Slashdot Mirror
The 10 Tech People Who Don't Matter
TopShelf writes "Business 2.0 recently ran a feature on the Top 50 People Who Matter in the business world, but perhaps more interesting is their list of the 10 People Who Don't Matter. Leading off the list is a Slashdot favorite, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer..." Given, Rob's in there as well, but I'd say his company in the list is pretty decent.
Yeah, sadly slashdot is becoming less and less a part of my daily habit. I use to be sure to meta moderate and try to give meaningful contributions to the site but seeings as where the development end of things have been in a nose dive around here and the site has become more a Bush bashfest than a technical news source... eh... I just don't feel bad not being as much a member of the community anymore.
On another note about the top ten: I have to completely disagree with the "DVD is an endangered species" noise mentioned for NetFlix. While I'm not a NetFlix subscriber physical media like DVD is certainly nowhere near its endlife. I just don't know what people think is going to replace the physical aspect of DVD media in the near future. I've heard this boy cry wolf before and frankly it's gotten old.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
In the thirty years I've been involved in IT I have to guess that we're approaching the point where hero-god-gurus don't matter much at all. Hasn't the industry matured to the point of being boring yet? When are we going to get past eccentric non repeatable brilliance and to the point of dull efficient execution?
Linus has the one entry that is really a compliment.
Dennis Ritchie gave a nice talk on the 21st(??) birthday of Unix about how it is like a child growing up, leaving home, being all grown up and an adult... He felt a little like a proud parent.
What better compliment for Linus than to have created something that has grown and matured to the point that it is beyond the creator? I can imagine few more satisfying accomplishments in life.
Digg is a pile of shit
/. is more a "middle of the road" type of news source. It's the equivalent of reading MSNBC for business news. While I (obviously) still come to the site I find that more and more I'm spending some old slashdot time down the corner at sites like devx.com. While DevX themselves is a much less active site (an understatement) than /. I find the reading more meaningful than the endless posts by armchair engineers, pizza delivery kids who couldn't really make the geek squad and the GNAA.
While this is true I think the article missed the idea that
And older articles on other more specialized technical sites have more impact and more value. I'm wondering if more people are like me and are looking for more technical meat over flamewars and bad noise.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Alexa is spyware, is it not? If Digg is getting more visited by Alexa users than Slashdot, to me that signifies that more people that read Digg are unsavy enough to have spyware installed on their machine. To me, having a lower rank in the Alexa ranking system when you are talking about a tech news site means that the readers of the lower scoring sites have better spyware protection and are more tech savy. This lends MORE credence to slashdot than Digg, IMHO.
I think you've got it backwards. I feel that people got tired of waiting, sometimes hours, for a new story to be posted. At digg you can go to the site and skip the articles you dislike and savor the articles you like at any pace that you like. If you are bored at on the web or something, there's almost a guarantee that every 15 minutes there will be a new article up on the main page. Or you can look at the listing of recent articles posted that have no made it there yet.
/. method, any one editor can veto the posting of an article simply if he's the one that reviews it. I know plenty of stories that have been submitted to /. that were LOVED on digg...yet were rejected by a /. admin.
/. here. /. DID pioneer the tech news industry that exists today, but it is possible that it's time for something new to be tried. Just try to "keep an open mind" about things like digg. Just because it's competition to /. doesn't mean it's evil.
An added benefit of digg is that just because an editor doesnt like an article, doesnt mean it won't be shown. If the people like the article, tons more people will see it. If they don't, it will be lost. With the current
People go to digg BECAUSE of the fast pace at which is flows...not in spite of it. That's what people want. I'm not dogging on
I remember something different about the pre-2001 Slashdot, obviously.
OMG look at this case mod1!!!
Here's yet another link to Tom's Hardware! Look at how bad the Intel chip is!
Study shows Windows is totally better than Linux. Gee, but are the considering all the advantages of Open Source?
etc. In other words, it's my opinion that Slashdot content has matured over the years. In a sense it is no longer as exciting; back in the day it felt like we were all fighting an urgent war against the DMCA and Microsoft and Intel and even SCO (and the trolls were way way better).
These days it feels more like a news and discussion outlet. I don't think that's bad, but it just indicates the ongoing aging of the editors and readership. I feel that this makes the comments more interesting because you are more likely to see a serious debate between intelligent people with good ideas. Back in the day it was more "party line" unless a troll came in to stir things up.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Not only that, the "democracy" way of moderation in digg is vulnerable to astroturfing. I posted it on my journal.
/. . It's not unusual for slashdot to publish stories that were posted on digg 2 days earlier. Perhaps there could be a way to make high karma users to accept or reject (or even vote on) pending stories?
HOWEVER, I agree that the story submission system on digg is nice - it avoids much bureaucracy that currently exists on
Regarding scientology, what we're seeing on digg is some kind of "gossip" phenomenon - with echoes. Digg could be used as a measure of what the geeks are thinking about today. It's like some kind of social laboratory with nerds as rats and stories as the maze.
I wouldn't say digg is going to replace slashdot. But it's a very nice complement. As someone said in digg, "I read digg for the stories, and slashdot for the comments". This could be an indicator of what is good on slashdot and what needs to be improved.
Apart from that, digg is becoming not exactly a technology website but a nerd website. The stories on scientology and global warming are representative of it.
