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Academics and geeks, who used to make up the entire Net population are now represent just a tiny percentage of those logging in on a regular basis these days.

In fact if you were to monitor the lines you'd be far more likely to find a suburban housewife searching for a good recipe or a teenager hunting down a free copy of the latest top-10 tunes than you would a PhD doing research.

As a regular visitor to the geek-site Slashdot I was very interested to read the BusinessWeek article (in the headlines below) which suggests that geeks are either far less parochial in their surfing habits, or perhaps they're even reducing in numbers.

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I've had my websites "slashdotted" several times and the traffic spikes this produces are quite significant.

In fact the slashdot-effect is often responsible for completely knocking out smaller websites hosted on third-tier systems, the traffic generated by tens of thousands of geeks being so high.

These days however, the slashdot-effect is waning and being mentioned on the once iconic site no longer has the stampede effect it once did.

I noticed this myself the last time one of my sites got a mention -- the traffic generated was far less than on previous occasions.

Could it be that standards over at Slashdot have slipped? I know they are getting a growing number of complaints about duplicate postings and this indicates that perhaps the editors have lost some of the passion and dedication they might once have enjoyed.

Or maybe, as BusinessWeek suggests, it's simply that Slashdot is no longer the only game in town for geeks.

There are now a plethora of similar discussion sites tailored to the needs of the nerdy, geeky or techie Net user. What's more, many of these other sites are now carrying interesting stories well ahead of Slashdot so that much of the content is now "yesterday's news".

I wonder if Slashdot has peaked and will now slowly decline as visitors become increasingly disenchanted with the originality, timeliness and relevance of its content and discussions?

One thing's for sure about the Net -- the only constant is change.

Are you a Slashdot regular? Have you found standards to be dropping recently?

What other techie discussion sites do you use and do you use them more often than you did -- perhaps in preference to Slashdot?

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