Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Subscribers Now See The Future
So while subscribers won't see news posted at the last minute before everyone else, most of our stories will be available to them 10-20 minutes before everyone else. This means they can click through and beat the Slashdot Effect.
Another possible feature addition that we're discussing is to allow subscribers to post during this window. We haven't decided if that's a good idea or not. Since subscribers are still subject to all the same restrictions as anyone else in the forums, they could still be moderated into oblivion if they were jerks about it so it's probably not subject to all that much abuse, but this is still something we're only considering. Feel free to discuss it in this forum, or to contact me with opinions.
A couple of notes here:
- Subscribers have a variable on their subscriptions preference page that tells us how many banner ads they wish to "Spend" per day. This number must be at least 10 for you to be eligible to see the Mysterious Future plum. This means that your $5 subscription will last 100 days- or, $15-20 a year.
- You also need to hit the checkbox to disable ads on the Index. Once you hit your Max Pages for the day, you will see ads again, but you will also be eligible for the plum.
- These notes will be clarified on both the subscriptions page and in the FAQ very soon. Your feedback will help us decide how best to explain this since it's not exactly black & white here. Give us a couple weeks and it should all be blazingly obvious from the documentation how everything works.
In closing, this is a new feature and we appreciate all your feedback, both good and bad. We decided to implement this after tons of feedback from you, and we're really excited about it. This is a really great incentive for users to subscribe, but it also can give subscribers a chance to alert us in advance if stories have mistakes in them. We'll likely be expanding this sort of functionality in the future.
Now please go subscribe and help support Slashdot!
Update To clarify the timing. Right now the mysterious future is set to 20 minutes. That number is not a promise tho, since a story posted 11 minutes before "Air time" would be seen slighter later. A story posted 30 minutes in advance will be visible 20 minutes early.
Is that a Subscriber Benefit too?
sulli
RTFJ.
doesnt /. want to be free??
;)
What, me Tweet?
Will this now result in a pre-/. effect? Maybe the subscribers will be nice enough to mirror /.-ed sites on their own sites before the rush, but I'm not holding my breath.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
No only do you stop getting ads that even the most brain dead ad-blocker could have gotten rid of for free, you also get to be Taco's personal dupe checker! I can't wait to send my money in!
So, since I'm a subscriber, am I actually typing this in the future as well since the title bar is green? It's really red, but I am seeing it green, thus I must be operating in the future! Jeez, and I though Babylon 5 was confusing!
I knew about this yesterday.
This space intentionally left blank.
If you see the article hours before most of slashdot readers, I think that yes, this will be a subscriber benefit. For the others a lot of discussions will start half full just when the article is widely available.
Didn't TotalFark already go this route? What's next, Slashdot Photoshop contests? *grin*
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
But..
Another possible feature addition that we're discussing is to allow subscribers to post during this window. We haven't decided if that's a good idea or not. Since subscribers are still subject to all the same restrictions as anyone else in the forums, they could still be moderated into oblivion if they were jerks about it so it's probably not subject to all that much abuse, but this is still something we're only considering. Feel free to discuss it in this forum, or to contact me with opinions.
I don't think that is a good idea. I think the fact that users can read ahead of time and then they can prepare their posts. This might make better prepared comments.
Thats a pretty good idea. I would still think the /. effect would be better suppressed if slashdot would mirror stories, especially if its running off of somebody's mother's DSL connection.
Still, this offering may finally make me a subscriber. And I do like the idea of a subscriber getting to post first. The types of people that would subscribe are probably not the same ones that post the goatse.cx links and such. I'd even go so far as to maybe allow a subscriber another +1 bonus to karma, or maybe allow a subscriber a higher karma cap, or even let a subscribers post get modded to +6... but what do I know...
ergo: they pay you to help you doing your job ?
(just a question : not a flamebait)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I already see all of Slashdots news in the future!
...Wait...never mind. My system clock is running slow.
OSDN outsources slashdot editing to its subscribers base. These happy few will have the privilege of beta testing dupes, broken links and poor spelling and grammar. They will also be the sole beneficiaries of the prestigious first post award as well as the (somewhat less prestigious) AYBABTU, ISR and Beowulf Cluster awards.
