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FS tells me that Ars Technica reports that Dice is selling the Slashdot and Sourceforge sites. The company in their second quarter earnings announcements stated they have "not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business", and are planning to divest this business.
The report goes on to note that in spite of what the report calls "an incredibly loyal and passionate following of tech professionals," Slashdot and SourceForge aren't core to DHI's business and that DHI has partnered with KeyBanc Capital Markets to advise DHI on the sale. There is no buyer lined up yet.
The report also says that Slashdot Media (the aggregate of Slashdot and SourceForge) made $1.7 million in revenue for the second quarter and that it's estimated Slashdot Media will pull somewhere between $15 million and $16 million in revenue for fiscal 2015.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:30PM
Beta was a fiasco, but Slashdot's young readership hasn't been willing to work with the new owners in the usual way audiences negotiate with media providers - you give us this, and in turn we'll consume (or ignore) some ads, occasional puff stories that tie in with Dice's other businesses, etc. Slashdot's response to ANY puff story or almost ANY change in format is to post obscenities, which are modded all the way up. It's a juvenile attitude IMO, and one that the editors haven't lifted a finger to discourage.
So I'm not surprised that Dice Holdings would want to bail. Their experiment failed, because they overestimated the maturity of the site's readers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:24PM
Anonymous MBA shithole, I reply in kind.
You contradict yourself: Slashdot's readership is not young. The young submit to social media sites without concern for privacy or integrity. Slashdot's readership is grognardy and curmudgeonly and resists being taken advantage of.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:16PM
The way I read the GP post was that the grognardy and cumudgeonly user base resists being taken advantage of in the most immature ways. Much like how you would expect a 13 year old userbase would react.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:26PM
I haven't kept up with Slashdot in years so I'll take your comment as fact. However I will disagree with your comment about being juvenile. The main problem with polite discourse is that it only works when you have reasonable parties involved. All effective protests are disruptive, humans generally don't pay attention otherwise. I doubt Dice, or the community at large, would pay much attention to multiple long well thought out responses to shitty articles. Its the same reason the "fuck beta" campaign took off...
So, not necessarily juvenile, just the only effective response to a system that doesn't care about the users.
(Score: 2, Funny) by jdavidb on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:00PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:41PM
You know, there's a time and a place. It behooves a person to start out with, "I believe, good sir, that you're not taking all the facts into account." A person ought to endeavor to preserve comity with, "I have meant to impart a reasonable counterpoint to your arguments; please consider it." But in the end, sometimes nothing drives the point home like, "You're behaving like a fucking retard."
I know I have been shaken out of my carefully constructed rationales thus. It could work for others too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:30PM
The vast majority of the folks who left and came here were 10+ year users. Since we left I would argue that indicates that the OLDER "audience" members were the ones most oppposed.
Their experiment failed, because they overestimated the maturity of the site's readers.
I would argue that they underestimated the maturity of the site itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @08:01PM
Yes they underestimated maturity of the site. Simply the site was mature and defined, they attempted to redefine it and failed.
(Score: 2) by spxero on Tuesday July 28 2015, @08:39PM
I echo the underestimated sentiment. There were three items that pushed me away, and two of them were in the direct control of the site. The first was beta. I just want to read the site in an easily viewable format with easy to view comments. The second was the video. Most, if not all, of my /.-viewing time is at work. Having to put headphones on to view the video just didn't work, and the content was far from well-produced. Most of what I saw in video could've been covered in a summary. Both of these are products of having a job where my slack-off time is valuable, and viewing something they tried to evolve into Facebook with video is far from appealing.
The third item for me was the lack of quality comments as well as how many comments were on an article before I even saw it. Too many users without meaningful discussion.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:37PM
That's because business schools teach you how to manage from the perspective that humans are stupid cattle, numbers. They abstract "humans" to "consumers" and "what they legitimately want" to "demand." They want everything to conform to an abstract formula that they manage from the one app they know, Excel. Ask them to actually do something or comprehend something and they'll stammer and back slowly away, "But the market will provide..."
As such it's not surprising at all that Dice failed to monetize the Slashdot community. Retards cannot be expected to understand the why's and wherefore's of their intellectual betters. They'll shake their heads (as they have, here), back away, and blame it on the community ("we failed to monetize them...").
Nevertheless, if an intelligent person had been empowered at Dice to work with the Slashdot, it could have worked out well for everyone.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:15AM
...the one app they know, Excel
Not all of them know Excel. I have been asked several times to "convert this spreadsheet to powerpoint, for the higher ups"