Re: SquishDot

[Camilla R Fox <cfox@MIT.EDU>]

I agree that SquishDot is cool, but what is it about us that makes it
appropriate for us to jump on the bandwagon?

As it is, our archives are easy to use, our content meaningful, and our
list productive.  Why do we want to throw a way a system that works,
that has effort invested in it, and that isn't duplicated elsewhere?

The SlashDot thing seems to be designed for people with shorter
attention spans, and larger supply of news.  The reason SlashDot works
so well is that it's always got a lot of fresh content - in fact, it
takes a full time staff to maintain, even with all the reader input.
You can't just set up something like that, and expect it to run itself,
nor can you scale it down to our size, and still keep it alive - the
SlashDot medium has a higher critical mass than the web page and
mailing list mediums.  Our web pages and mailing lists seem to work
with the level of maintenance and input that they get, and I'm
unconvinced that we have enough input to fuel something with SlashDot's
format.

Quite aside from that, SlashDot is very general, and big enough to be a
nitch filler.  Why do we want to compete with them for it?

-Camilla