Tragedy of the Commons - or How Not To Redesign A Social Website

Although its heyday may be years behind it, Slashdot remains a favored place for geeks and techies to congregate, there to discuss the latest news, gadgets and software. It is a site where traffic is not driven by the articles half-heartedly posted by the often-absentee editors, but by the conversation those articles generate. It is in fact a running joke that nobody actually reads the articles and instead they all just jump into the discussion to offer their two cents. But - thanks largely to its robust moderation system, controlled not by the site's administrators but by the audience themselves - the discussions on Slashdot are remarkably on-topic, intelligent, humorous and free of spam or flames.

Slashdot was founded in 1997 by Robert Malda, under the name Chips and Dips and remained under his curation until 2011, when it was sold to Dice Holdings, along with a number of other Geeknet websites including SourceForge. Dice Holdings started as a high-tech recruitment site and that remains the core of their business; they most recently acquired recruiting startup getTalent. Long-time readers of Slashdot worried what their purchase of Slashdot might mean for "their" site. However, over the first couple of years it appeared that their worries were moot, as the changes - largely the addition of a "Business Intelligence" section and the rarely-visited SlashdotTV video - seemed to indicate that Dice would remain fairly hands off of the website. In fact, there was occasional grumbling about how disinterested Dice appeared in maintaining certain editorial standards, especially when obvious marketing pieces or poorly-proofread articles slipped into the newsfeed.

That is, until February 7, 2014, when the controversial "beta" redesign started to be pushed onto existing members. The actual design has been unveiled in October the previous year but had been running on a side server and few users visited it except to provide feedback on what they thought was wrong with the new look. The February switch-over actively began redirecting users to the "beta" design.

The new redesign featured a front page filled with large images, a floating header, glaring whitespace and - most tellingly - a simplified comment system and a design that reduced the prominence of those comments. The site's look was changed from a relatively information-dense and text-heavy website to something more akin to a image-heavy blog.

Slashdot "Classic" - The Original Design

Slashdot Beta - The Redesign

To say the readership found this change unwelcome would be a gross understatement. Thousands of comments poured in expressing their distaste for the new look. Entire discussions were purposely disrupted, intent on making clear their anger to the Slashdot administrators and their bosses at Dice. Some comments were thoughtful, wondering as to the meaning of the change and what alternatives the readers had open to them. Other were as spiteful as would be expected on any angry message board.

Of course, Dice would not be the first to face such anger; most community boards suffer through similar growing pains and upset when they try to update their appearance. And certainly Dice had reason to want a change; while the rest of the web had embraced "Web 2.0", Slashdot had purposely remained old-school, favoring content over chrome.  Robert Malda, the previous owner of Slashdot wrote on the redesign: "Pretty much every Slashdot change, big or small, as been met with some level of community objection," he said in an e-mail. "When I originally added (totally optional!) user accounts in 1998, the community freaked out that I was asking them to even consider logging in!" What made the response to the Slashdot beta so extra-ordinary was the unanimity of the opposition; not one voice spoke up in favor of the new look, and it was four days before the first commentators started to say "enough" to the most vocal of the objectors, not in defense of Dice's decision but out of a desire to just get back to business.

Dice's response - after nearly 48 hours of silence after the explosion - was less than encouraging. Although promising to take user feedback into consideration, they also remained adamant that the new look was here to stay, and even the option to switch back to the "classic" interface would eventually be removed. This delay in responding smacked many of corporate politics, and few believed the promises that their feedback would be honored; after all, the initial design had been lambasted by the userbase for months since its unveiling in October 2013 and yet it had still been pushed, relatively unchanged, onto users months later. How, Slashdot regulars wondered, was this listening to the users?

Of concern to many was Dice's intention with their revered site. Were they, as Dice claimed, merely updating the look merely to "grow the audience" and attract new users? Or was Dice, as many suspected, attempting to reposition Slashdot from a techie-oriented social site to a more traditional news provider oriented towards the needs of CIOs and tech-business? Many of the changes of the past few years seemed in line with this theory, and the new design shared similarities with other business-oriented websites. Perhaps most damning in the eyes of the objectors was an except from Dice's own 2013 financial report:

Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

Whatever the reasoning behind the redesign, the objectors felt betrayed. Although the site was run by Dice, many users felt a sort of communal ownership; after all, it was their comments which were the primary draw for the site; it was their discussion which attracted new traffic, and it was the users who - through their comments and moderation - molded the spirit and mood of Slashdot. In fact, Slashdot allows the users to retain full ownership of all their comments. Dice's actions were seen as unilateral and lacking in respect for that spirit and the community that built it.

This may have been unintentional. Web designer Joe Peacock discussed in a Notacon seminar  his own disastrous attempt to change the look of Fark.com, a competing social site, in 2011. He states that such problems may stem from a lack of understanding of the difference between social and corporate websites by the designer."On a corporate website, it is their  [the owner's] site. You go to the site and they push information down to you. On a social site, it's my site."  Web-designers used to building a web-presence for corporate entities often have a certain hubris that blinds them to this difference. "We thought we knew better what to do with the site than the users did," Peacock warns. "We didn't give the users time to acclimate. Don't shock the user." He instead advised pushing out changes incrementally, and engaging the community in the changes. By allowing them an opportunity to voice their objections or to help chose a direction, the web site owner can mitigate much of the outrage. In fact, more often than not by providing this option most users find they actually do not much care about the proposed changes; they just appreciate the opportunity to share in the development. Fark.com, which remains independently owned, wisely backed away from the 2011 redesign and worked with their audience to come to an agreeable middle-ground - in part by allowing them to vote on proposed mock-ups - and has rebounded from the debacle.

This is unfortunately one lesson that Dice did not take to heel. Although they did present the beta redesign months earlier, they ignored the feedback from the community. They did engage the users by allowing them to discuss different designs. They forced the changes on the users in its entirety rather than trickle them in gradually. Dice followed up these blunders with a response that struck many as nothing more than a blow-off by a corporate entity that neither respected nor valued the users who were both the audience and the primary content providers.

The fate of Slashdot.com remains uncertain. Already many users have indicated their intent to leave the website, either to join other already-existing communities - such as the venerable Ars Technica - or to create a simulacrum of Slashdot not under the control of Dice's corporate thumb. Already one such attempt is in early planning stage: SoylentNews.org, largely using the same underlying code that drives Slashdot. Others seek pleasanter - and freer - pastures on Usenet, reoccupying the comp.misc newsgroup. A week-long boycott of Slashdot.com is also intended.

Ultimately however, the short-term effect to the website will likely be fairly mild. Most users will likely migrate back to the social site again and the outrage will fade, especially as the classic design still remains accessible for the moment. However, in the longer term Dice may have sealed the fate of their website, having forced their users to reconsider the relationship between Dice, Slashdot, and themselves. The users have been reminded of their alternatives and the community will likely diminish at a faster rate. Engagement amongst those that stay will drop.  Dice hopes that its redesign will attract a new audience, making the loss of this old guard may be insignificant, but many of the current users believe that the new Slashdot has too little to viably compete against the many other similar sites and without the users to provide the intelligent commentary even the existing audience will have little reason to hang around,  at which point the website will probably be shuttered, ending a nearly twenty-year presence on the Internet. If this happens, all that will remain will be fond memories and a lamentable lesson likely to be ignored by the next round of Internet entreponeurs who only see the social community as an obstacle and not a valued partnership.