What happened to Slashdot?

For years I found cutting edge technical pointers at Slashdot (“News for nerds, stuff that matters”). Two or three times per day I’d pull up the site to see what was new and often found myself scrolling through comments, clicking on links to the main topic or ones from commenters, and generally feeling really on top of what was happening with alpha males in techdom.

Today, Slashdot (/.) is just one of many sites I skim with my RSS reader. Rarely do I see something there that I’ve not already seen somewhere else, or simply don’t care about and thus don’t read the /. post.

So why have they become less relevant? It seems to me that there are so many bloggers that are covering seemingly every development technically, that the smart people formerly posting to /. are simply doing it on a blog instead.

Makes me wonder how many other hot sites are becoming less hot now that blogging, blog conversation trackers and other sites are making new information available virtually the moment there is awareness.