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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: 4, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:35PM
So they have "not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base" and are flipping the property before it becomes worthless.
I wondered all along what Dice was trying to do. They bought a site where the audience was a watering hole the kind of technical professionals that are in demand, but ... Dice is a scum of hives and villainy, full of recruiters and crappy temp jobs (and not much else), and in-demand technical professionals aren't going to be interested in bottom-feeder employment. When you want someone with a decade of professional experience for a crappy three-month temp job, you're not going to attract quality talent. So the whole thing was an impedance mismatch from day one. How do you monetize a mismatch like this? You either need to match high-quality jobs to in-demand talent, or do what LinkedIn does, which is charge desperate recruiters to troll their database of professionals and then charge the recruiters to spam them (it's like printing your own money). I never figured out how slashdot fit into recruiting. Apparently dice didn't either.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tibman on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:56PM
It did seem like they had no idea what they were doing. They could have started by expanding the user features by including an optional resume. Next would be a checkbox for "i am looking for a new job in x that pays y". There are fucking millions of engineers (still) on slashdot, i'm sure they could have had thousands of participants at least.
They could have even attempted to integrate some of sourceforge into slashdot. Associate a ./ UID to your SF projects. People can see your projects from your ./ profile. You could even advertise for open positions and needs for your sourceforge projects. But they just squeezed sourceforge and made it repulsive. They tried to "modernize" slashdot against everyone's wishes and thought that would help make them money. The site was already incredibly popular! They didn't have to "improve" the look, the eyeballs were already there.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:08PM
Yeah, see? They should have hired you to advise them, not some MBA flunky from Thunderbird. The integration of hiring in Slashdot could have been very good for everyone, but Dice sucked at it.
I want to put down a marker here, on your comment. Soylent should do this, the way you have described. Being an active member of Soylent ought to not only give you the satisfaction of conversing with smart, opinionated people, but help you advance your day job career as well. It ought to help you find compadres for your open-source project. It ought to help your good-idea startup get off the ground. That would be kick-ass, and everybody could sign onto that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Funny) by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:58PM
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:12AM
And while we're on the subject of improving Soylent News, I suggest this very awesome idea be presented in a way that is favorable to managers -- not recruiters and most certainly not human resources. I've been looking for a job for a long time and the single biggest hurdle I have is not being screened out by HR and recruiters who cannot understand what talents are. (Hint: It's not usually technological knowledge or experience.) Next step is to help managers understand what they're really looking at when they see a person like most of us common Joes.
We wanted money for the site? I think we just stumbled across a way to do it. Specialize in a niche that no one seems to be able to offer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:03PM
And isn't that phrase a perfect example of what gets crapped out the ass of an MBA? "not successfully leverages the Slashdot user base." How about not being a reductive, greedy asshole and offering great, hard-to-fill opportunities to talented, meaningful tech professionals instead? It's really not that hard.
I know that as a hiring manager it would have been great to hire a Slashdot native. They would have questioned my taste in music. They would have accused me of being a sell-out for my choice of compiler. But they would have been fucking brilliant in the clinch.
Alas, Dice was too stupid to see that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by Kawumpa on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:28AM
What about the "reductive and greedy" arseholes who sold them the site in the first place? Why don't they get any of the blame?
(Score: 2) by MrNemesis on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:27PM
Whenever anyone, especially Dice, uses the word "leverage" in that context I always unwittingly transplant the speaker into Battlefield Earth [youtube.com]. Given their seeming nature as planet-trotting uber-capitalists behaving like always-crooked bad actors it's perhaps a fitting metaphor for Dice's stewardship.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:01PM
Pure speculation is they had no idea that /. was all about the comments, and thought it was a clickbait/tabloid kind of site like gawker or whatever.
So hey we can't buy gawker but we can put job ads on this site thats also an internet "infotainment" site, eh whats the difference?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chewbacon on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:09PM
Gotta say I feel partially responsible for Dice's failed venture and it feels so good! Assholes.