Slashdot innovations

I’ve been reading slashdot for probably 5 years now. Although I don’t have an uber low UID (the low 6 figure range) and I’m just as tired of listening to CmdrTaco whine about everything, I still read it quite frequently. Recently I’ve found that the site is just getting plain stale. What have they done (other than under-the-hood mojo) in the last five years that’s particularly innovative?

In the not-so-distant past, Google and Slashdot were in the same place. Growing user base, lots of page views, $$$ from ad revenue, etc. But somewhere, Slashdot stalled. Where Google is now looking at a huge IPO leveraging their users and innovation after innovation, Slashdot has done almost nothing to grow the community and leverage their users. Of course Google and Slashdot are not in the same business, but back then, who knew Google would/could do anything more than just be a search engine?

I would love to see one or all of the following ideas implemented:

Caching: Squid is your friend. You could easily set it up as a service for your paying customers (or be really innovative and do it for free) where you crawl and then mirror the site in question that you are about to devestate. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to view a site that has been slashdoted only to forget to go back and look later. A big, fat public squid proxy cache would solve this problem (or even tie it back to freecache.org somehow).

Talkback: Why not have irc or IM channels dedicated to each story as it comes on? Then folks can get in there in _real-time_ and discuss it. Then, just as with archives on the website, you could ferret away the chat logs and turn off the channel (essentially making it read-only).

Users: Slashdot’s greatest asset hands-down is its user-base. By any number of accounts there are half-a-million users that read Slashdot on a regular basis. That’s pretty impressive. So what are you doing for them? How are you making their experience better? How are you making it so they can communicate and share and innovate better? The fact is, the creaky slashcode codebase is getting on in years and I just don’t think it is up to snuff.

Maybe its time to gut the entire beast and start over?