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: 1) by tomtomtom on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:59PM
I started reading the other site back in 1998 or so although I didn't register my current account until maybe 2001 or 2002 (I had an older uid before but lost it). I wouldn't class myself as a lurker as such; however I don't post to many stories.
One thing which hasn't been mentioned is that over the past 4-5 years the weight of stories on the other site became less and less things I felt interested me - so it wasn't just that I didn't feel I had anything to add or that it had already all been said. These days I still read both sites but I gloss over the headlines on the other sites and don't even read most of the summaries.
Over time the level of OSS/Linux/Internet/Computing related stories seems to have dropped with an increase in "general" politics stories, science stories, broader tech stories and tech business-type stories. We used to get stories about quite interesting random hardware hacks someone had produced, new release news of the more important OSS projects, etc. Stories you wouldn't see discussed on other sites at all. I'd love to get some of that feel back. It's quite interesting to look back at the headlines from 10 years ago (say) - the subject matter is somehow more something that interests me.
Hacker News has this feel to some extent in its headlines but the commenter crowd there feels rather too "Silicon Valley" to me - a lot of people who are in startups and care more about "doing it now" than "doing it right" is about the best way I can put it I suppose although that's not quite how I feel. I'd love for this site to become what the old site used to be 10 years ago. That really felt like something I enjoyed reading.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday April 02 2014, @01:02PM
The biggest issue we have right now is that if we run too many stories, they drop off the main page and into the slash equivelent of the ether. This got hilighted by the editoral team, so nexus's (topic.dev.soylentnews.org) are coming back, which will allow us to run stories like this 24/7 without having information overload.
Still always moving