If you’ve followed any tech news aggregator in the past week, you’ve probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, SourceForge has a long history of adware laden installers, but they used to be opt-in. It appears that the process is now mandatory for many projects.
People have been wary of SourceForge ever since they added a feature to allow projects to opt-in to adware bundling, but you could at least claim that projects are doing it by choice. But now that SourceForge is clearly being malicious, they’ve wiped out all of the user trust that was built up over sixteen years of operating. No clueful person is going to ever download something from SourceForge again. If search engines start penalizing SourceForge for distributing adware, they won’t even get traffic from people who haven’t seen this story, wiping out basically all of their value.
Whenever I hear about a story like this, I’m amazed at how quickly it’s possible to destroy user trust, and how much easier it is to destroy a brand than to create one. In that vein, it’s funny to see Slashdot (which is owned by the same company as SourceForge) also attempting to destroy their own brand. They’re the only major tech news aggregator which hasn’t had a story on this, and that’s because they’ve buried every story that someone submits. This has prompted people to start submitting comments about this on other stories.
I find this to be pretty incredible. How is it possible that someone, somewhere, thinks that censoring SourceForge’s adware bundling on Slashdot is a net positive for the SlashdotMedia, the holding company that owns Slashdot and SourceForge? A quick search on either Google or Google News shows that the story has already made it to a number of major tech publications, making the value of suppressing the story nearly zero in the best case. And in the worst case, this censorship will create another Digg moment1, where readers stop trusting the moderators and move on to sites that aren’t as heavily censored. There’s basically no upside here and a substantial downside risk.
I can see why DHI, the holding company that owns SlashdotMedia, would want to do something. Their last earnings report indicated that SlashdotMedia isn’t doing well, and the last thing they need is bad publicity driving people away from Slashdot:
Corporate & Other segment revenues decreased 6% to $4.5 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2015, reflecting a decline in certain revenue streams at Slashdot Media.
Compare that to their post-acquisition revenue from Q4 2012, which is the first quarter after DHI purchased SlashdotMedia:
Revenues totaled $52.7 … including $4.7 million from the Slashdot Media acquisition
“Corporate & Other” seems to encompass more than just Slashdot Media. And despite that, as well as milking SourceForge for all of the short-term revenue they can get, all of “Corporate & Other” is doing worse than SlashdotMedia alone in 20122.
I can understand the desire to do something to help SlashdotMedia, but it’s hard to see how permanently damaging Slashdot’s reputation is going to help. As far as I can tell, they’ve fallen back to this classic syllogism: “We must do something. This is something. We must do this.”
Ironically, if you follow the link, you’ll see that Slashdot’s founder, CmdrTaco, is against “content getting removed for being critical of sponsors”. It’s not that Slashdot wasn’t biased back then; Slashdot used to be notorious for their pro-Linux pro-open source anti-MS anti-commercial bias. If you read through the comments in that link, you’ll see that a lot of people lost their voting abilities after upvoting a viewpoint that runs against Slashdot’s inherent bias. But it’s Slashdot’s bias that makes the omission of this story so remarkable. This is exactly the kind of thing Slashdot readers and moderators normally make hay about.↩
If you want to compare YoY results, Slashdot Media pulled in $4M in Q1 2013.↩