I think the editors or owners of Slashdot are either 1) Trying to increase viewership by appealing to a lowest denominator (Star go boom! Big word scary! Chemicals are mean! Vroom vroom car!) or 2) Trying to deliberately weaken the readership for purposes I can only speculate that. That second theory is bolstered by the clumsy rolling out of 'features' during the past few weeks - breaking things that once worked, adding new features that don't, and in general doing their best to make the site almost more trouble to read than it's worth.
Does anyone else have any suggestions or inside information? It's almost a meme now that 'Slashdot is self-sabotauging', but lately it's just gotten noticibly worse.
I have no inside information, but it's apparent to me that Slsahdot is trying to be the new 'Facebook' or 'MySpace' for geeks. Or something. I'm expecting any day now the ability to add tacky photos, weird fonts and poor layouts to your journal pages.
Furthermore, I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode. So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday June 11, 2009 @11:56PM (#28304207)
Furthermore, I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode.
How true. Not that it was ever Shangri-La, but Slashdot did once have some interesting and informative discussions on, you know, technical matters.
So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.
And making it another pile of useless shit like Digg or Reddit is precisely the wrong way to do that. A younger audience can be intelligent too, dontchaknow. Competing for the large but well-served market (if you can call it that) of the sort of drooling morons who argue in YouTube comments is ultimately futile.
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Friday June 12, 2009 @12:08AM (#28304289)
Furthermore, I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode. So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.
I don't think they're gone, and lurk mode depends on your definition of it. If I'm sitting around with a bunch of geeks talking about non-technical stuff, I don't think that makes it lurk mode so much as everyday conversation. When we have technical discussions on here, the level of discussion isn't the same as a professional journal but it's very impressive for a public forum filled with a diverse technical audience. It's still a common occurrence where I see posts on here that give me insight on an issue that I may never have otherwise come across; there are even fairly profound anecdotes.
I also tend to guess that people remember the olden days as being better than they were. I think the signal to noise in replies has gone up, but moderation takes care of that. The stories, well, frankly I've been here ten years now and I don't remember a time where people weren't groaning at a lot of the stories. I wasn't as regular of a reader back then, but I certainly remember vitriolic replies to every Katz story I saw.
A lot of times I see people whine about stories on here, it's seems to be myopic assholes who expect slashdot to cater to exactly their tastes to the detriment of everyone else -- and expect top shelf journalism despite it being free and them making little to no contribution of any type at all. I've seen complaints about technical stories, hard science stories, what I would call soft science interest stories, stories about new products, lots of the stories about nerd or geek culture. There's really very few types of stories that seem to be without complaint; if slashdot went the blameless route, it might have three stories a week and it'd miss a shitload of stuff that's quite interesting if you're a person who's actually curious about the world. If you want to complain about the quality of the actual writing, then I suggest you submit more stories with high quality writing -- this is a user-driven site after all.
However that doesn't mean that there aren't things that/. should fix. Your post is a case in point, a helpful realist perspective on the situation, but because you posted AC it stands at score 0, while the comment 'Having "journal pages" was bad enough.' unbelievably stands at score 2. The cause? Very simple, AC's start moderated at 0 instead of 1, which means even most moderators will not see them, so often they don't get moderated up even if they're good, or only after most readers have moved to the next
You can always just turn it off for yourself. That's what I do.
Anyway, what did you not like about my post? It was intended to draw the types of comments the parent posted. I wasn't so much interested in griping as finding out what other people really think.
Many of us who moderate have a rule not to moderate any AC, no matter how insightful. As per the moderation suggestions, I browse at -1 to undo any inappropriate downmodding. But I won't touch an AC because I believe my upmods are reserved for those registered and logged in.
It has been so long since I fiddled with my settings, I cannot say if my view is the default or not. But I don't recall only browsing at 1 or greater.
I would like rid of the AC post all together. It makes a great way to flame without getting a Karma hit. That and I think people should stand behind what they say. On Slashdot your not going to go to jail for what you post so protection from the man really isn't a good reason. Of course a lot of people will not agree with me and that is fine. They have their views and I have mine.
