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Competition & AJAX 4 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I’ve seen people post in two or three different occasions when they got linkslammed by multiple sites, and they all said that visitors coming from Slashdot were by far the bulk of the traffic, with a much larger initial spike and a much longer overall wave. The biggest reason is probably that stories stay on the Slashdot homepage much longer than links fall off the bottom of the Digg homepage.

    • I've seen that analysis, too, and I agree. I did overstep and say that Slashdot was toppled, when it's not really.

      What I'd really like to emphasize more is that since I've known, read and followed Slashdot (5 years?), it is only recently that it has made steps to improve itself and it seems to be a reaction to the gaining popularity of Digg.

      My bad [perl.org]. ;)

      - Jason

      • I don’t know if it’s competition in that exact sense.

        What I see is more that Slashdot was up to par with the status quo until recently. Noone at Slashdot had specific incentive to improve upon the interface. Then the AJAX wave broke out, and people started to think about how to use that for a community site – and these people do have incentive to improve upon Slashdot. So basically they’re doing R&D for Slashdot. Anything they come up with, Slashdot will eventually catch up to.

        Maybe that’s just how you see it, too, and you simply didn’t word it so finely. The distinction is admittedly somewhat subtle, or to put it more bluntly, hair-splitting. But I think it’s still important because of the ramifications. It means that this isn’t a phenomenon isolated to a single site (Slashdot) – which would be rather uninteresting, all things told –, but has swept up the web at large – Slashdot is just getting dragged along.

        • The thing is, we have made many improvements in Slashdot over the years, but in the last several years, most of them are more under the hood. There is some truth about other sites doing R&D for us, but it is mostly because we are so big, we can less afford to do client-side improvements than alienate a large number of users. Even the things we are doing now may not work with IE6, but should work with IE7. We've wanted to do JavaScript and CSS on comments for a long time, but really, the time is just
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