Slashdot, a user-generated news, analysis, peer question and professional insight community. Tech professionals moderate the site which averages more than 5,300 comments daily and 3.7 million unique visitors each month.
As I said before, we don't have a really good idea on the number of unique IPIDs visiting the site, but we do have solid numbers for our daily comment counts. Here's the graph as generated by slashcode for a biweekly period:
(due to a quirk in slashcode, the graphs don't update until 48 hours later; our comment count for 04/01 was 712 comments total).
Taking in account averages, we're roughly getting a little less than 10% of Slashdot's comment counts, with a considerably smaller user base. As I said, the OkCupid story made me take notice. Here's the comment counts at various scores between the two sites
| SoylentNews | Slashdot.org | --------------------------------------- Score -1 | 130 | 1017 | Score 0 | 130 | 1005 | Score 1 | 109 | 696 | Score 2 | 74 | 586 | Score 3 | 12 | 96 | Score 4 | 4 | 64 | Score 5 | 1 | 46 | ---------------------------------------Furthermore, I took a look at UIDs on the other site, the vast majority of comments came from 6/7 digit UID posters. Looking at CmdrTaco's Retirement Post as well as posts detailing the history of the other site most of the low UIDs are still around, and are simply in perma-lurk mode.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:02PM
I have all but quit slash myself because its quite obvious that...well "its dying" for lack of a better word. I came to slash because I liked CONVERSATIONS, where posts became actual DIALOGS with people of differing views from all walks of life. Thanks to this I had string theory explained to me by somebody from CERN, talked about low power PC designs from somebody that actually worked at the factory, it was interesting and engaging.
Now a good 90%+ of posts are never responded to, there aren't any conversations going (unless you call whoring for karma a "conversation") and if you remove the obvious shills, the trolls, and the "frosty piss, mod up" kind of BS? The discussions are all but gone. Its just not an enjoyable place to be which is why I recently removed slash from my bookmarks bar and replaced it with Soylent, at least here actual dialogs and discussion does exist.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday April 02 2014, @03:59PM
I get both Soylent News and Slashdot via RSS feed. I start with Soylent News. (Duh. Much higher quality.) I scan the titles and then maybe the summaries if it looks interesting. I'll look at comments if I feel there could be something there. Only higher quality comments pop out in my RSS reader. If I feel like moderating, I'll log in for an interesting story and skim at a lower level looking for things to moderate. If I'm reading a story and something looks like it's worth commenting to, I'll do it. It's much harder to do this kind of thing at Slashdot because I'm drowned out by all the other voices unless I post early. Often, I don't have anything that interesting to say.
For this story, it looked really important, so I logged in and started commenting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 02 2014, @06:51PM
slash[...]"its dying"
Weekends tend to be the lightest days there but it usually spills over to a 2nd page.
I had grabbed the Google Cache[1] from the previous Sunday;
the front page over there fit on a single page.
Yup, it's headed for insignificance and getting there fast.
[1] No pagehits for /. that way.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Friday May 02 2014, @05:48PM
test-comment
(Score:1^½, Radical)