Does anyone read Slashdot any more?
I'm pretty close to unsubscribing from the Apple Slashdot RSS feed. In the age of Digg, del.icio.us, Newsvine, etc, having a service model where an editor picks what to post just seems so antiquated. This is a perfect example of the pre-filtering vs post-filtering that Chris Anderson talks about in The Long Tail. For what it's worth, the Apple Slashdot site has had only 8 posts in the past seven days and pretty much all of them brought news that I saw hours or even days before they showed up in my Slashdot feed.
The most recent example is Phill Ryu's fake Leopard screenshot contest results, which were announced Wednesday 7/26 at 1:44PM. While I did see it straight from his blog no more than 30 minutes after it was posted, had I not been subscribed to his feed, Digg picked it up less than 90 minutes after so I would have seen it then. If I happened to miss either of those two sources (highly doubtful, considering one is the primary source) a link to the blog post appeared on many, many other Apple-related blogs. When did it show up on Slashdot? Tonight, Thursday 7/27 at 10:54 PM. It's "only" a day in real world time, but in blogosphere time that's an eternity!
And what about the tens or even hundreds (on a good week) of Apple stories that showed up in the past week? There's no mention of them anywhere on Slashdot. They bill themselves as "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." but there's a lot more that matters in a week than 8 stories. But I suppose that tag line became as irrelevant as Slashdot itself did a long time ago.
Technorati Tags: Slashdot, Digg, blogs, news, editors, Long Tail, del.icio.us, speed, relevance, editors, social media, traditional media, Web 2.0, community
RJS wrote:
You know it's funny, I've been thinking the same thing. I subscribe to the main Slashdot RSS feed so I get everything. I'd have to say that I click on maybe 1 post out of ~30-40. I used to click on 1 for every 5 or so, but frankly, Slashdot just isn't that interesting to me anymore — they don't post stuff that grabs me like they used to.
I don't subscribe to any of the digg feeds, so I can't make the comparison between the two. This comparison is made in a relative vacuum, which is perhaps more telling than drawing comparisons.
Posted on 28-Jul-06 at 11:18 am | Permalink