Slashdot Mirror
Introducing the Slashdot Firehose
The Slashdot Firehose is a way for you to participate in the Slashdot editorial process. You are able to see all the content submitted to Slashdot: from RSS Feeds and user submissions, to journal entries and successful completed Slashdot stories.
You can participate by voting on these entries: click the minus icon if you don't think the story is great for Slashdot, and click the plus if you do. Better yet, when you make these choices you can help further refine your decision by clarifying why you made the choice you did. You can tell us if a story was binspam, or a dupe, or insightful. If you don't like the options provided in the pop-up windows, you can always open the tagging box and provide whatever tags you think will help Slashdot Editors, and other Slashdot Readers make informed decisions about the content they are reading.
Why does the Firehose have articles in it?The Firehose has all data on Slashdot. RSS Feeds. Journal Entries. Story Submissions. And of course, accepted Slashdot Stories. The idea is that this view of Slashdot can provide you a single place to view all Slashdot content in one interface.
If you don't like any particular data type, you can filter it out. If you don't like journals, you can just filter on -journal and they are gone. If you don't want Slashdot stories, -story will get you there.
You will note a variety of interesting options that allow you to control how this page is displayed. For example, if you filter on 'story' and set 'expand top rated' you will see a page that is very similar to Slashdot's main page today... except that it dynamically updates and allows voting and in-place expansion of sectional content. Alternatively, filtering to -story and toggling 'abbreviated mode' will let you see a real-time stream of reader contributions. It's really up to you
What do the colors mean?The spectrum of colors represents an overall quality rating for content. Red is the most popular, the highest rated, and hopefully the best content on Slashdot. There is relatively little Red content, although most stories we post default to red. Some stories show up as orange. As you work down the spectrum you will find more content. Default submissions to the Firehose start at blue. At indigo you will find a number of RSS feeds and journal entries. At violet you are probably wasting your time, and at black you definitely are!
Play with the color slider to find the level you enjoy reading most at. Use Red or Orange for busy days or if you are a casual reader. The lower you pull the slider, the more content you will see.
How does the calendar widget work?The Firehose is usable in 3 "Modes". In "latest content" mode you are looking at the last few days of Slashdot content. Display is optimized for you to easily navigate within this small bit of time. In 'Day Of' mode you will see content only from (surprise) any day you specify in the calender. Finally in 'Search Archive' mode you will search the entire database. For now, this goes back only perhaps 6 months but eventually we think this can replace our existing search infrastructure.
What can I do with the Firehose Tabs?We've found that we like to use the firehose in a number of different ways. Sometimes I want a casual view of Slashdot, and other times i want to see more stories. Sometimes I want to see only the stories I've tagged. Other times I just want to see Journals. Well, shockingly enough, each tab will remember your settings and allow you to quickly return to them later.
If you change your settings, you do so in an 'Untitled' tab. If you click on your tab, you can name it which will save it for later. Also, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for any particular tab if that's your cup of tea. Please keep in mind that we have a robots.txt file that restricts the rate that you refresh pages. I'd suggest a 30 minute minimum.
What browsers are supported?Currently we work great under Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, as well as Safari. IE7 is functional but has glitches that we are working to fix. The iPhone functions as well with a number of optimizations for small screens (although the bandwidth requirements are still fairly steep so you are probably better off on a WiFi connection for now)
IE6 is known to be broken. Other browsers might work, but we haven't really tested them.
Why didn't you post a submission that made it to red?Slashdot is a complex beast with readers with a wide variety of interests. Part of the job of Slashdot Editor is to create a website that is interesting to all of us. That means that sometimes our opinions may differ from yours. We use the voting in the Firehose as an indicator of value, but not as the definitive measure of if something is a Slashdot story.
If you don't like that, you can simply remove our Slashdot stories by putting -story in your filter. The firehose you read will be then be completely reader driven. We believe that the way we've built this system can appeal to the wide variety of Slashdot readers without compromising the story quality for our core audience.
Doesn't this make you just likeWell first of all, we're happy to use good ideas when we see them. Countless websites have knocked off our cool ideas, just like we joyously took ideas from those that came before us. But ultimately the idea here is not to imitate any other social network news site. We feel that the editorial layer that exists on top of Slashdot is important. But we also think that having many eyeballs will help us more efficiently sort through the ever increasing volume of content on this here internet of ours. That's why we'll aim to strike a balance. Slashdot stories will continue to be posted by our editors. We will use the advice given to us by our readers. Sometimes we will agree, and other times we won't. You are welcome to read more or less editor content depending on your tastes.
