Dice swallows Slashdot, SourceForge, Freecode in $20m deal

WTF?

"The deal caused some head-scratching from observers"...

...yeah, as a company handling the job-market couldn't possibly find a way to see the benefit of a db containing a lot of people ranked informative a lot of the time etc.

'Tis a bit of a head-scratcher, yes.

dice.com is hopelessly american-centric, possibly moreso than slashdot. Just about the only non-NA jobs are jobs elsewhere that require USoA security clearances. Bit of a pity because the user interface looked more promising than the latest worsening from monster, who seem to think that artificially crippling the interface leaving you with much more work to do for the same result set constitutes a better user experience. I'd welcome competition here because monster is awfully big, to the point of having a virtual monopoly in more than a few countries, but I'm not confident dice.com will deliver, or even wants to try.

Slashdot's userbase makes more claims to being american-centric than it actually is. Maybe that'll change, but with these new owners, a bit more probably than not for the worse. Which could turn out to be bad news for sourceforge.

What I think dice're after is obtaining a "community" like the (still very much windows-centric and more-or-less USoA-centric) websites with reasonably successful tied-in careers sites like stackoverflow and and tdwtf, where it's done as a service to the community. There it's also built-up from within the community, there's a difference. (Compare and contrast monster with their relentless push to get you to sign up with them and then "connect" with facebook and linkedin, giving away yet more information. My cv and social contacts I don't need nicely bundled and owned by THEM, thank you very much.) Only coming at it from the commercial side, as it were. So they're trying to "innovate" but without a soul behind it, 'tis perilious going.

One might note that el reg briefly tried to test the waters teaming up with a British outfit that have several similarly-named websites that are nearly entirely infested with recruiter-reposts (Dominic knows just how much recruiters are hated in these parts) and that have a habit of spamming themselves (and hide behind well-known spammer-supporting ISPs, where abuse@ is entirely unresponsive, ie they're not merely poorly done and/or bad websites with very poor content, they're wilfully bad net citizens), but it seems they've left well enough alone, and so it should be. There's a limit to how much crap the product you're selling to your advertisers will put up with. One can but wonder how slashdot will react to dice and whether dice understands what it can and can not make the community accept.

As a long-time USENET user, I admit to no "/. id".

All your Open Source software...

... are belong to us!

Has it happened yet?

I note that the /. Terms still refer to Geeknet.

It'll be interesting to see how they change.

Bootnote

You just wanted to brag about your 4 digit UID.

Always trying to impress the ladies.

quirky and cantankerous :p

What two adjectives would Reg readers use to describe themselves, I wonder?

Another four digit ID here. Signed up in the early days when the signal to noise ratio was very high, and the world of open source software was something that just bemused big business. I remember a boss at the time stating that he'd never allow the use of open source stuff - unbeknown to him our FTP server ran NetBSD and one team where using Linux machines to do batch processing.

Slashdot

.. the MySpace of the IT news world. Carries stuff several days after sites like Hacker News and now mostly only populated by people of less than stellar intellectual capability..