Must find my credit card, quick!
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
After reading the article, I was prepared to just close the link since I have no interest in paying to visit ANY site. Hell, at least I registered with /., I still won't do that for the NYTimes articles that keep getting posted -- I just ignore every single one.
And pay to PARTIALLY disable banners? Very lame. I never see them anyways, since I have gotten so accustomed to ignoring them... It's amazing at how trained you can get at ignoring pretty much all graphics on all sites.
But, to top it off, I read ALL of the comments to this article so far. Not a single good one -- doesn't that hint at something?
Malachi
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Actually, it would be, and AC's (unless they're logged in, posting anonymously) would be 30 minutes and 100 comments behind.....
I could start reading at zero again.
FWIW, I did subscribe. It wasn't much. I just wanted to get the ads out of the story pages. Banner ads don't bother me. I went back and checked before I posted, and I've still got like 400 out of the 1000 pages left. It's been worth it, I think, and this will just convince me to renew when the time comes.
I've noticed that the shere volume of stories in the past few months has increased, yet the quality of them is kinda variable. ask slashdot hovers around unbearable, but is sometimes good.
Why can't subscribers get a chance to mod stories during this "preview" time, and possibly even keep silly stories and dups from getting posted to the "real" slashdot.
(1) If a story gets pulled, lots of comments could already be posted. This would be pretty annoying if you had spent some time posting.
(2) Moderation is biased torwards early posters, and as such it would provide a disincentive for non-subscribers to post, thereby reducing the amount of discussion. This could be a good thing, since subscribers (hopefully!) provide more worthwhile reading.
There's only like 10 subscribers abd they are all CmdrTaco's family.
Isn't red/green the most common form of color blindness?
- Tal Cohen
I'm a bit ambivilent about the early posting idea, since having an early post is directly related to the number of people likely to see your post, that "privilege" suddenly becomes a paid one. So people who might actually have something worthwhile to contribute suddenly have to become paying members.
But anyway, that is not the point of this post. I just wanted to say that if they do allow early posters, that they should NOT allow these early posts to be anonymous. This should help keep the quality of the early posts up. Maybe even have another modifier that increases any negative moderation by 1, again to try make the privilage of early posting a true privilage and keep abuse down.
In a round-about way this is a bit like selling karma (something I think you've avoided).
Good show! Could I purchase 1.25 kg of enlightment please?
There'd just be 2 varieties of first posts...
FPP: First Paid Post!
and
FUP: First Unpaid Post!
All it takes is a few trolls with some available cash...
Perhaps now there will be a little bit of warning. When you start seeing the first referrals from slashdot on your web server, those are the subscribers -- the advance guard before the real assault.
if you pay more, you get more
unfortunate, but true
for healthcare, for the legal system, for media/ information
equality is an illusion
true in life, true in not-real-life internet communities
sad but true
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Here's a great marketing opportunity for someone entrepeneurially-minded:
./ ... Profit!
1. Subscribe to the Mysterious Future via
2. Contact Web site owners and warn them politely of impending future slashdotting
3. Offer to sell them (short-term?) service on a Content Delivery Network
4.
Commercial sites would love this. Academic/government ones probably wouldn't care as much. You could sell them a contract with an existing CDN (Akamai, Mirror-Image, etc.) or build out your own special purpose service, just to handle slashdot-like effects.
-Mark, founder of Clearway Technologies (now owned by Mirror-Image Internet)
This means they can click through and beat the Slashdot Effect.
Something is wrong when a subscription incentive is to see a site before Slashdot launches a distributed denial of service attack against it: That's right, subscribers, click on the link now because we are about to DDoS the site!
"Another possible feature addition that we're discussing is to allow subscribers to post during this window."
This is a bad idea, because earlier posts tend to be moderated higher than later posts, simply because more people see earlier posts. This will give subscribers a much louder voice in the forums, while potentially degrading the quality of the discussion.
Having said that, my lack of subscription is for a very simple reason: it's not professional.
I won't subscribe until I never see a dupe or typo. Really, for all of our vaunted technology, if Slashdot cannot surmount these two very simple obstacles, it doesn't deserve any real monetary support. It just doesn't. And again, I say this as a real fan.
