Slashdot Mirror
Winning Critical Acclaim
Alex Reynolds writes "'Are pop critics doing a good job? What does it mean to do a good job as a pop music critic? What is the difference between good and bad pop music criticism?' Loren Jan Wilson's innovative Pitchformula project takes the archives of music criticism and journalism from the popular Pitchfork web site and analyses them for commonalities in content, determining what attributes make for a 'good' or 'bad' evaluation. From this data, Wilson sculpted his compositional and performance technique to write rock music that should win critical acclaim."
she bangs, she bangs
Why Slashdot sucks. Posted in support of the Jihad - http://anti-slash.org/
1. Lack of articles
I'm sorry, but what are called articles on Slashdot are only summaries that contain links to articles. Articles are not one paragraph blurbs containing not much more than links to one or more documents. Why on earth would anyone read Slashdot for the articles when the articles (literally) are somewhere else? I don't know. At one time, Slashdot used to inteview people on a regular basis, thus actually producing articles available nowhere else. Heck, Slashdot used to have Katz, and although his articles were pretty bizarre to say the least, at least it was fun heckling him. However, the time between interviews keeps growing longer and longer, hence the length between articles grows longer and longer. The only content worth reading on the site are the trolls. At least the trolls come up with original content. Face it: Slashdot has about as much content as a "price comparison" site.
2. Lack of conflict-of-interest disclosures
The news items that appear on Slashdot are written by people who are more or less anonymous. While some authors are truly third parties without financial ties to Slashdot or the sites linked to a summary, it's obvious there are hidden agendas underneath practically all Slashdot submissions. For example, any submission naming some new product as the next revolution to shake the world is suspect, as nobody but a marketroid believes any of that crap. Extra points if the product has even a slim chance of ending up being sold on a certain store website owned by VA Software, owner of Slashdot. Also, any submission containing links to a certain rag that requires user registration are suspect, particularly when the user accounts posting these summaries have very suspicious user info pages and posting histories. TRUTH: SLASHDOT IS A SITE OF MARKETERS FOR MARKETERS RUN BY MARKETERS.
3. Harsh and unfair moderation
Posts are moderated down to -1 far too frequently. Unless posts contain links to obscene material, or are otherwise inflammatory, a score of zero is low enough. Posts critiquing products or manufacturer claims are frequently bitch slapped down to the depth of Hades.. particularly when companies of such products are likely to purchase advertising on Slashdot. Can't handle negative opinions of products, can you? That would just scare away ad money. There are some exceptions to the no criticism rule: criticising Microsoft is fine, because everybody has something to say about the company. Also, it's fine to hate the RIAA and MPAA as long as you support such fine, honest, upstanding companies as Kazaa. After all, judging from the content on Slashdot, the site has no hopes of ever having an RIAA or MPAA member company buying ads, so why not support the enemies of the content industry? The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
4. Long IP ban periods
IP bans have been around, but have been short until recently, when 30 day long bans have been implemented. Thirty days is more than long enough, which might be fine if you are trying to block crapflooders from filling up stories with thousands of comments, but that's not the case. Why are you blocking those who criticize you, Slashdot editors? You can't keep the truth in the bottle forever. Slashdot keeps getting worse. Let's face it: Slashdot sucks!
Ashcroft does.
This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.