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Comment by Spoom | Hacker News Reader

I've been posting on Slashdot since the early 2000s and have stayed on the site primarily for its community; the higher-modded comments tend to come from some pretty intelligent people. Unfortunately it seems like the current staff don't really understand why the community that is there remains and have been trying out a shotgun blast of different strategies recently: Slashdot TV, SlashBI, SlashCloud, SlashDataCenter... I just want to discuss IT with intelligent people. If they only got that the community is their power, they might be able to make the site more relevant again. It seems like when Rob Malda knew something was going on behind the scenes when he quit last year. (For more, read his AMA: http://www.topiama.com/r/137/iam-rob-cmdrtaco-malda-founder-... )

At least there's HN if this latest sale makes /. go south completely.

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With slashdot being sold for that little, I am still holding out hopes for Rob somehow getting his hands on the site again, gutting it, and bringing it back to its old (albeit not really profitable) glory.

Rob would have to start something new. Actually, I think some new young punks would need to build something up. Slashdot, SourceForge, the whole VALinux experience was a sort of magical time when it happened. Not sure it will again. Really it was all anchored around Linux and this idea that we as a community could do it all without MS or IBM or whoever. Hard to really explain it all, if you were around in the late 1980s, the industry was very much top down, MS or IBM handed users stuff to use and then there was some freeware. As GNU and Linux got larger and became real, there was a dramatic cultural shift and the world just isn't the same anymore. (Hell, compilers and dev tools use to cost thousands of dollars and that's just how it was, when I was a kid, I actually couldn't get a compiler unless I pirated it)

What I'd like to see is a mix of slashdot, reddit and hn where you have to pay something, $5 a la metafilter just to weed out the bastards.

Not saying it won't happen again but it'll be different next time, Google, Apple and company give the community enough that the completely free community isn't nearly as addictive as it was back then.

$5 to weed out all except the bastard operators from hell, but yeah.

That would have had to been one hell of a kickstarter ;)

You just have to first convince Dice that they spent to much on it! ;)

No reason it can't be one now. Make membership in the site exclusive with a donation, a minimum of $10 gets you first years membership and donations above $10 are used to assign visible user ids by sorting from highest to lowest donator.

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