Slashdot Mirror
KaZaa Suspends Downloads
chill writes: "'Download Temporarily Suspended -- Download of the KaZaA Media Desktop software is temporarily and voluntarily suspended pending Dutch court decision on January 31. We apologise for the inconvenience. Please check back at www.kazaa.com for more information.'
--- Both the Linux and Windows client downloads are offline. I wonder what the judge thinks this will do to the tens, if not hundreds of thousands who already have the software?"
Here is an idea. I am not sure if you have a valid point or not but you are definetly off topic. If you have something that is important, go create a discussion topic so you have a place to talk about it?
That way you won't have to worry about the offtopic moderations to your post.
You can't grep a dead tree.
Welcome to /.'s vision of "Freedom of Speach". The freedom is controlled by the elite few that have the only *real* power. Now doesn't that sound familier?
Well, I mostly don't get involved in these debates. But this is just FUCKED UP. You will never make me believe that all those -1 Off-topic mods where done by earnest moderators.
0 660
Prove: normally there would be more variety (off-topic, troll, redundant, what not).
I'm convinced that someone did abuse their power to mod this entire thread down. And I don't like it. See, I think the moderating system works pretty well as it is (it's not perfect, but what is). HOWEVER, if someone that has the power to do so silences an entire thread, that's just pathetic.
In fact, I would ask anyone that does not agree with this behaviour to report this as abuse to Rob Malda (aka CmdrTaco). In other words: email the guy. Don't forget to add a link to the original thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=285
I can't find where now, but somewhere he asks us to report abuse.
I complained about the very same thing to CmdrTaco in an email a while ago. He responded on 8/30/01. Below is the text of my email as well as his reply.
;)
My email:
I
> enjoy the site because of the moderation system, where users can post
> comments and only the most informative or best comments can get read.
> In other words, I don't have to waste my time sorting through 75-100
> awful comments to find the few true gems.
>
> I've noticed recently (in fact, since the upgrade) that the moderation
> system seems to have gone downhill. First, a lot of good insightful
> comments don't get moderated, and the few comments that do get
> moderated seem to have been modded down as "offtopic" or something
> similar. I know you say in your moderation guidelines to try to mod up
> instead of down, so I don't think the moderation system itself is at
> fault. Rather, it seems that there are very few moderators actually
> perusing the stories!
>
> For instance, there was an article today about AMD. With 150 comments
> posted, there were NONE moderated above 2. With 175 posted, there was
> ONE moderated to a 3. Something is seriously wrong here. If the
> comments aren't being moderated, this is no better than the imbecile
> flamewars on fc or ZDNet.
CmdrTaco's reply:
I think part of it is that I'm out of town and not moderating much
-----
My comments:
I only find something wrong with this if the editors of Slashdot aren't doing their job. I believe that part of the job of owning a community site is listening to that community. It's very similar to running a company -- if you don't listen to your target market, they will leave for a company that does.
However, this thread, and moreover the fact that this entire thread has been moderated to -1, says that someone at Slashdot is not listening. That endangers the very idea of being the self-appointed king of a community -- that you listen to your constituents. At this point, Slashdot has become ridiculed for everything from its UI to CmdrTaco's grammar to Jon Katz to the asinine comments posted without moderation possibilities to submitted articles. (Witness the war today about CmdrTaco's comment regarding the cheating system used at a university.)
The fact is that Slashdot needs to change. Personally, I have several ideas about how it can change for the better, ranging from more moderation points in the system to the abolishment of the "Offtopic" moderation. (Can you imagine if you were at a dinner party and the conversation drifted to something besides the "assigned" topic and you complained about it? This is the same type of thing.)
On a slightly unrelated note, I believe the 50-karma point cap should be abolished because it doesn't encourage people to post good comments after hitting 50 karma. Furthermore, I believe karma should be milked for all it is worth, and that people should be praised for high karma -- even to the point of putting a "Top Karma Whores" box on the front page listing the 5-10 people in the system with the biggest karma (ala FuckedCompany's scoring system.) Why not? Positive karma means you have posted what is viewed as a good comment. Why not make it a contest? People love competition.