Fix that, Taco, and you've got my money. And maybe even a little more credibility.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
If people can read articles from the future it will inevitably corrupt the time line and will spell certain doom for everyone. Resist the urge. Don't do it.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
The BSD section is already red. How would stories from the future be posted to the BSD section?
I can see the replies already to this post: "*BSD is dying; it has no future!"
Users can always make suggestions to stories by emailing the author. We do hope that subscribers will be likely to alert us to typos and stuff. No story on Slashdot is really ever set in stone. But I would consider a story from the mysterious future to be totally plastic- I will be editing and updating stories during that window without spelling out changes or putting in little "Update" comments. We've always used the last few minutes before a story goes live to make updates and corrections. This won't change, but users will be able to alert us to issues before it goes public.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I wonder if slashdot themselves offered this service, wouldn't it be coercion? As in "you will be slashdotted if we post our story - which we are going to post - so either pay up or adios!" ... hehe
Good marketing, Slashdot! It reminds me of the Coke machine fiasco a few years ago. They tested machines that had temperature controls -- when the temperature got hot, it would automatically raise the price of the bottles. The media caught wind of this and had a field day. If Coca Cola had only beaten them to the punch and billed it as a "machine that discounts soda in cold weather", they'd have been heros.
"Slashdot subscribers - you get news quicker!" Sounds a lot better than "Cheapskates: you get delayed news!", doesn't it?
Josh Woodward
However we hope that enough of our users will think beyond that and try to support us. Programmers, Editors, OC3s and Racks of web servers cost money.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
ISP's figured out a long time ago that people would rather pay for one month of unlimited access than a bucket load of hours that would probably take them over a month to use. People, like information want to be (feel) free.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Web site operators worldwide are encouraged to sign up for advance notice of port-80 DDoS attacks. "If you see it coming," said co-founder Hemos, "at least you have a chance to take down your web site before your ISP prepares a gigantic bill for that web site you put up to show your friends what you've been doing with your Lego kits."
Slashdot is a subsidiary of OSDN is a subsidiary of VA Software Corporation.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
...to fix spelling, to check for dupes (HAH!) or even to reject the story outright!
How about putting a simple little form underneath the stories for these previews? Something like:
Story is:
[] dupe (enter orig. url: ______)
[] fake (rebuttal url: ______)
[] mis-filed (better section: {popup})
[] mirrored (enter mirror url: _____)
Misc. Comments: [__________________]
[submit comment to editor / author]
Something like this would make it trivial for people to immediately help with the editorial process -- as opposed to having to write up a full email, etc. Plus, by allowing previewers to voluntarily announce a mirror this way, a list of mirrors could be presented once the mirror goes live, right at the top of the article. (come to think of it, it might be good to keep a mirror link list / submission form for all users, even once it's posted...)
I'll be more likely to subscribe when I see:
Being able to see articles "early" just doesn't motivate me to send money.
All about me
I am a Total Fark susbcriber and the only reason I did it was to get access to EVERYTHING that was submitted.
... why not open up the whole queue for people to read? No comments, but at least let us check out what other people think is important and relevent.
The enjoyment in using Fark comes from the ability to see what other people think is unique and newsworthy.
Slashdot is a great clearinghouse not only for technical news, but of technical thought as well. How many times have articles been submitted that the editors don't think are relevent to their vision, but that I'll get value from?
Isn't that what Slashdot should be selling? Access to the stuff other people consider important?
When I read Taco's explanation about the early preview the only thing it does is:
1) Offer the community the ability to check dupes.
2) Offer a headstart on crushing a site.
If a site is going to get slashdotted what is the big deal if it's slashdotted by the first 100 or the last 100? It's still going to be slashdotted.
If anyone from the Slashdot editor team is listening
Right now your model is focused on avoiding ads. Why? Focus on the CONTENT and you'll do much much better.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I'd rather see all the ads, and just pay $20 a year. Perhaps you could offer 2 subscription methods. I just feel that if I turn of ads, I'll miss something someone wants to sell me that I like.
-BrentNope. You can't post a comment until the story goes "live." I checked.