At the end of the day, striking a balance between the wisdom of crowds and the tyranny of mobs is a difficult one. It's also a personal one: some people might regard it as having a moral component. Others may just want to read a bunch of good stories no matter what the methodology. We're hoping that we can strike a balance that will work for everyone. Your feedback can only improve the system for everyone.
...but better. Like those sites if they were posted to, read by, and moderated by people with a mode age greater than 6 and a mode emotional age greater than 2 :)
u-bend
Risk is that people vote based on whether they like the subject or not, not based on how important it is. I.e: "FSF gets donation" - gets plus because people like it "Microsoft sues 10 major Linux vendors" - very important but gets minus because minus is associated with bad things
Colorblind. Can't help you with this new feature. You'll find that about 9% of your male audience will also be unable to use it correctly (not that some of them won't try.)
In general, color-coding is a poor practice when designing any UI. Especially contiguous spectrums.
Call me when you rank your firehose stories by popularity using a number, okay?
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
It would be nice if stories that I have opened to read would not scroll off when more come through or fall off the 'hose or disappear because someone else voted it down below my filter setting. At least, not within the first two minutes of opening it. It happens before I have a chance to decide to click "Read more" to open in a new tab, and some (like bookmarks) have no "Read more" option.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The Firehouse has been active for months now - have you noticed any good or bad effect?
People might pay more attention to their subject line and try to do a better job of selling the story. Or they could post leading and inflammatory headlines to get extra attention...that's kind of staple around here anyways...
Eventually I suspect we will provide a pop-up dialog box with various checkboxes for you to noodle with, but for now the filter box is just simply 'word' and '-word' and we've defined a few things that are in various degrees of working. EG, hate me? -CmdrTaco and I'm gone. Not interested in linux stories? -Linux and you're done. Don't like journals? -journal etc etc... I think it's fairly obvious personally, but as we progress there will be more subtle keywords in there that will require documentation.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
Why the hell can't we have (Score: -5, Dupe) in the firehose? (Score: -3, Slashvertisement) or (Score: 4, solid analysis) or somthing like that would also be great.
As it, I think the majority votes after skimming the summary. What we need, is a way for people that actually read the article to get the word out. Tags are nice, but not enough. What the firehose needs, is a way for some people to read the article and rate the story according to various criteria.
- Good articly or a stinking pile of self-promoting crap?
- Unbiased or paid for?
- Good summary or in need of a rewrite?
- Enough relevant links (maybe we can add a few more?)
- Dupe or new article?
There are many articles that seem interesting from the summary, or from a quick skim. While closer reading reveals that the text is horribly bad.
I lost my sig.
And you aren't kidding about the interestingness of stories falling apart upon click. I've rejected 10s of thousands of submissions ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I've been manning the hose for a while. Sometimes I have to reject a story that's a perfect fit for slashdot subject matter, but just isn't "big enough" to be a full story, since full stories have to be meaty enough to soak up comments for about an hour until the next story gets published.
It would be cool to have a place for the worthy small-fry stories, while keeping slashdot's overall big-stories-only-on-the-front-page approach. Right now that place is digg, which is too free-for-all for my taste.
The problem with the concept of 'Community' is that the so-called 'Community' is the vocal minority. More than half of Slashdot readership is only interested in the articles those editors you hate so much. Perhaps a third of you are 'The Community'... so we need to strike a balance between what works for each groups particular needs.
My hope is that the hose will give us a chance to satisfy the desires of a broad spectrum of users... the ones who want minimal to no editor involvement and simply want to participate in the community discussion aspect of the site... to the silent majority who simply want the 10-15 best stories, without seeing crap like 'Amazing Photos!' etc...
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
I hadn't thought about the difference between the submission date and the content date... that's an interesting idea, although one that wouldn't be very trustworthy... plus people wanting to promote something would tend to exagerate the newness of their content because new is better (generally speaking)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
How can I filter stories that are already on the frontpage, I don't want to see them in firehose. I don't see the need to mod these stories as they are already on a frontpage and me down modding them will not remove them.
Tagging for these stories can be done on the frontpage itself.
What power has law where only money rules.
Defining the inter-relatedness of stories is on the TODO list. There's a number of relationships: Clarifications, Follow-ups, Duplicates, Continuations... coming up with a UI for all of this is hard. We've no shortage of ideas :)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
...if they manage to include rejected stories in the history mechanism. Damn shame we can't see the rejected stories from 1996-2007, I'm sure there would be some interesting gems lost among the tripe.