Slashot is a moderated user site with an agenda of open source.
Slashdot doesn't have an agenda of open source. Maybe it used to, but not anymore. If it does seem like open source is posted a lot, it's because, well, open source is in the press a lot. Companies are cutting costs with the economy and one of the most popular methods employed is by rolling out new open source strategies.
Yeah, Jon Katz was... special. I just looked him up on wikipedia - seems like he went on to write about dogs. I especially liked how it says that his books "[...] have been met with a hostile reaction in segments of the border collie community. [...] Critics have faulted Katz for a fundamental lack of understanding of the dogs [...] criticism of the author intensified after he gave away his second border collie and had the first put down for behavioral problems."
Yep, that would be this bug [sourceforge.net], which, like pretty much all bugs in slashcode, will probably not get fixed.
And then there's this bug [sourceforge.net], which they don't seem to be in any hurry to deal with. If you read through the comments on the bug, they add up to complete info on how to reproduce and fix the bug. The bug only occurs for stories in certain slashdot sections, because only those sections' CSS is messed up. So all they had to do to fix it was to copy the correct CSS out of the not-broken files into the broken
I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode. So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.
I suggest a sidebar/RSS that tracks the secret relationship of Cmdr Taco and Jeff to spice things up, and making the front page look like the Apple Store. And use some FLASH to shake the text around. And add lens flare.
I think it's kind of cool that I see a huge block of grey space beneath your title bar, and the text of your post waaaaaay off to the right conveniently split up into one and two word lines. Good going who ever coded that up!
I also love the Options button not working any more.
I hate this feature, it has nothing to do on/./. is a site for nerds, and wow is way too mainstream to be define as a game for nerds. This kind of features can only attract pseudo-geeks who will whine about very non-game stories.
That, and my server is not in the list (Sinstralis - EU).
1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.
Not a bad idea, in principle. Over the years, there have been several sites that slashdotters would talk about as good alternatives. I was active on the old kuro5hin.org [kuro5hin.org] site for a while, before they erased the whole database of stories and comments and started over again from scratch. A lot of those folks seemed to move over to hulver.com [hulver.com].
Bruce Perens tried to do it with technocrat.net [technocrat.net], which is now a redirect to his own blog b
My two bits on this thread is - there is nothing we can do about it - things change - especially the good things - IMO/. is still cool - but like I said - things change...
Love you guys (and that girl that was here once)
The Internet Meme of which you are referring is the meme of the wailing site member whining that this site or that site is going downhill - going to he'll in a handbasket or that the quality of submissions has fallen. - It's user submissions! Submit Brother!
Well for one thing the star would actually go boom. Since a Supernova throws off a lot of it's mass it would no longer be in a vacuum and there would be shock wave and there would be a boom if you where close enough. I have to admit that Slashdot does seem to be getting less geeky and political all the time. Pay to many stories that are clearly politics are being listed as News or other things. Helpful hint if the summary has the words Demarcate, Republican, Green Party, Congressman, or Congress woman in it
Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it THAT slow of a news day, or could no one else possibly outdo this clown of a submitter?
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the editors or owners of Slashdot are either 1) Trying to increase viewership by appealing to a lowest denominator (Star go boom! Big word scary! Chemicals are mean! Vroom vroom car!) or 2) Trying to deliberately weaken the readership for purposes I can only speculate that. That second theory is bolstered by the clumsy rolling out of 'features' during the past few weeks - breaking things that once worked, adding new features that don't, and in general doing their best to make the site almost more trouble to read than it's worth.
Does anyone else have any suggestions or inside information? It's almost a meme now that 'Slashdot is self-sabotauging', but lately it's just gotten noticibly worse.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no inside information, but it's apparent to me that Slsahdot is trying to be the new 'Facebook' or 'MySpace' for geeks. Or something. I'm expecting any day now the ability to add tacky photos, weird fonts and poor layouts to your journal pages.
