Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community.

Much of the reason why Slashdot isn't impacting the social Web community is its focus on heavy duty tech. Slashdot's byline is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." That captures not just who its core audience is (nerds), but its attitude to what is newsworthy (only stuff that "matters" to technical people). Slashdot founder Rob Malda wrote on his web site that typical topics include "Linux, Open Source Software, Legos, Games, Star Wars, Science [and] Technology."

Slashdot is targeted to engineers and programmers - and makes no apologies for it. However this relatively narrow focus means that Slashdot has not grown to have broader appeal, like StumbleUpon and Digg. However, why then is Hacker News - which is also targeted to programmers - doing so well in Woopra's statistics?

The obvious answer is that Slashdot has lost users to Hacker News and other tech news communities. The following monthly traffic chart from Quantcast suggests that users have migrated from Slashdot to other sites. The trend over the past few years has mostly been a downward pattern (although note that these are estimated figures only).

Do You Still Read Slashdot?

We asked our community via Twitter: do you still read Slashdot?

The following responses were from ex-Slashdot users who have either reduced the time they spend there or drifted away from the site entirely:

@Transition: "On occasion. I've been on /. since 1998, but don't follow it as much anymore. Never got into the others, but I should."

@peterc: "Still visit /. once a week or so but no longer contribute (used to be a heavy user). Use HN & Reddit mainly now, never Digg."

@morganpyne: "I was a longtime Slashdot reader (5-digit ID, lurker way before signing up), but it became irrelevant a few years ago. So... no."

@ceesaxp: "/. always was a much different place from digg or reddit. But you're right I'm reading it much less, hardly once in a month these days."

@jezlyn: "I haven't read /. in many years. Got tired of the snotty attitude and comment wars."

Others Still Loyal, But Frustrated By Slow Social Media Take-up

Another reason for Slashdot's decline in the social Web has been its slow uptake of social media technologies. It only recently introduced Facebook and Twitter integration, many months after similar news communities had added them. In addition, Slashdot has historically favored stories submitted from traditional media, over 'new media' such as blogs. Both of these things have made Slashdot seem behind the times and a bit too closed minded.

However, Slashdot obviously still has a core and dedicated audience. For example Adam Monago, a VP at a California IT company, said via Twitter that he still reads Slashdot. "It continues to have a community feel that the other sites you mention do not have," he commented. By that he meant that the other sites (like Digg, Hacker News and Reddit) "do not have [an] identifiable set of traits or ideals that bind their users in the same way as Slashdot." Certainly, Slashdot's audience shares a common set of values around open source and scientific discovery.

Some people also complained that Slashdot was too slow to feature breaking news. "I catch a Tweet from @slashdot now and then," remarked freelance web developer @pluc, "[but] it didn't ride the realtime wave like others." Likewise, library student @battmutler commented that Slashdot "seems to always be 12-36 hours behind the curve." Although to be fair, a story can sometimes take 12 or more hours to hit the Digg frontpage too.

Slashdot continues to have a passionate, intelligent community. However the impact that this community has on the social Web is minimal, according to Woopra's statistics. Slashdot is no longer the powerhouse it once was.

Let us know in the comments if you still use Slashdot; and if so, whether you are happy with the experience there or would like to see it improve.

DailyPerfect hails from Estonia and is an incubator project of investment company Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), who we interviewed earlier this week on ReadWriteStart. DailyPerfect uses behavioral targeting to try and predict a user's interests, through what the company says is "an automated semantic analysis of publicly available information on the web." The company is also releasing an API.

Does it Work?

When you first enter the site, you're asked to enter your name into a textbox. Then you sit back and wait for the personalized news to come rolling in, based on your 'digital footprint.'

The topics that DailyPerfect thought I would like initially were a motley bunch. Some were correct, like 'web 2.0' and 'alternative music.' Some were broad enough to have little chance of not being correct, such as 'History' and 'Fiction.' But there were also some perplexing topics presented to me: for example 'Mining' and 'Benelux countries' (Belgium, Luxembourg or The Netherlands). However the site offers the familiar thumbs up or down beside each option, so you can train the system. The thumbs also apply to individual stories.

