizard]

Consider - Slashdot could be paving the way for users to accept the fact that they will have to contribute to the sites they use in some way if they want them around. Your own site could eventually benefit from this action.

I personally feel Slashdot is worth the cost of a magazine subscription especially considering that you get less content with a magazine and you still have to put up with ads.

Side note though, I think I've been $rtbl'd, and I'm not gonna pay until that comes off.

$rtbl

[Blue Aardvark House]

I've been $rtbl'd as well. I am a Slash author elsewhere, and did a little experimenting.

It seems the $rtbl has the same effect as unchecking the "Willing To Moderate" box.

I wouldn't pay either. Besides the $rtbl, the moderation system is a joke. Check my journal [slashdot.org] for details.

Re:$rtbl

[TurboRoot]

Me 3rd

All 600 or so of us that modded up the great slashdot troll investigation got $rtbl'd.. and I doubt any of us are ever going to subscribe.