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 tr
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 because he gave up on it. There was also half-empty (what was the url?), which was cool for a while.
The impression I got in the cases of technocrat and the original kuro5hin was that they failed because of issues with social dynamics. Kuro5hin somehow lent itself to a cliquish dynamic, where tribes got more and more hostile to one another, and it also seemed somehow very vulnerable to trolls and sock-puppets. At some point there was an infamous incident where someone got a hold of a picture of Rusty's (the owner's) wife and photoshopped it onto a porn picture. I believe Technocrat somehow attracted a nucleus of crazies (right-wing survivalists types, IIRC?), who dominated the site.
Although slashdot is having some serious technical problems with slashcode these days, the truth is that they've accomplished something very rare. They've managed to reach a stable equilibrium, where jerks, trolls, and crazies aren't able to make things miserable for everyone. They've also built up the membership of the site enough so that on a lot of issues, you'll get comments from individuals who are experts on the topic. (Of course you'll also get 10 times as many people who think they're experts.)
In the past when I've looked at Slash's perl code, I was always very impressed by how clean it was. However, they just seem to have taken a wrong turn with all the CSS and javascript features, and they seem to have zero interest in fixing bugs like [sourceforge.net] these [sourceforge.net].
What they really need is an option 3 to add to your list: admit they have a problem with maintaining slashcode, and open up the development process in the same way that X11 had to fork and evolve into x.org to keep from dying.
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: (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 tr
Re: (Score:4, Interesting)
1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.
Re:Wow, Great Summary (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 because he gave up on it. There was also half-empty (what was the url?), which was cool for a while.
The impression I got in the cases of technocrat and the original kuro5hin was that they failed because of issues with social dynamics. Kuro5hin somehow lent itself to a cliquish dynamic, where tribes got more and more hostile to one another, and it also seemed somehow very vulnerable to trolls and sock-puppets. At some point there was an infamous incident where someone got a hold of a picture of Rusty's (the owner's) wife and photoshopped it onto a porn picture. I believe Technocrat somehow attracted a nucleus of crazies (right-wing survivalists types, IIRC?), who dominated the site.
Although slashdot is having some serious technical problems with slashcode these days, the truth is that they've accomplished something very rare. They've managed to reach a stable equilibrium, where jerks, trolls, and crazies aren't able to make things miserable for everyone. They've also built up the membership of the site enough so that on a lot of issues, you'll get comments from individuals who are experts on the topic. (Of course you'll also get 10 times as many people who think they're experts.)
In the past when I've looked at Slash's perl code, I was always very impressed by how clean it was. However, they just seem to have taken a wrong turn with all the CSS and javascript features, and they seem to have zero interest in fixing bugs like [sourceforge.net] these [sourceforge.net].
What they really need is an option 3 to add to your list: admit they have a problem with maintaining slashcode, and open up the development process in the same way that X11 had to fork and evolve into x.org to keep from dying.