Slashdot Effect Weakening?

Wednesday, Mar. 16 2005 | Author: Nicole

BusinessWeek Online has an article by Olga Kharif questioning whether the Slashdot Effect has, well, lost its effect. Basically, sites that used to see a significant jump in traffic when linked on Slashdot now see much smaller increases in traffic. One example given is TomsHardware.com which used to see a 30% increase in traffic when slashdotted, but now only sees a 5-10% increase in traffic.

Slashdot probably has more readers than ever, but they’re going out into a far larger Internet news world. While their impact on the Web as a whole is still significant, the effect on individual sites or even particular stories is a lot less than it used to be.

What seems to be missing in the article is how much the traffic of sites mentioned has changed. I’m assuming TomsHardware.com had fewer viewers two or three years ago. It’s much easier for a slashdotting to account for a 30% jump in traffic for a small site as opposed to a 30% increase for a site that has a large readership. Seems like basic math to me.

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10 Responses for "Slashdot Effect Weakening?"

Dylan Bennett

March 16th, 2005 at 01:32
1

Then again, as my “daily reading list” has grown, Slashdot seems more and more behind the 8-ball on stories. I frequently see stories on Slashdot that I read about days, sometimes even a week, before on other blogs or tech sites.

I don’t know if this is a result of my daily reading list growing, and therefore I’m reading about things earlier before they hit Slashdot, or whether Slashdot is just not as on top of the hot topics as they used to be. It used to be that I’d see something on Slashdot days, even a week, before I’d see it anywhere else. Now it’s the opposite.

So what’s my point? I don’t click on links from Slashdot nearly as much, often because I’ve already read about it elsewhere and clicked from there.

I’m interested to hear what others have experienced regarding this.

Another factor is the atrocious inaccuracies and bad editing in Slashdot posts. I end up trusting it less and less as a reliable source of news.
Steve Eyre

March 16th, 2005 at 01:46
2

Or perhaps its all the mirrors that pop up in the comments almost immediately after the article is posted – people would rather browse the website at speed than try and fetch from the agonisingly slow pages linked from the main page of /. Then again, saying that, I still believe that the “good” content on the Internet is spreading, and we have much more choice, and with the advent of blogging, people are getting to know things before even Slashdot posts about them (like Dylan said before me).
Kent

March 16th, 2005 at 04:56
3

I too find that Slashdot is getting the scoop on a story less and less.

I wonder if the rapid growth of RSS has helped with their decline? If you wanted new stuff, Slashdot used to be a good bet, but now it’s so easy to keep track of 100’s of sites with RSS feeds, you are bound to see the story before it gets to Slashdot.

So perhaps now the surges in traffic are more spread out.

In a truly /. fashion, I haven’t RTFA, but the given example (Tom’s Hardware) might be for a totally different reason – that particular site is no longer a good source of information either, and perhaps people are now avoiding it. I know I do.
JC

March 16th, 2005 at 09:06
4

Not that we needed it, but more proof that most posters there don’t RTFA
cliche

March 16th, 2005 at 09:52
5

I for one, and most people I know, use mirrordot nowadays. Faster, more reliable, and I’d rather not DOS the site that’s giving me the information.
Nicole

March 16th, 2005 at 10:33
6

Good points, Dylan. In the article, Rob Malda says that Slashdot’s readership is growing — but that doesn’t necessarily translate into link click throughs. I use Slashdot as a good tech news aggregator. However, I don’t click through on all of those, especially ones that I’ve already read elsewhere.
Matt Burris

March 16th, 2005 at 14:27
7

I think it’s a multitude of factors, but the biggest is like what #1 Dylan said, Slashdot just aren’t on top of news these days. With sites like digg.com, metafilter.com, and fark.com, people are becoming more involved with submitting and reading stories. Slashdot has editors to approve stories, and most don’t even go through. This is a result of another problem at /. – elitism. There’s a high-horse attitude amongst the members there, and it has gotten tiring over the years. There’s also the design, which is years old, and mundane now. A fresh redesign could attract new audiences, and rejuvenate bored members.

My site has been slashdotted 4 times over the years, and the last time it happened, it wasn’t overwhelming and didn’t even crash the server. What it did do was bring over elitists who fought and flamed away in my forums, and put off a number of people. These days, I just stick to digg.com.
Michael Slater

March 17th, 2005 at 09:44
8

Slashdot is growing increasingly irrelevant now that everyone has RSS subscriptions. Why?

1) Can do my own aggregation — slashdot’s own aggregation of 10 stories a day is less interesting or unique or specialized.

2) Slashdot’s editors are jerks — I’m more than happy to find other things to read than their stuff. (and of course most comments are stupid or annoying)

3) People read the web w/ RSS Readers and Slashdot is not RSS-friendly at all, so they aren’t on my opml.
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10

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