Time was, Slashdot was the big, big, dog. The first time I got hit, 3½ years ago, there were 27,000 hits in the first day and around 40K in aggregate over the next few. This last Monday, two days ago, Slashdot hit my XML schema-language piece at 7PM Pacific. As of now, mid-day Wednesday, I’ve had 8,361 hits. Now, there are mitigating factors: the Slashdot link to ongoing was kind of hard to see, and quite likely in the years since 2003, the set of Slashdot readers who care about the things I write about have mostly subscribed, so they’d seen that piece already. But still. By way of comparison, I got 17,849 links in the first 48 hours to Java Is Free; Reddit was the leading referrer with 5,623. Times change.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: wka (Dec 06 2006, at 13:58)
Note that the Slashdot item was posted at 10:26 PM Eastern/7:26 PM Pacific. I suspect the audience size is lower for Slashdot stories posted after the end of the (typical) workday. Add to that the fact that Slashdot editors are good about posting new stories first thing in the morning, so the next day's readers would have to scroll down a ways (or go back a ways in their RSS readers, depending on how the reader is configured) to get to the RELAX item. For comparison, Slashdot's <a href="http://slashdot.org/developers/03/03/18/0712248.shtml">item</a> on "XML is too hard for programmers" was posted at 8:10 AM Eastern.
(Not that this explains everything about the traffic difference.)
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From: Preston L. Bannister (Dec 06 2006, at 18:02)
The traffic numbers are probably a lot less meaningful.
Lots of folk (those with any sort of clue) are reading RSS/Atom feeds via an aggregator (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc.). They are unlikely to link from Slashdot for something they have already seen.
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From: stephen (Dec 06 2006, at 18:19)
And I'd add that the title/topic seems a tad less clickworthy to me than the previous one. All links on Slashdot -- or Reddit for that matter -- don't receive the same number of clicks. If you want clickthroughs, you need to title and spin your posts to encourage them. The programmers-are-too-dumb-for-xml angle was perfect for Slashdot.
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