Slashdot and SourceForge sold to Dice Holdings (opens in new tab)

The number of users on Slashdot is quite transparent, given that you can see the growth in user ID numbers over time. It doesn't seem to support your position.

I'm also rather disappointed to see the stereotype "we hate everything" characterisation of Slashdot from a couple of posters here. That's like saying HN is just full of college kids who think making a social web app with geolocation and a REST API is going to turn them into gazillionaires when they pivot to something useful (after all, the idea doesn't matter, it's the people who count) and then get acquired by Facebook for the GDP of a small country.

Obviously there really are quite a few young, delusional people on HN, but I don't think most of us spend time here because of those people. Obviously there really are quite a few very negative/selfish people on Slashdot, but I don't think most of us who spend time there do it because of those people, either.

Incidentally, as I write this, Slashdot's home page is full of topics that might have been (and in several cases have been) popular on HN as well: several articles on new technologies, several popular science articles, commentary on issues like piracy and privacy, and so on. There are some decent comments in the related discussions, too.

That all said, I don't go to Slashdot as much as I used to. Partly that's because they keep messing around with (and often breaking) the basic design and functionality of the site. Partly it's because a lot of the stories are old news by the time they get past the editors, and they've already hit the front pages of HN, relevant subreddits, etc. Partly it's because the discussions are too big for a simple chronological ordering to really work and the system for filtering by moderation score doesn't seem to help much. All of these things make the site more frustrating than it used to be, and I suspect if Slashdot is indeed on the way out there will be plenty of places to point fingers.

But please can we not descend to the level of "Oh, those people on {other site} are just {arbitrary negative stereotype}". Such generalisations can be levelled at any popular forum site on the Web, and they're about as useful in each case.

Not sure about sourceforge. It lost its lustre to github, but there are still a lot of good project there.

freshmeat/freecode is really great. Lots of great software there (I liked the old name better)

Browsing the freecode frontpage is far more satisfying than the HN page because it's all about real code that does something and very little hype and BS.

My dad is one of those 3 million dial-up subscribers - but not by choice. He doesn't use dial-up, hasn't had a PC with a modem in it for several years, but every time he calls AOL to cancel they give him six months to a year of free service.

Why everyone is so obsessed by "growth"? Who in their right mind would ride a horse down because it can't be grown into an elephant?

And/or if the parent wasn't desperate for cash and found few takers.

That said, upside doesn't look all that great.

You nailed it. GKNT shareholder here. They have struggled for years to monetize the media business, with little success (profit-wise). Cost of revenue is always very high. Add in a lot of turnover in editorial/content/business leadership (basically everything on the media side) and it has been a whole lot of operating losses. ThinkGeek, meanwhile, has had great year-over-year sales increases, and costs are being brought under control. With the sale of media business, 2012 could be GKNT's first profitable year in many a year (or ever--haven't checked back more than 5 years). Or it could be they finally unloaded the media business (they hired a company to shop it around, BTW) and will now try to sell the e-commerce side (say, to Amazon) and close the doors.

Perhaps, but how much revenue did Instagram have?

And it's an established business. No zero-point extrapolation here.

I heard $5M.

But enough about 1999.

Honestly, wasn't that always what /. was about?

"negativity, bile and cynicism"

Sounds like a niche to me. Niches are good.

It got a lot better since that crowd migrated over to Reddit.

I can give you many counterexamples, at least in computer gaming circles. You need to have something in addition to cynicism, though.

Freedom and rights with absolutely no responsibilities.

Works for Fox.

This was exactly my experience.

/. then Digg and then Reddit.

I got tired of reddit being too political and too liberal (although I am a liberal myself) so I was hoping/looking for something else.

Then in a StackOverflow podcast Jeff and Joe was talking about a new place where all the cool kids hung out. They didn't want to say the name in fear of it being overrun and ruined.

With a little research I found HN and haven't left since.

I agree - Digg is a good example of how creators can kill a community, and Reddit is a good example of how overall community quality is inversely related to size.

Sourceforge has very aggressive ads, think video, with decent targeting of a high value market.

Slashdot also has the high value market, less aggressive ads, but tons of pageviews per visit.

Altogether the numbers to do not appear absurd.

Or 2 pages per visit is an absurdly low number.

Slashdot allows users to pay some amount of money to "subscribe" for some minimal benifits. I doubt they make much on that though.

FWIW, I know first hand that their rate card CPM's would start around $30 and go over $100 for their 'Immersion' unit.

I think for most software on Github, the "end users" are themselves developers. Libraries, vimscripts, languages, programmer oriented utilities, etc.

I almost never got that sort of software from SourceForge. Most things that I have gotten from SourceForge are more "user application"-y. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head since it's been so long.. maybe things like Wesnoth.

