Slashdot.org: You had me, but you lost me

I haven't touched /. in a week or two now. I doubt I'll ever bother to again. This is the culmination of years of faithful reading, posting, commenting and moderating. I'm pretty sad that it has come to this—in fact, I had hung on a lot longer than common sense tells me is wise. You had me, Slashdot, but you lost me…

[At this point, I should pause to give full credit to Eric Burns for popularizing the format and phrase "You had me but you lost me" on his and Wednesday White's fine webcomics and related topics blog Websnark. They still have me.]

My /. uid is about 180000 IIRC. (Just checked: it is 187055.) This puts me solidly in the second wave of adopters; those who started reading /. based on word-of-mouth from the original 50-100K of pioneers. My karma has been maxed out for a long time now. I modded about once a week until I turned off the "willing to mod" bit a few weeks ago.

What happened? Several things.

• The article and comment volumes continue to balloon. There was a time when I read below +5 on a lot of the articles. These days, I read at +5 on just a few, and still get overwhelmed. To some extent, /. is a victim of its own success here. However, a finer-grained and more discriminating moderation system would really have helped me to keep my /. minutes reasonable.
• The clue level of the commenters has plummeted through the floor. Many of my comments early on were about someone teaching me something. Now it seems like every comment I make is either a tutorial or a flame. I want to make the world a better place through sharing information and kicking creeps. However, I'm not paid for it, and thus have limited bandwidth.
• The article quality has dropped through the floor. Lots of spam articles. Lots of really ill-informed rumor and wrong-headed speculation. Lots of just dumb stuff.

• The editors in general, and Taco in particular, have publicly confirmed their commitment to not caring about the site, even as they have expanded from a hobby site to a professional business that accepts reader dollars for subscriptions.

  Maybe I'm reading that wrong. But though Rob Malda is putatively a "professional editor":

  • He seems proud that he can't spell or write grammatically, and considers this as something that contributes a sort of "unique flavor" to the site.
  • He refuses to acknowledge that repeated instances of allowing particular folks to effectively advertise themselves and their products might contribute to an appearance of impropriety that needs addressing.
  • He is coyly unrepentant about the side effect of his site's popularity that outright damages other sites' ability to operate.

  One of the foremost responsibilities of professional editors is to act professionally. Most of the /. editors seem to have abrogated that responsibility.

• Not one, but two credible alternatives have emerged. digg.com is a good source of rapidly-updating, interesting news. reddit.com, which I read more frequently, updates more slowly and has slightly higher overall quality. Both of these sites seem to have articles selected by a group moderation system, just as comments are. (I think. I've actually never really investigated it.) I've found that between tracking reddit.com and occasionally hitting digg.com, I see plenty of interesting content and miss little. The lack of insightful comments is sad, but at least I don't feel too compelled to deal with trolls and the clueless on a regular basis.

The loss of shared geek culture that comes with the deterioration of /. is sad. Further, if I was making financial decisions on /.'s future, I'd be seriously looking at the way it is being run.

All in all, I just can't do /. anymore. You had me, but you lost me.