Slashdot has long been a significant source of daily news for the tech community (dupes, typos, trolls and all). Over the past year, however, I’ve noticed a gradual decrease in its importance as a source of information. Others around me have echoed similar thoughts, so I gathered some statistics to see if this is a growing trend.
Without access to long-term Slashdot usage metrics, I looked at the number of comments per story for the last 7 years by writing a few scripts to walk through the Slashdot daily archives, cache them locally, parse the data and then generate a file with the output. Here are the initial results:
The yellow period in the data is due to Slashdot wonkiness. That range of time doesn’t return the usual filtered count (usually the filter is 3) without being logged in, and the overall comment counts are drastically lower than the trend, so I removed it from any conclusions.
There appears to be fairly significant falloff of average comments per story at the beginning of both 2004 and 2005. I also graphed the output of each day’s average comments per post as an xy scatter, reflected below with a trendline.
Note that the count for 9/11/2001 is not drawn (but included in the calculations), as it is exceptionally large.
This second graph reinforces the initial observation that community activity is on the decline.
Why is this happening?
The habits of those around me indicate that the decline in Slashdot activity is due to the following:
- Broad adoption of RSS
Feeds are ubiquitous, and the result is that everyone can easily customize their daily information exposure — much more precisely than CmdrTaco and the boys can. - Emergence of social applications
Yep. Web2.0 apps are killing Slashdot. Relying on the community to process information relevance for individual consumption is a hell of a lot more efficient than Slashdot’s closed door approach (open source indeed). Sites like digg.com and the del.icio.us/popular are far more reliable indicators of what is being talked about.
See Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot at wired.com and The Rise of Digg.com on Slashdot.
What does this mean?
Each of the above linked stories suggest that users are relying on digg for timely information, and go to Slashdot when they want insightful commentary (digg and del.icio.us are for tuning in, Slashdot is for participating). This would imply a drop-off in visitor traffic, but not necessarily community activity (which we obviously see is happening). A sustained decline in both traffic and participation would be bad signs indeed.
If the pool of comments continues to drop, I suspect the signal-to-noise ratio will take an unfavorable turn. If Slashdot can’t do fast, and if it has no community, what remains?
I’ll to continue to track comment activity every few months to see if the trend continues.
The continual pimping of Digg is ridiculous – not only is it late to the party (a lot of sites did what Digg does far before it), but now that it’s in the sights of spammers, the quality of stories on the “front page” have quickly degraded to terrible (yes – there are people obviously scripting “Diggs”, as some unbelievably bad stories have had hundreds of Diggs). I don’t CARE what the groupthink is pushing today, or what meme all of the lame sheeples are going to parrot – I care what a very small subsection of experts and peers consider interesting. Of course I’m not describing Slashdot either, but Digg is no closer to that goal. It’s just gross groupthink in action.
I disagree almost with everything Dennis Forbes says above.
Dennis – THANK YOU! Exactly!
” I don’t CARE what the groupthink is pushing today, or what meme all of the lame sheeples are going to parrot – I care what a very small subsection of experts and peers consider interesting. Of course I’m not describing Slashdot either, but Digg is no closer to that goal. It’s just gross groupthink in action.”
I, too, disagree with Dennis. Digg isn’t replacing slashdot, it HAS REPLACED slashdot in my book.
I want a big fat firehose of a link source. I don’t want some arbitrary group of people filtering it to a narrow set.
Digg is just such a site. It, supplemented with a few linkblogs like kottke and waxy.org provide me with all the chewy link goodness I need.
The “Groupthink” of digg isn’t perfect, but it’s enough of a lameness filter for me. I even read the queue.
Who cares really, I don’t want digg or Slashdot to go away, they are both really cool sources of information.
“Digg is better than Slashdot! NANNY NANNY POO POO!”
Whatever.
It is my contention that Slashdot will always be around, for it is an institution in the geek community. Despite all the recent hype that sites like digg and reddit (I’m a bit surprised that you left reddit out of this) are getting, Slashdot still has a loyal following unwilling to jump ship for a site bloated with 13-yr-olds (digg).
The masses will always be able to find information faster, but will it always be worth reading? I think not.
This is where I hope filtering will come in…something I know reddit is currently doing and digg planning on emulating.
I don’t think measuring the comments is an accurate measure of whether or not slashdot is dying. I read slashdot but I rarely leave or read comments. I just don’t think its worth reading through hundreds of comments that have little to do with the the story. Slashdot discussions go off on such stupid tangents, I gave up even trying to keep track of banal minutae of geek bullshit.
I was thinking of plotting exactly this sort of graph just to see if what seemed to be happening was actually the case. Still, I’m not sure if it reflects the amount of traffic Slashdot is getting or simply people waking up to the fact that both the posting of and reading of comments is a waste of time.
I still visit Slashdot all the time, I just don’t bother commenting anymore because I never get any mod points when I do.
Yep. Digg has replaced /. in my book. It is my daily source.
Digg is no replace for Slashdot and never will be!
Slashdot has professional and qualtiy articles on daily basis which Digg lacks of and if they have some articles those are still terrible and very messy.