The way to solve all of this, of course, is to simply make a Slashdot discussion forum, and have user input not only discussed but actively implemented. The whole point of open source is that anyone can contribute. It's sad to see that one of the biggest open-source-proponent websites can't encourage the same level of participation.
Count me in.
/. is an open, free and user-moderated forum out of one side of your mouth, while instantly nuking entire threads to get rid of discussions that you (apparently) don't like. The parent post may be off-topic, but the last time I checked, user moderators have an "Offtopic" option and could have marked it as such if they desired. (Many, in fact, did so; many did not.)
/. editor. This is beginning to happen with some regularity; your credibility would be helped if you would at least come clean. None of this namby-pampy fiddly-fuck "um, we don't do that sort of thing."
/. for a long time; I liked it, and in general I still do like it. But IMHO the editors would do well to let the moderators do their jobs. Moderating and meta-moderating is not exactly the easiest or most enjoyable task in the world, you know. It takes time and effort to find insightful comments to moderate up. It takes time and effort to pour through people's moderations and judge them on their merits. And frankly, it does piss me off a little that these efforts are being overshadowed by skriptz that will handily dispose of all "subversive" comments in a manner that is not subject to metamoderation.
I find this clandestine mass-robomoderation to be thoroughly distasteful. I'm not going to yell "censorship", as so many others have; after all, it is your site and you are free to do what you like. However, it is entirely hypocritical to claim that
If you're going to be doing this type of thing, the least you could do is have the cajones to come clean about it. Explain that editors may, on occasion, wipe out threads that they find undesirable; explain that this nullifies the expressed wishes of the existing moderators, and explain that people should attempt to preserve their karma by avoiding discussions that could potentially invoke the ire of a
I've been reading
There's my $0.02. I could check the "No Score +1 Bonus", but I won't. I think three karma points is worth it, when there is a point to be made. I hope I've made one.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Oh, that, and the parent thread. Reading it may illimunate what may possibly happen if government can track all your actions and act without any wisdom and respect for different ideas.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
I've been reading /. for well over a year now and have never seen such a petty, small-minded display of chicanery on the part of the editors like this. This thread is a disgrace to a site that claims to be an open and user moderated forum. I know I'm burning a karma point by posting here but, like others here, I don't care since I feel the need to express my (logged in) opinion.
/. editors for their juvenille behavior.
Shame on the
---
I didn't want to leave this space blank.
I always found the Linux client, which uses the FastTrack proprietary-but-cross-platform (http://www.fasttrack.nu/) P2P stack, to be buggy to the extent of being unusable. Could've been a libc mismatch with my Debian-unstable system, but it wouldn't accept user input after starting up and logging in.
We should do this more often, and call it the "International Internet Is Fast Again Day".
Affectionatly known as IIIFAD.
Murphy(c)
Why would you want it to? Linux has shown itself time and time again to be sub-par for a wide variety of reasons.
Is Linux for you and your business? Probably not.
Isn't the real reason for the war the fact that they didn't turn over the terrorists?
IE, we're not invading them because they have terrorists inside their borders (in which case, we'd have to invade half of the world), but because they didn't turn over *the* group of terrorists that killed 3000 of our people.
Underrated moderations give a +1 bonus but don't show the reason.
My name says it all.
I have a real problem with the offtopic mods. Often when discussing an article, discussion will drift away from the original article. I think this is to be encouraged or at least looked upon neutrally. Not everyone is so anal retentive that they need every post to be under its "proper" article. Sometimes there isn't a proper place for it, like the comment that spurred this extended conversation.
Cat
How can you tell which posts are 'mod points' and which are 'scripted editor mods'?
./ . There *is* no place on ./ to discuss ./ itself, or the inner workings, or the moderation system.
This is something that has always bugged me about
Karma to burn. Let's see how long it takes for this +2 post to become -1, offtopic.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."