Slashdot Mirror
Bloggers Propose Code of Conduct
akintayo writes "The New York Times reports that in response to the recent brouhaha, some technology bloggers have suggested raising the level of civility on tech blogs by implementing a code of conduct. Kathy Sierra, a technology blogger and friend of O'Reilly was subjected to threats and insults from readers and other bloggers. In partial response, O'Reilly and others have proposed a code of conduct which could include restrictions like the outlawing of anonymous accounts."
...before all these emo trendy assholes started pushing their whiny agenda on the rest of the world. 20 years ago if you talked the way that most of them do in their blog posts, you were guaranteed an ass beating just for good measure.
Back then the men were men, the women were women, and things got done.
Now everyone acts like an emotional woman, and the world is going to hell.
This post will probably get modded down by some suicidal, over-emotional teenager who is blinded by the tears in his eyes from crying about how horrible his middle class life is in suburbia America, all while people are starving to death in Africa.
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
Predictably enough, some fool decided to prove my point by modding me flamebait instead of rationally arguing why Slashdot's moderating system is not broken and why the system does not serve the interests of leftists. But of course, the person who modded me flamebait is almost certainly a leftist himself, so it's obvious why he wouldn't try to argue anything. The system works for him: his first impulse is always to flame people (or strawman representations of those people) who disagree with him, and Slashdot's system allows him to do that with total anonymity and zero accountability. He doesn't even have to write anything! If it's not broken, don't fix it, but make sure to always mod down anyone who think otherwise.
So, the reason why Slashdot's system is biased towards leftists is simple: leftists like to silence people who hold non-leftist ideas (you could replace leftist with liberal if you wanted to, I'm not sure if it makes any difference). I've personally seen it happen time and time again in various places on the Web, and read countless reports of similiar behavior in the media, government and academia. Here at Slashdot, you can't exactly silence people, but you can make their posts unreadable to some (-1 or 0), reduce the karma of the poster and tell them to go fuck themselves (troll, flamebait). You can do all this with full anonymity and zero accountability.
Have something positive to say about the US? Troll. Do you support Israel? Troll. Do you, in general, have opinions that do not conform to leftist dogmas? Troll. On most other forums the leftists usually have to explain things, even if amounts to nothing more than saying "you racist white man," but here they can just press a few buttons and let the system take it from there.
This is why the system is shit. Of course, even when the leftists either aren't on Slashdot or are out of mod points, their nonsensical arguments, incredible strawmen and endless flames still don't amount to anything reasonable or intelligent.