Digg is a Fun based link base with terrible articles!
It wont care me if Digg goes down, but I hope that Slashdot wont !
As long as there are 15-year-old script kiddie wannabes who type *only* in hackspeak, Slashdot will be there to insure that their voices are heard, for whatever it’s worth.
Slashdot it’s one of the best, you could have really good conversation there with smart people, as for Digg – look at the comments.
Dennis Forbes, i dont care what your “subsection of expert nerds think”. Im 99% percent sure it would be something stupid like “optimization of linux kerneal by .00009 percent. ” and then you get in a fight with dep, explaining that “.000091 percent optimization is not efficient.”
if you dont like digg, go digg find your “expert stories” somewhere else.
Dennis – I agree that the quality of what comes through digg is pretty low (this post being a perfect example… ; ).
I personally do not use digg much, and still rely heavily on slashdot. The better alternative to digg for me is delicious/popular, as it’s the product of individual habits (bookmarking) and not a concerted effort to promote something to the rest of the community.
The post was written as a set of observations that were concerning. I certainly hope slashdot remains the tech news constant it’s always been.
I read them both–almost always through an RSS aggregator–and rarely comment. Slahdot will never go away. Digg is interesting, but a bit too “look at how neat I am”. If you are cool, saying you are cool obviates your contention. Sorta like being told repeatedly “We are winning the war”. Stop it.
I agree with Karl Prigge. Yes, digg usually breaks stories first, but only then in-between breaking stories about “Best Flash Pool Game Ever!” (1068 diggs mind you…). Because that IS what I’m interested in as a professional. I’ve noticed a decline in *quality* stories on digg in the past few weeks alone. Slashdot is a collection of stories and following discussions. Digg is a collection of stuff, some of which manages to be interesting. I will continue to use both regardless as I don’t see them performing the same service.
For me it is feeds that are affecting Slashdot. I read both Digg (via feed) and Slashdot, never commenting on Digg and rarely on Slashdot. It is very rare that I find any new science/tech news stories on Digg, finding them via tech feeds first. Instead I primarily use Digg for those ‘fun’ stories – flash games, videos, and trivia – since its comments are worthless. I continue to use Slashdot for the rare stories I miss and the insightful/interesting comments available on stories I care about.
Unless the high karma slashdot community does significantly diminish, I don’t expect it to go anywhere; whereas Digg feels like a social experiment with nothing to insist that it must stay.
There is no such thing as “fairly significant” in statistics.
“Slashdot has professional and qualtiy articles on daily basis which Digg lacks of and if they have some articles those are still terrible and very messy.”
You’re kidding, right? Slashdot’s articles are either wrong headlines, dupes, reposts of stuff that was on Digg the day before, or big editorials that don’t belong on the front page of a “professional” tech news site, such as poor little CmdrTaco complaining for seven paragraphs about not being able to use his nick in World of Warcraft because it’s against the rules to use a title in your name. SEVEN PARAGRAPHS!
One thing to say to this: http://diggdot.us
That’s replaced my homepage. It’s all I need (granted there is some duping, but I don’t care much).
nice grap and interesting thoughts.
btw: what tool did you use, to draw the graph and the pattern?
indeed, what did you use to create your graphs?
They were initially created in Excel (for OS X), then moved into Photoshop for a little cleanup. The XY-scatter is almost as-is from Excel, but I did redraw the line graph.
Loved your article and graphs. I’m a quant so I really dig your methods. Your charts are so lively that I wish you would post a “how to” for us online. In my blog post about your post I say that your graphics look “Web 2.0ish”. Excellent!
>> Article shows Slashdot is dying using extremely cool graphs!
I think when Sites like DIGG came up, they provided a place for people that they could more easily understand thatn what is being presented at /. *g*
Diggs overall quality is pretty low compared to Slashdot, and even in the comments section you can see the difference…
at slashdot, you have to think more – dont want to sound arrogant but its what I think. The web is more casual than intellectual for most people, at least in what they are looking for…
but it shouldnt matter…. Heise’s Telepolis (mostly german) never has had a large amount of readers and its been around for a long time anyway…
slashdot is just loosing the poeple that came there because of the lack of simplier alternatives but this doesnt necessairily imply than every story on /. is of high quality also.. but I think the average is
sorry for late commenting
Interesting studies, and topic as well. I am wondering if you can provide the plot for the number of stories on /. (which I believe is for sure growing)? It seems to me the more stories, the denominator is bigger when you calculate “Daily average comments per story”.
I’m not a big fan for RSS, never digg after a few try. but to me RSS and digg should bring in more appropriate audience thus comments to a /. story, if RSS/digg work the way it should. It’s like, the short header attracted someone to that particular /. story. The viewer should be at least interested in the story to do that extra step and they should be more likely to comment.
in short, i guess it’s simply becasue there are more stories on /. or Maybe people got overloaded.
The comments on /. still make it superior to any other similar web site. Many of the best slashdot comments are collected at http://seenonslash.com
what did you use to create your graphs?