Slashdot Mirror

Lots of the regulars are still active over at Hulver's site, although it's focussed more around the journals than articles.

There were several waves of mass exodus. It's been a long time, but maybe in '03 a bunch of regular users left to go hang out at Hulver's Site to avoid pervasive and cruel trolling.

http://www.hulver.com/scoop/

Rusty waved sayonara to some of his most active and committed community members then. Hulver put it up just for the old community to hang out and didn't pursue general readership or expansion. It's still around and arguably more active than K5 is now, though also pretty slow.

By '05-'06 K5 was nothing but a trollfest. At that point, I believe rusty was actively seeking large readership and advertising revenue by promoting troll content. For example, there was that "Fuck Natalee Holloway" article, which generated vast numbers of page views. From there the site continued its slide downhill, as rusty pursued more and more salacious material to drive traffic. It became a business model. Those who objected had their accounts summarily shitcanned one by one.

I think rusty was of the opinion that the general community couldn't write well, and he was interested in attracting professionally written material. But he didn't care about substantive content - per se - only prose style. Many of the site trolls were actually good prose writers, so he coddled them.

But a troll's interest was not in crafting useful content that would drive sustained readership. The interest is in shocking and offending the sensibilities of average readers. And so K5 transitioned from publishing useful - if marginally well written - articles about computing, technology, and social issues to the kind of thing that might drive short-term bursts of high traffic by an offended and angry anonymous readership.

rusty made the bet that if he sacrificed an active community producing marginal but useful content in order to coddle those who produce offensive but quality written offensive material, that his site could generate the pageviews necessary for a successful business model. He was wrong.

Now it looks as though they're engaged in a publicity effort to generate a burst of final advertising revenue. For example, we have this story. And at the same time on reddit over in /r/WTF we see this story hit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/15ye9g/girls_guide_towtf_really/

Which generated significant short burst traffic to the site. Timed within a day of each other. But it's a story about bestiality with dogs. Seriously.

And I suppose writing in character a bogus female first person account of having sex with her dog is probably more fun than detailing the latest OS tricks or talking industrial policy. But Slashdot is still around and kicking. It still provides at least a marginal service to its user community that has meaning beyond just pissing people off. K5? Not so. And that's why rusty's site is dead while Slashdot employes people and retains a large user base.

Because a to run a successful forum the community _does_ matter more than a few well written - if obscene - articles.

May rusty enjoy his well deserved obscurity.

I kludged up some code a while back to create a shim dll that can be used as the basis for selectively replacing functions in dlls...

A slightly more sophisticated solution would've been Detours.

Or, if you didn't feel like coding, WinAPIOverride32.

Funny you should mention DX3. Microsoft actually removed some surface caps flags in the transition from DX3 to DX5, and silently flipped the orientation that .BMP files were loaded (i.e. loaded them 'right way up' rather than 'upside down' as they're stored in the file). I know that was like three ice ages ago in Dev Years, but it still hurts when I think about it.

I realise that TheFineSummary talks about Windows 7, but there's still a fair number of XP boxen out there, for which Direct2D isn't an option. That said, I'd guess (as the article is down) that it's more of an ideological position, or - given that it's clearly a hobby project - just what the author is familiar with, or enjoys using. Given that we're talking about playing games here, I'd go with the latter explanation.

I do intend to RTFA when it recovers, since I find replacing/subverting dlls quite fun. I kludged up some code a while back to create a shim dll that can be used as the basis for selectively replacing functions in dlls, while calling through to the 'real' one for the other functions, so you can easily hack some functionality without having to re-implement the whole thing.

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 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. Bruce Perens tried to do it with 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 these.

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.

My Apple buying story.
   

Yes, that is me. On my board last summer.

I've quit smoking and put on weight since then.

pre is a magic newline and space deal, whereas ecode is a capricious beast that I do not understand. Apparently it depends on the site owner's implementation.

pre is a magic newline and space deal, whereas ecode is a capricious beast that I do not understand. Apparently it depends on the site owner's implementation.

One of the key changes is an article submission sandbox. Not as open as Digg but not as closed as /. Basically editors would still select stories but they would modded up or down prior to being posted, again by an editor, to the mainpage.

Or you could have users approve stories democratically. This is the approach of Scoop sites such as K5 and K6.

I'd be watching for Isiah. Then again I'm more into the Old Testament end times.

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  Husi is where's it at

No one forces you to buy Windows.
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  Husi is where's it at

And the GPS unit, don't forget that too.

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  Husi is where's it at
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  My new Home

I'd find a new job.

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Husi is where's it at

Coral Cache dudes! use the Greasemonkey scripts!

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Husi is where's it at

sid was teh kid who destroyed toys, in Toy Story.
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My last.fm page
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Husi is where's it at

See, war crimes trials are for the LOSERS.

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Husi is where's it at

Since no one runs as root, that would just delete the home directory. No real biggie, the robot has backups right?
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My last.fm page
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Husi is where's it at

Steve Irwin is yours???
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Husi is where's it at

Grandma Lockwood killed by semi truck: haw haw haw

ror

Annoyingly you might have to log in to see it, but what the hell. Fact is you picked just the wrong day to make that dig ;-)

mooo.

At last count, Kuro5hin was closed to new users. Therefore, K5 is not a general purpose discussion site. New users have mostly gone to K6 instead.

If this was Kuro5hin, I would have put "(n/t)" in the title, but this insn't, and I couldn't fit it in anyway. Humph.

I hung out on half-empty for a while, but eventually stopped going there, I guess partly because almost everybody there was a college student, and I didn't feel like I had much in common with them. (I'm 38, and have a family.) The new half-empty.org seems cool (just created an account today), but it seems to have a completely different focus (reviews).

Kuro5hin was cool, but now it's dead. I don't have any hard feelings against Rusty, but he clearly got frustrated and intentionally killed it off. (I did subsidize the site slightly by buying ads, but I hope nobody is under the impression that the money people gave Rusty even came close to paying for the time, money, and anguish he put into the site.)

Husi seems to be a nice Scoop site, but it's got extremely low traffic so far. It'd be nice to see it take off. Seems to have a UK focus, though.

Don't forget HuSi!

Their terms and conditions are straight forward, no hidden legalese.

It's a good service.

Plus, because I'm an open source developer, they give me a hefty discount! I'm very happy with them.

If you do have a problem, their support is all geeks who have no problem answering any question I've thrown at them.

moderate down parent! parent is cross posting to the site Kuroshin and is a liar! here is a cross post diary! read the REal Gary Whittles write about this impostor!

The Europeans have left for gayer pastures, so K5 is simply just waist-deep in trolls at this point.

You can at HuSi. [Scroll to bottom.]