There were a bunch of reasons people left. Personally, I thought the slashdot site redesign really sucked. They ruined the comment section. It was harder to follow comments and it seemed the amount of comments shown varied at random. Sometimes you would only see high rated comments, other times it showed all, even the troll comments. It was weird. And the look of the design was weird. Oversized margins that forced more scrolling. There were a few other things I didn’t like, but those were negligible.

There was also the sourceforge drama where slashdot buried negative articles about sourceforge, its sister company. Hard to trust a site much after.

Overall, its still usable. I still stop in once in a while to read tech news, but that’s it. Those stop ins are getting less and less, too. HN is my main go to for tech stuff.