This Mashable post is one of the most unintentionally hilarious pieces I have read recently.
The writer actually tries to give Slashdot advice on running a “social news site”. Check this out:
What Slashdot needs to understand is that the power of social news sites comes directly from how much traffic they drive [...]
That’s like me telling Federer, “what you need to understand is that the key to the serve and volley game is a powerful serve.”
Seriously though, Slashdot has been a “social news site” long before the term was coined. As for driving traffic, the term “Slashdotted” existed long before Mashable or Digg was an entry in anyone’s DNS.
The basis of Mashable’s post is that the author feels Slashdot “usurped by Digg as the distracting tech news site geeks read at work”. Quoting no source at that (by the way, Mashable has been usurped by Progprog as the site people read for high-handed tautological advice)[citation needed]. He concludes with more helpful advice for those poor traffic-starved developers behind Slashdot:
If Slashdot wants to win, it has to cater to news sites more, and remove some of the smoke and mirrors from the confusing process of making the Slashdot homepage.
Right. Because there are plenty of smoke & mirrors to Slashdot. They provide their source code, for crying out loud! Is this some kind of subtle dig at Perl?
And who said site traffic is a zero-sum game that you have to “win”? Many people, myself included, read both. Being a regular visitor to one site does not prevent you from going to another.
Not that I’m a die-hard Slashdot ‘fanboy’, but I just find the idea of an armchair critic giving Slashdot advice on site traffic (with a straight face at that) very amusing.
(And yes, I do realize my slagging of the Mashable entry can be likened to their advice for Slashdot. C’est la vie.)
