We've found that Slashdot people are "our people" when it comes to our products and projects. A mention in the comments on reddit or digg or HN brings a handful of clicks to our site and no difference in sales...a mention in a Slashdot comment brings a deluge of traffic, and a big sales spike for the next couple of days. I guess it makes sense: We're heavily involved in Open Source software (which is far more important to Slashdotters than redditors or diggers or HN'ers), we're building systems management tools (again, Slashdotters are more likely IT guys than any of the other sites), and our projects are less shiny but still have a lot of Linux/UNIX credibility that newer Web 2.0 sites generally lack. Priorities seem to fit what we're doing better at Slashdot. I'm having trouble imagining what a front page Slashdotting would be like for us (though I'm always trying to imagine what story we need to tell to get one...and figuring out what I'd need to do to our sluggish Joomla site to make it weather the load).

And, of course, I read Slashdot regularly, and enjoy it quite a lot. I think it's the only news site my co-founder reads.

You do get knowledgeable posts on Slashdot. But there is a lot of noise and a lot of snideness. You still get posts implying Smalltalk is slow, though it's actually one of the faster pure-OO languages at this point, and one of the commercial implementations (VisualWorks) has an unbelievably good implementation of generational GC. (Seriously, I put an infinite background loop that just allocated memory into the petro trading client I was maintaining, and it was hard to notice!)

A lot of the population there doesn't have a CS degree, and hasn't bothered to give themselves an equivalent education by reading, and so find basic stuff like the "Sources of Disk Latency" to be "Interesting" and "Informative." But the site works for real signal, because eventually some expert is pissed off enough to post a page long in-depth spiel.

One thing to keep in mind is that IT professionals are different from software engineers which seem to be the majority of the technical backgrounds that HNers have.

I'm surprised there aren't more sysadmin related posts actually. (Wiring Servers? How do YOU do it?)

I've been watching Slashdot since it came out.

Over the last 2-3 years, it's went into the crapper. More political ranting from the left, more pointlessly provocative articles, and more anti-MS bashing.

It's just a cesspool over there. I blame the new editors.

I will say that it's good for jokes. Also there is a very small percentage of posts which are ranked interesting and are actually interesting.

I agree. Those guys have in-depth knowledge.

/.

Yes, you come across some ignorant and rude comments at times, yet I find that when taking into account the number of posters and posts, the number of quality comments - which is why I have been reading it almost daily for over three years now - is actually quite high . . .

. . . and the humor. I don't laugh that easy, but I find some of the comments to be incredibly humorous, and that has value to me, a good laugh can make a difference in one's day.