Furthermore, I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode. So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
How true. Not that it was ever Shangri-La, but Slashdot did once have some interesting and informative discussions on, you know, technical matters.
And making it another pile of useless shit like Digg or Reddit is precisely the wrong way to do that. A younger audience can be intelligent too, dontchaknow. Competing for the large but well-served market (if you can call it that) of the sort of drooling morons who argue in YouTube comments is ultimately futile.
Shorter: we can has good geek site again?
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think they're gone, and lurk mode depends on your definition of it. If I'm sitting around with a bunch of geeks talking about non-technical stuff, I don't think that makes it lurk mode so much as everyday conversation. When we have technical discussions on here, the level of discussion isn't the same as a professional journal but it's very impressive for a public forum filled with a diverse technical audience. It's still a common occurrence where I see posts on here that give me insight on an issue that I may never have otherwise come across; there are even fairly profound anecdotes.
I also tend to guess that people remember the olden days as being better than they were. I think the signal to noise in replies has gone up, but moderation takes care of that. The stories, well, frankly I've been here ten years now and I don't remember a time where people weren't groaning at a lot of the stories. I wasn't as regular of a reader back then, but I certainly remember vitriolic replies to every Katz story I saw.
A lot of times I see people whine about stories on here, it's seems to be myopic assholes who expect slashdot to cater to exactly their tastes to the detriment of everyone else -- and expect top shelf journalism despite it being free and them making little to no contribution of any type at all. I've seen complaints about technical stories, hard science stories, what I would call soft science interest stories, stories about new products, lots of the stories about nerd or geek culture. There's really very few types of stories that seem to be without complaint; if slashdot went the blameless route, it might have three stories a week and it'd miss a shitload of stuff that's quite interesting if you're a person who's actually curious about the world. If you want to complain about the quality of the actual writing, then I suggest you submit more stories with high quality writing -- this is a user-driven site after all.
We should get rid of the AC -1 modifier (Score:2, Interesting)
However that doesn't mean that there aren't things that /. should fix. Your post is a case in point, a helpful realist perspective on the situation, but because you posted AC it stands at score 0, while the comment 'Having "journal pages" was bad enough.' unbelievably stands at score 2. The cause? Very simple, AC's start moderated at 0 instead of 1, which means even most moderators will not see them, so often they don't get moderated up even if they're good, or only after most readers have moved to the next
Re: We should get rid of the AC -1 modifier (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
You can always just turn it off for yourself. That's what I do.
Anyway, what did you not like about my post? It was intended to draw the types of comments the parent posted. I wasn't so much interested in griping as finding out what other people really think.
Re: (Score:1)
Nevermind on the last part. I didn't see the post you were talking about until later.
Re: (Score:1)
Many of us who moderate have a rule not to moderate any AC, no matter how insightful. As per the moderation suggestions, I browse at -1 to undo any inappropriate downmodding. But I won't touch an AC because I believe my upmods are reserved for those registered and logged in.
It has been so long since I fiddled with my settings, I cannot say if my view is the default or not. But I don't recall only browsing at 1 or greater.
Re: (Score:2)
I would like rid of the AC post all together. It makes a great way to flame without getting a Karma hit. That and I think people should stand behind what they say. On Slashdot your not going to go to jail for what you post so protection from the man really isn't a good reason.
Of course a lot of people will not agree with me and that is fine. They have their views and I have mine.
Re:We should get rid of the AC -1 modifier (Score:5, Insightful)
If you get rid of AC you'll get rid of lots of noise, true.
you'll also get rid of people who post inside info...
-nB
Re: (Score:2)
Yea sure like it is hard to make an account to leak. Besides do you really listen to "Inside info from an AC on Slashdot?"
Talk about iffy at best.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You should check back once in a while, that 0 is now a 5.
Seems like it works to me. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Very simple, AC's start moderated at 0 instead of 1, which means even most moderators will not see them
Wrong solution for what has been a suggestion from the first day moderation was added - moderators should read at -1.
There are not too many posts from Anonymous Cowardons that I want to mod up when I have mod points, but sometimes I do.
