Signs of Intelligent Life detected on Planet Slashdot

Slashdot is in decline. Not so much so that a simple google query would prove it, but enough that it warrants a section in Slashdot’s wikipedia article (making it a Grade D notion on the Internet Validation Scale).

To be completely fair, this decline is not Slashdot’s so much so as it is of editor driven news sites. The internet has moved on and, for better or worse, it is the new Web2.0 internet, a child of the wisdom and folly of its crowds.

Two signs of Slashdot’s decline are indicative of this overall shift – the slowness of news to be posted and the number of duplicate posts. Before this Web2.0 internet, it took longer to find and filter news, which delayed its posting, and it was easy to assume that no one else had found the same story yet, which resulted in duplicate posts.

We now have the seemingly illogical situation where it’s faster for 358 people to “publish” a story to digg’s front page than it is for 1 Slashdot submitter and 1 Slashdot editor to get the same story out.

In this version of the internet Slashdot has lost its position as the premier nerd news source, and is left with one core strength, its community. It is quite a mature community, having suffered through various growing pains like self hate, scandal, forking and outright jihad. Digg, as a comparison, is only getting started on this ride.

It is the strength of this community that will to reverse the decline, imho. The first sign is in a development that might have escaped those of you who have fully joined the digg/reddit new world order, Slashdot now have a “BackSlash” section - Slashdot editor Timothy has begun to post selected comments from a story, summarizing the discussion. The first story appears to be this one, about the story about Kent State’s Facebook ban, from Jun 28^th (I can’t find a formal announcement, or much reference to its creation).

It’s rather like a human produced alterslash.org, with all the cries of “Dupe!” and “RTFA!” edited out. It is published a couple days after the original, which removes any sensationalism. It adds concise and meaningful discussion to the story, and hopefully encourages other commentators to attempt to do likewise. This is rather timely, judging by the state of digg and reddit’s discussions.

So, for the moment, it doesn’t look like the Slashdot community needs to be reset (or hottub’d, as defined by this rather salicious account).

Oh, one parting comment from Slashdot. Who said “Self parody is the first portent of maturity” ? Fingers crossed.

I await the first backslash story about a backslash story.