The real problem with digg competing vs. slashdot is that, as i said before, real technology stories typically posted on slashdot are posted much faster on digg. I used to read slashdot on a daily basis to find out "what's new" on the tech world. Today i read digg for that (and not the published, but the pending stories).
In conclusion, I'd say digg is much broader than slashdot, and appeals to a less specialized public. Perhaps changing the submission method for slashdot would help us regain some popularity.
For me, I use a combination of RSS feeds that pull from news.google.com and blogsearch.google.com. I guess I've become a google fanboy but only because they offer such great tools (and APIs) for me to feed my need for information, opinions and conflict. Now that I basically have my own "wire" to all sorts of news on all my favorite topics, as well as OpEd ("blogs"), I can get what I want when I want rather than using a site like slashdot or digg.
The great thing about this is that I tend to filter out sites that DON'T have an open comment forum at the end of the article. I still come to slashdot daily (RSS!) for the comments, but I also pay more attention to the everyman comments at other sites. I'm in it for the response of the readers, not necessarily for the "facts" in the article.
any idiot with an agenda moderates
I'm posting at -1 specifically because of idiots with an agenda. Someone set up a script to watch my user page and check for new comments, then load an account with mod points and mod me down. +5 posts weeks old would still be getting marked down until they were -1. I went from +2 karma to -1 in four days. Emails to the editors did nothing.
At Digg, everyone has a voice, so if one person doesn't like me, so what? I might convince other people who will balance out the rating. Here at Slashdot, you can ruin someone's account just for fun.
me2
/. is read the replies to my messages. It is cool to see how and why various people disagree or, occasionally, agree with me. I noticed you got a lot of replies to your Stallman messages, so I will have to go there next.
/. has more threads that are interesting including quite a few that are both stupid and interesting. Heiarchial threading (sp?) does a better job of displaying the conversation structure. Why don't more websites use it? It's not a new idea, it's also one of the things I like about usenet.
/. design: I have a harder time following the structure, children seem to be nowhere near their parent.
The first thing I do when I come to
I just went to Digg and checked a few threads, the Apple sweatshop thing and another which I forgot. The comments were stupid and uninteresting.
Minor complaint about new
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
That's an interesting feature - I hadn't seen that before. Browsing back to 20010911 brought back some terrible memories.
It's interesting to browse through those stories, and see how many posts there were, within an hour or two of the attacks, saying "now this will result in a war on terror, watch our rights get trimmed, etc." Impressively prescient.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I've been reading it faithfully since (circa) 1998, but it's not as hardcore as it used to be. It might be I'm getting older and wiser or that I'm not as militant about Linux as I used to be, or it might be a dilution of the nerd population to other discussion forums - I dunno. But the fact is I've seen contenders vie for /.'s crown before (Kuro5hin immediately comes to mind, maybe Plastic) and they've been trounced. Slashdot feels like home. It's a part of my life. I enjoy the readership and have made lots of friends and enemies here. And best of all, I've learned alot.
Malda may be irrelevant to the biz/tech world, but not to me and many other readers. I guess what I'm trying to say is "thanks Slashdot, for being a part of my life!"
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- Get rid of "Troll". There are relatively few genuine trolls compared to the number of people of simply express unfounded opinions. Not that we want to reward that habit either, but calling them "trolls" is rude.
- Get rid of Underrated/Overrated, or make it subject to metamodding. There is a very good reason to allow people to post Anonymously. By contrast, there is no good reason to allow people to moderate without being subject to metamods. Underrated and Overrated both allow that. As a result, Overrated becomes the scoundrel's refuge: "I don't like [Republicans|Democrats|atheists|Christians|your sig], so I'll ding you a spite point and hide behind the Overrated rule." And anyway, what could "overrated" possibly mean? Rated over what level? Well, obviously, my subjective assessment of the comment's ideal score. That's nonsense. Every mod point assigned should have some objective component to it, else it is meaningless as feedback for readers and posters. "Overrated" and "Underrated" encourage pure subjectivity.
- Allow for a "Useful Sources Cited" mod, which would reward those who take the time to provide useful references for the rest of us. Yes, Google can and should be used by all
... but effective Googling should be rewarded. This is different from Informative in that it rewards process rather than content. - Provide options to mark something as "Counterfactual" or something like that. Suppose Alice posts something that gets modded as +5 informative, but which Bob challenges. The moderator sees the challenge, checks the info, finds out that Bob is right, and wants to bump Alice down a bit. What are the choices? Troll, Flamebait, or Overrated. Troll and Flamebait do not fit the situation. Overrated is overly broad (leaving aside the issues mentioned above). A "Counterfactual" option could be very useful here to give specific content to the negative moderation. Also, a Counterfactual mod could be easily scored by a metamod.
- Ditto for a "Sound Argument" mod.
In general, the current mod system tends to reward those who think thoughts agreeable to the majority of moderators; that is, it rewards content instead of process. As a result, comments often become cheerleading for one side or another. A good moderation system would reward those whose thought process furthers the conversation at hand, not those who spout party line.Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
I think one of the problems is that the mods system tries to do in one dimention categorization that is in multiple dimentions - Topicality, abusiveness, quality, humor. A post can easily be funny and flamebait, or insightful flamebait, or interesting and offtopic.
I would like to see the mod system as a series or radio buttons that go like
[Funny | unfunny], [on | offtopic], [redundant | overrated | underrated], [flame | tame], [insightful | interesting | informative | incorrect]
with the ability to customize your view to rank comments based on humor, topicality, etc. instead of just the numerical ranking.