So, can subscribers grab the story URL, hop into the latest public thread, and anonymously post the URL for everyone's viewing?
...
"Hey, I'm calling about your impending doom... I have a way out. Deny my offer, and suffer..."
Oh wait... You're talking about a slashdotting... At first you sounded like a Microsoft rep warning me that Win2K won't be officially supported anymore and I'll have to migrate the entire IT department to XP.
Whew. (for now)
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
It might be nice if moderators also got the advance reading. That might increase the chances that the moderators have had a chance to read the topic before they moderate. Plus, moderators would get a peek at what the advance viewing system would be like, and it might encourage them to subscribe.
Nearly every change made to Slashdot over the last several years has made it harder to offer any real diferentiation in a premium service. People buy totalfark subscriptions to get more time to "win photoshop contests" - while slashdot has hidden it's equivalent karma system (and most regulars have topped out anyway). The delay from story acceptance to publication isn't all that long - it can't be: Slashdot is primarily a news site. The sophisticated readership could avoid ads if they really wanted to (I suspect most don't because it's part of the social contract). Finally, there are too many people who have run afoul of Malda's notoriously thin skin to have built up a "save salon" type of outpouring. (Setting special flags on people's accounts just because they dared mod up a critique? How juvenile -- but I digress).
Still, there are a number of ideas that haven't been tried that might be of interest, if done right:
Have a special premium queue for stories, plus the promise that one story will be picked a day. Suitable markings to differentiate stories drawn
from "preferred" queues ala google.
Allow premium users additional access to html. IMG tags anyone? Maybe combine this with small level of image storage.
The ability to "challenge" a mod down. Automatic if the mod is "overrated" which doesn't get metamodded; better yet, get rid of "overrated" it's an invitation to abuse.
The option of mirroring any content mentioned in slashdot (except ads) for any site owner who is a premium member. Most site owners love the attention slashdot brings them, it's just the slashdot effect that's so hard to deal with.
The ability to be modded to a value of "6". (The post still has to earn that value from the mods on it's own merits though.)
The ability to read from low karma to high. For fans of "alternative humor".
The ability to start at a +1 karma level (editable, of course, for those so unamerican as to believe money != speech). This would be especially attractive to people with "high uid" accounts.
A higher bandwidth channel to premium customers.
A java plug-in that downloads slashdot incrementally in the background, making those annoying page-load/drill-down delays go away.
Allowing edits of your own posted comment, so long as it hasn't been modded or responded to. If it has, you can still edit it, but a link is added to the original version.
I think this is a good start on you offering enough differentiation to make a "premium" view worth money without cutting into your site's popularity.
The bill for my business advice will arrive in the morning.
So, you're cool if you set it to 0. And thanks! :)
Look, it's the spirit of the thing, y'know?
Go ahead and block slashdot ads if you want. I'd like to think slashdot isn't evil, like x10.com.
If you don't want to subscribe, don't. But I don't think it's virtuous to not subscribe, to kill ads, *and* to post saying "I'm bright - and you can be, too!".
Do the first two, and you're fine. The last makes you an anti-slashdot fanatic and you'll no doubt be visited by the proper authorities any time now (knock, knock...).
Just my $0.02. Very much tongue-in-cheek. CmdrTaco will be sending me the usual check for $0.02 at the end of this month...
Redundancy is good; triple redundancy is twice as good! - Me.
I see. So if the subscribers were allowed to post early then we'd start off with a higher quality of posts, instead of those from people who don't read the article. Except for you, of course.
if you allow paid subscribers to post comments in stories early you are asking for trouble. your moderation system does not work. whoever posts first always has the best chance of getting rated up no matter how stupid they are.
don't allow people to pay to sway the masses.
take a hint from kuro5hin, early posts into stories should only be -editorial- comments meant to make suggestions to the editors. they should disappear when the story goes live.
I agree with most of what you said, except this:
"Lose the moderation system. It doesn't work, and never has."
If you don't like it, ignore the mod scores. You can just read at -1 unsorted if you want.
And IMHO, if you think reading at -1 unsorted is the same as reading at +2, highest first (which is exactly what you're saying by stating "It doesn't work"), you're on glue.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson