And yet, the number of on-topic comments hasn't increased, either. It's not that people are getting accustomed to beta, it's that they're leaving.

We're locked into the current two-party system by the very nature of first-past-the-poll voting. We're more-or-less locked into Youtube by its sheer mass: your average Joe doesn't have the server space or $$ to hold all that video content like Google does.

We're not locked into slashdot. We have nostalgic feelings for it, but that's all.

So you're saying that only Troy Barnes, the Truest Repairman, can save us from Beta?

I'm trying a new tack - contacting outside media. If Alice Hill doesn't read her own email or /. comments, maybe she reads tech news in other places. If tech bloggers elsewhere start writing about slashdot's impending demise, she (or her boss, maybe) might take notice.

Anyone have any journalist friends?

OMG Ponies also lasted a day. If Beta is a February Fools Joke, I don't think many people are amused.

I think the first and easiest solution is just the /r/slashdot subreddit. A suitable standalone replacement could be decided upon once there and free of the threat of Beta.

Amazon's redesigning their site. They're removing the whole shopping functionality. beta.amazon.com will simply show you pictures of things you might want to buy, one at a time with blinding whitespace surrounding all the pictures. You can't actually buy them, though.

Even Hugh Pickens' submission today was about Beta. The widespread and general crowd-hate may have been passed off by Dice as just groupthink and circlejerking, like the rage when Facebook changes up profile settings. But now that the site's most prolific/published submitter has threatened to leave, I hope that at least gives them pause.

I wonder if you could set a subreddit so it maxed comments at +5.

There was a guy with a pretty insightful point on a few stories yesterday. His thought was that Beta is exactly what you'd look for in a site designed for CIOs and other C-level types who want to skim tech news. Just the headlines, summaries, maybe a few comments, then move on to the next. Ads specifically tailored to C-levels apparently pay more (dunno if that's true), so if they throw away their whole userbase but gain a bunch of CIO readers, they still make the same $$.

It wasn't there for me. As I said in other posts, I apparently got an even worse version than usual - there was no sidebar or footer, so no Slashdot Classic link. All I could see was the header and the stories.

http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 also works, if it bugs out like it did for me and there isn't a sidebar or footer.

Yup. Keep the Beta hate-train rolling. We do not want that shit.

Oh, thank god, I'm out. And thank you for the link - it most definitely was not there in the footer on my screen. Then again, I had no sidebar on it either (the tutorial/tips that popped up were pointing at a nonexistent sidebar), so it was probably just broken more than normal.

If this is "fine", I don't even want to know what you considered "half-baked". Stories and commenting are literally the only functions available. I can't access my profile, log in/out, look at messages, or see the poll. Hell, it doesn't even show users' sigs.

Poll? What poll? There's a slashdot button at the top, and the rest of the page is just stories over the whole width.