I look forward to seeing the new services. I particular like the idea of sticking the best comments to the top. All the best,

Kieren

What may address the issues you raise more directly is that we’re starting to roll out what we call our “Firehose” — a public mix of bookmarked URLs, journal entries our users have written, and old-fashioned submission writeups — and readers who prefer the high-speed browsing style may find that more addictive than the regular Slashdot homepage. It’s in beta right now and only available to subscribers, but we hope to start rolling it out in stages soon.

We’re really impressed by Digg of course, and delicious — and I’m a longtime fan of reddit which you didn’t mention but which got huge (and bought) in the past 3 months. All these sites have their own strengths and I don’t think any is dying anytime soon. Personally I think the sea change is that by now many people have moved to RSS, which is a very different reading dynamic.

“Perhaps Slashdot was always meant to be a medium-sized site with a niche readership but its software brilliance catapulted it far higher”, and

“People no longer need Slashdot to tell them what links to what stories they should follow. They have their own way of highlighting stuff of interest to them on their own blogs.”

I wouldn’t for one second view Slashdot as a fad. But it is losing readers for reasons that I outlined above - which you also recognise when you say “nobody should rely on just one information source”. Slashdot will have to make a decision whether to go for a closer core of geeks or move more with the times and open up.

I would say with regard to the Slashdot effect though that I’m in a good position to judge having had access to the stats for some of the main IT news sites over the years. Where else can you judge Slashdot’s impact over time than the sites most regularly linked to?

I’d be interested to see what others that run IT news sites make of slashdotting over time, but I think I have a valid viewpoint because of my job.

Kieren

The Slashdot crowd is 90% geeks. This implies a higher level of intelligence and involvment with technology. I much prefer the comments on Slashdot to those on Digg, for example. It raises the bar, there’s a difference in quality and it shows.

Second, Slashdot is not a fad. I think its long history has proved that. Whereas any of the social websites of today may well be gone within a year. What is the target public for Digg? It doesn’t have a very well defined one. Meanwhile, geeks aren’t going anywhere. As long as Slashdot keeps on running, it will be a meeting place for them.

Third, I hope you realise the lack of technical merit to your metrics for the “Slashdot effect”. It’s too much speculation, too little fact. I could just as well counter-speculate that the fact that Slashdot keeps producing funny memes is a statement to its vitality. “Itsatrap” is one of the most recent, look it up on Wikipedia; it has taken a page from the ancient Star Wars and applied it to actuality. That’s geeks for you.

Fourth, as you undoubtedly know, nobody should rely on just one information source. Slashdot is just one feed among many in my RSS reader. But it’s there, and it stays there.

Fifth, as a geek, I much enjoy Slashdot’s interface and how it’s organized. I have no trouble wading through the hundreds of comments. And what I don’t like I recently had the occasion to voice in a survey they ran, and it looks like they’re already acting on things I touched upon.

Finally, Robert Scoble once said “don’t ignore Slashdot”.