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: 5, Interesting) by fliptop on Wednesday April 02 2014, @07:55AM
I always logged in on /. when reading, but rarely commented unless the discussion was new or I had specific knowledge of a topic and felt my thoughts would be helpful. The problem I see at /. is there's so many users that a discussion gets tons of comments very quickly, and even if you don't count all the GNAA and frosty piss ones, it's difficult to see how adding a comment at the end of a list of 200 or more other ones will ever get read. So what's the point of posting?
I think SN has attracted an active and involved userbase from /. and these users want this site to succeed so they're apt to participate more. I'd rather read a comment thread w/ 20-30 posts that are of high quality than one that has 200 of which half are "frosty piss" or "mod parent up" types.
If you have second thoughts about booking a trip to an Indian casino, is it a reservation reservation reservation?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khakipuce on Wednesday April 02 2014, @08:33AM
Me too, unless I felt I could contribute something I didn't bother, here with few comments there is more opportunity to comment.
One of the worst things that the other site did (and is happening all over the web) is posting videos. Life is too short to sit through a video, I can skim read text to get a quick view on whether it worth me spending time on. That and some of the blatant advertising posts just caused me to avoid those posts, or skim them for a synopsis but then by the time someone had posted a synopsis there were too many other posts to make commenting worthwhile.
BTW (and may be I shouldn't say this on here) do you still visit the other site? I do but pretty much entirely for alternative headlines. Since SN launched I have contributed very little to /.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Wednesday April 02 2014, @08:40AM
I do, but not every day like here (and like I used to do there). In fact, I posted a comment last week and that's something I had not done in many months.
I browse /. now mostly to "fill in the gaps" although lately there haven't been that many.
If you have second thoughts about booking a trip to an Indian casino, is it a reservation reservation reservation?
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 02 2014, @11:02AM
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, @02:59PM
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, @05:51PM
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, @04:48PM
test-comment
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Woods on Wednesday April 02 2014, @09:15AM
I have /. on my feed reader, and I am consistently about 100 stories behind, which means I am stuck about a week in the past. While it is good to get fully developed conversations in the comments, it means I cannot comment on anything.
I feel like the down side of SN is that the stories are posted too quickly to allow decent conversation to happen in the comments. I keep seeing stories with less than 10 comments on it, and I keep asking nobody in particular what the point is of the site. Is it to post news stories, or have conversations about news stories.
Maybe I am just looking at it all incorrectly, and the purpose is to just get the news out there, with the comments being a bonus.
I guess I am really saying that I use /. solely for the comments and conversations on my favorite subjects, because SN does not have that (Yet). My favorite thread was when a guy who studied octopi all his life just started answering all the random questions everyone was asking, even though I do not really care about the subject, it was still immensely more interesting that the actual story.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday April 02 2014, @11:19AM
This sounds bang-on with what I'm doing. I'm quite upset about the way they treated the users and I tend to be a little more bitter when I feel wronged. I'm still boybotting Sony for example, and generally avoid Microsoft after the ISO fiasco.
The do have good stories though, and some of the regulars did not leave and make good comments. That said, I don't comment. The really annoying part if that I finally started getting mod points after the last 4 or 5 years, but I'm really not interested in using them.
(Score: 1) by Woods on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:40PM
Since I have become eligible for mod points, I have been getting them seemingly every other day on Slashdot. Sometimes as often as twice a day. I never really see the use of them anyway, I always browse at -1 so I can see everything, it is easy enough to just scroll through a trash thread.
On SN, there are so few comments that every time I get mod points, I have no idea what to do with them. I end up being torn between posting more comments so I have more things to mod, and actually modding things by avoiding posting comments. SN, y u so paradox?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03 2014, @04:09AM
You reference squidflakes
He rocks
http://slashdot.org/~squidflakes [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2525242&cid=38 066216 [slashdot.org]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday April 02 2014, @12:05PM
Does anybody know how to find one's oldest comments on Slashdot? After digging around, the best I could do in their current interface is get to page 65 which cuts off in 2013 and claims "no further comments" after that. And heck, I got an article submission accepted in 2010.
My google-fu doesn't seem to be strong enough either, as searching on a date yields that date in the article, and Google fights me if I try -2014 -2013 -2012...
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 02 2014, @06:20PM
My google-fu doesn't seem to be strong enough
Try this boilerplate, grasshopper. [google.com]
I assume that you know about the training-wheels version. [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by GeriatricGentleman on Wednesday April 02 2014, @09:25PM
I lurked for years. And years. I like reading viewpoints of experts and idiots - and often the dissension (and sometimes the condescension) taught me much.
I loved how often the ignorance would often be answered with insight and humour. Knowing how stupidity was propogated cheered me considerably (and kept me calm and amused) when dealing with relatives who think Fox news is the real pulpit of truth.
The commentary on tech, physics, the review of legal cases, chemistry, climate change - all sorts of things...I am smarter because of the insight coming from the community.
I never registered. Never commented. Even when I felt I had something to contribute.
But beta was completely unusable. I couldn't lurk and digest the commentary any more. So here I am. I haven't been back to see if beta was abandoned or fixed.
I registered cos I want to help this place succeed. I don't really want to comment, I just want the richness that comes from many people sharing their knowledge.
Sigh, ok ok - I guess I can make a comment a week and will try and do a submission a month (that would actually be helping) but in truth, I would rather just pay a subscription and not bother...