Re: (Score:1)
Slashot is a moderated user site with an agenda of open source.
Slashdot doesn't have an agenda of open source. Maybe it used to, but not anymore. If it does seem like open source is posted a lot, it's because, well, open source is in the press a lot. Companies are cutting costs with the economy and one of the most popular methods employed is by rolling out new open source strategies.
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot has always had an agenda of open source.
(...we're for it.)
Re: (Score:1)
The more things change, the more they sta
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:4)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You must be new here... ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Having "journal pages" was bad enough.
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Journal pages, friends/foes + geeks =
OMG! Slashdot is the first antisocial networking site.
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Informative)
tacky photos, weird fonts and poor layouts
Don't worry, they're currently hard at work on it.
http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~jlg95/stuff/shittycode.png [drexel.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Something's only a social networking site if the poor layouts are the fault of the users, not the site administrators.
Re: (Score:2)
haha, I didn't even realize I still had that one open. It was the same bug but screenshotted by someone else.
Re: (Score:1)
Yep, that would be this bug [sourceforge.net], which, like pretty much all bugs in slashcode, will probably not get fixed.
And then there's this bug [sourceforge.net], which they don't seem to be in any hurry to deal with. If you read through the comments on the bug, they add up to complete info on how to reproduce and fix the bug. The bug only occurs for stories in certain slashdot sections, because only those sections' CSS is messed up. So all they had to do to fix it was to copy the correct CSS out of the not-broken files into the broken
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:4, Funny)
The new Slashdot. News for nerds with girlfriends.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
The day I see Comic Sans on Slashdot someone is gonna freakin' die.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Furthermore, I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode.
We lurk, we mod... We post the occasional idiotic comment just to see if anyone is paying attention.
Re: (Score:1)
I think that much of the original geek crowd is gone or mostly in lurk mode. So they are doing their best to attract a younger audience.
I suggest a sidebar/RSS that tracks the secret relationship of Cmdr Taco and Jeff to spice things up, and making the front page look like the Apple Store. And use some FLASH to shake the text around. And add lens flare.
Re: (Score:2)
weird fonts and poor layouts
I think it's kind of cool that I see a huge block of grey space beneath your title bar, and the text of your post waaaaaay off to the right conveniently split up into one and two word lines. Good going who ever coded that up!
I also love the Options button not working any more.
What will they think of next?
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
"Show us your Warcraft main".
Your case is proven.
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:4, Funny)
"Show us your Warcraft main".
Your case is proven.
Your point being?
- Nefarious Wheel, 40 years an IT geek, also PVP Geared 80 Mage, 80 Hunter
Re: (Score:1)
I hate this feature, it has nothing to do on /. /. is a site for nerds, and wow is way too mainstream to be define as a game for nerds. This kind of features can only attract pseudo-geeks who will whine about very non-game stories.
That, and my server is not in the list (Sinstralis - EU).
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.
Re: (Score:2)
Not a bad idea, in principle. Over the years, there have been several sites that slashdotters would talk about as good alternatives. I was active on the old kuro5hin.org [kuro5hin.org] site for a while, before they erased the whole database of stories and comments and started over again from scratch. A lot of those folks seemed to move over to hulver.com [hulver.com]. Bruce Perens tried to do it with technocrat.net [technocrat.net], which is now a redirect to his own blog b
Re: (Score:2)
Continuing to be OT, why did the scrolling through comments become so horribly slow?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The Internet Meme is you! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Star go boom! Big word scary! Chemicals are mean! Vroom vroom car!
Yes? Yes? Go on.
Re: (Score:2)
Well for one thing the star would actually go boom. Since a Supernova throws off a lot of it's mass it would no longer be in a vacuum and there would be shock wave and there would be a boom if you where close enough.
I have to admit that Slashdot does seem to be getting less geeky and political all the time. Pay to many stories that are clearly politics are being listed as News or other things. Helpful hint if the summary has the words Demarcate, Republican, Green Party, Congressman, or Congress woman in it
Re: (Score:2, Funny)