There are also options to follow people and websites, which is useful in this age of Twitter and blogging. With websites, you can import your OPML file of websites you subscribe to in your RSS Reader of choice. I entered my Google Reader OPML file, however it only seemed to include a random selection of my feeds.

The site is well designed and the stories were fairly relevant to me. However we can safely say that it's no Techmeme challenger. For one thing it doesn't bind the same story from different sources together, which may be Techmeme's enduring killer feature. Anyone can scan Techmeme and quickly find out what the trending stories are, and what sources either originated it or are the most popular links.

DailyPerfect, on the other hand, appears to select just one source for each story - and it's a mystery how that is done. I saw a few links each to Telegraph, Reuters, and Macworld; along with links to a smattering of blogs, including one ReadWriteWeb story. There was even a Techmeme link in there.

Conclusion: Not Perfect, Maybe Useful

I'm unconvinced by the claims of personalization, semantic analysis and other technical fandangery that DailyPerfect made in its PR. Many new web apps make these same claims, but the proof is in the pudding - and as of now I don't see anything particularly special about the content served up by DailyPerfect.

I can't honestly see myself continuing to use DailyPerfect. It's likely to join the long list of web apps I've tried once and then never came back to. Admittedly, that's probably because I'm an information hound that looks for (and needs, for my work) context in my daily news fix. DailyPerfect may well suit casual news readers who don't require a wide choice of news, but simply a well-picked selection of stories. The question is whether those types of readers want an automated solution like DailyPerfect (other options include the well-established Topix, or a site like PopURLs), or whether they want the human curation touch that aggregator news sites like Huffington Post and CNET offer.

News aggregation and filtering is a crowded field, and DailyPerfect is going to need to do more than throw around words like "personalization," "semantic," and "predictive" if they're to survive and thrive.

So why even bother covering yet another Techmeme wannabe? Because competition is important. Techmeme may do a great job, but innovation can still be found elsewhere.

So who's the new contender? It's a site called TechNews.AM, "your morning dose of tech news." Given that tag line, it's clear they know just who their target demographic is: the geeks who start their day, coffee in hand, browsing through the latest stories from across the blogosphere.

Before you get too judgmental about the site's shortcomings, take note of their other tag line: "SSSH, NOT EVEN IN ALPHA YET." In other words, what we see now may not be the final product. Your complaints and feature requests could still be resolved by the time it goes gold.

The Layout

The first thing you'll notice about the site is that its structure is very different from that of Techmeme. Instead of headlines and "echoing" links, each article is its own headline and standalone post. The posts are sorted into two main columns: "Popular Today," which seems to look back on the past 24 hours, and "Upcoming," which features the breaking stories, all of which are time-stamped for freshness. In a sidebar, the popular stories and topics (tags) of the week are featured as well.

The thing that's most appealing about TechNews.AM's layout, though, is the sub-categories across the top which feature tech blogosphere niches like gadgets, marketing, mobile, search engines, social media, UX, web development, startups, jobs, management, and opinion. This is a pretty accurate reflection of precisely the kinds of categories we already have set up in Google Reader, so it looks like TechNews.AM could almost function as an alternative to RSS, at least for the more casual news consumer if not for the pro bloggers hunting for stories. It's also going to appeal to people who are generally only interested in tracking one or two niches, as each sub-page tracks the headlines, the popular tags, and the most read stories of the day and the week.

More of an Aggregator than Memetracker

Beyond that, there isn't much more to this news portal just yet. It's clear that it currently functions more as an aggregator than a memetracker, so Techmeme may have nothing to worry about. The sources for the news at TechNews.AM also seem limited to the top blogs you would expect and the site doesn't appear capable of highlighting the serendipitous B-List and C-List blogs that occasionally break news on Techmeme.

TechNews.AM is powered by memeriver, a social media strategy and web development agency that also runs a similar site called queensspeech. That "sister site," if you will, features gay news, views, and opinion and may hint towards where TechNews.AM is headed in terms of features and structure. (Note: queensspeech may be NSFW depending, as language is uncensored).

As it stands now, we don't see TechNews.AM killing Techmeme by any means, but we like its clean layout and sub-categories for tracking niche tech news. That said, we're not sure if it will become a daily read of ours unless they add in more sources.