Basically what I think I am saying is it depends on who the end user is.

Rob would have to start something new. Actually, I think some new young punks would need to build something up. Slashdot, SourceForge, the whole VALinux experience was a sort of magical time when it happened. Not sure it will again. Really it was all anchored around Linux and this idea that we as a community could do it all without MS or IBM or whoever. Hard to really explain it all, if you were around in the late 1980s, the industry was very much top down, MS or IBM handed users stuff to use and then there was some freeware. As GNU and Linux got larger and became real, there was a dramatic cultural shift and the world just isn't the same anymore. (Hell, compilers and dev tools use to cost thousands of dollars and that's just how it was, when I was a kid, I actually couldn't get a compiler unless I pirated it)

What I'd like to see is a mix of slashdot, reddit and hn where you have to pay something, $5 a la metafilter just to weed out the bastards.

Not saying it won't happen again but it'll be different next time, Google, Apple and company give the community enough that the completely free community isn't nearly as addictive as it was back then.

That would have had to been one hell of a kickstarter ;)

Conversely, a lot of free software I use on both the desktop and on servers is hosted on GitHub. (I'm not sure how this argument is a rebuttal against GitHub acquiring SourceForge)

Though, GitHub is in the collaboration business. They take the standard git model and remove 99% of the complexity of me trying to share my repo with my co-workers while I'm at a coffee shop and can't passthrough a NAT router, for example. Hosting software is kind of a by-product. SourceForge has always been about software, not collaboration between people. Buying SourceForge wouldn't solve anything since dead software will still be dead software without someone to take the reigns and become a manager of incoming patches and contributing him or herself, which all can be done without spending 20 million.

That's much more about momentum than someone starting from scratch, looking at SF and GitHub (and Bitbucket, etc) and choosing SourceForge.

> Don't confuse the popularity of github on Hacker News with general popularity.

GitHub is huge everywhere, especially with open source. It's absolutely not a HN thing.

Ha ha... I found this (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/11/17/204207/message-from-...):

(About "Junis", a hacker from Kabul two months after 9/11)

There are many computers in Afghanistan, Junis said, many in clusters in cities like Kabul and Kandahar (news reports have frequently mentioned that Bin-Laden's organization used both e-mail and encrypted files to communicate). Computer geeks are already hooking up with one another all over the country; Junis isn't the only Afghan e-mailing these days. He says other coders and gamers hid their PC's as well. Meanwhile, he's especially eager to get his hands on the Apple iPod, and has been drooling over the Apple website site since he got back online. And some things, of course, never change. "I thought they were going to get Microsoft," he wrote. "I guess not."

i recently read katz's "geeks" [http://www.amazon.com/Geeks-Lost-Boys-Internet-Idaho/dp/0375...], partly out of a sense of slashdot nostalgia, and found it surprisingly engaging.

$20m is the price you would expect. Rule of thumb is 3 years earnings + a little extra for goodwill/brand name/human capital.

As do I. I think there were only a few dozen made, so they are actually a "rare" item.

I'm still exploring that myself. There's /r/linuxadmin, but traffic's fairly low. You can toss search terms at the front page (sitewide) or through Google/DDG and see where you end up.

I'm having better luck at focused technical discussion on Stack Exchange rather than Reddit. I've found a few non-technical subreddits of interest though. For that, it's been a pretty phenomenal community builder. Better than any other forum I'm currently aware of, HN included (though HN's focus on tech and the startup world is pretty good).

Farmsteading Reddit seems to work reasonably well, though it takes time to generate traction. Seed, fertilize, and weed.

Sorry I should have been more clear. Yeah, geeknet is already publicly traded, but with these divestitures, their only remaining property is thinkgeek.

I agree it looks like they're setting up for a sale of some sort, especially in light of some recentish departures from Thinkgeek management clearing the way for an acquisition.

http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=701230

edit

also this makes sense in light of their Q2 financials, with their media properties losing money (no wonder the acquisition by Dice was at 1x revenue)

http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=697536

ThinkGeek e-commerce revenue increased 24 percent to $17.8 million for the second quarter of 2012, compared to $14.3 million for the second quarter of 2011.

Orders received increased by 21 percent in the second quarter of 2012 as compared with the same period last year.

Media revenue decreased 8 percent to $5.3 million for the second quarter of 2012, compared to $5.8 million for the second quarter of 2011.

Total cash and investments at the end of second quarter 2012 was $34.6 million.

TG has long been the revenue backbone for geeknet. Getting rid of the other properties effectively makes TG the same as geeknet meaning TG is now effectively a publicly traded company.

edit 2

also it looks like they were grouping geeknet media into a bundle prepping for a possible sale for a while, that division even had it's own web site that doesn't seem to have much purpose beyond trying to promote the properties as sales targets

http://geeknetmedia.com/