I noted once before how fed-up I was with the essentially useless nature of Slashdot.
Someone here in the terminal room mentioned "we could probably eliminate the network issues if we just put up a Slashdot-cache here, so everyone hit that," to which I glibly replied, "You mean there are still people who read Slashdot"? And much to my surprise, a large number of seemingly intelligent folks said they did.
This is amazing to me, considering that (to me anyway) the Clue Value of Slashdot had plummetted into the realm of the useless, and (as noted in the above-mentioned entry) there were horrible problems with the way they handled aggregators.
I'm trying to figure out how to explain the mental discrepancy this forms for me... intelligent people adamantly deciding to read something completely puerile.
Many of us still watch the slashdot headlines, as indicators of things of potential interest -- and then go off someone else to find out what is really going on about them.
I'll agree with chuqui - there's still some good information there, but you just have to use a bigger and bigger saltshaker all the time as you read. It's no longer the "Only Site You Need" for tech news, though.
If you get past the Red Hat bashing, the flavor-of-the-week cheerleading, the horrible editorial management, and troll infestations, there are still some pretty interesting people who post there. Of course, I read at +3.
--Wade (also at LISA '03)
I admit to reading slashdot, at +4 of course.
IMO, for news about open source/free software stuff, it's still pretty useful; but the comment thresholds are essential. It's *totally* unreadable without the threshold set to at least 3. And even then, a lot of pinches of salt can be required ;)
People still read Scripting News, too, for reasons I can't understand.
I still look at headlines, and from time read at +5, but I think my Slashdot addiction is finally coming to an end.
It's Inertia.
Yup.
I hit it up for the headlines and the interesting (occasional) articles. I rarely if ever read the comments, most of em are crap anyways. If I want comments I'll then do a search on the topic through weblogs.
I just read it for the articles.. no really.. I dont' even notice the pictures.
I read it for the whores.