Introducing the Slashdot Firehose

Logged in users have noticed for some time the request to drink from the Slashdot Firehose. Well now we're ready to start having everybody test it out. It's partially a collaborative news system, partially a redesigned & dynamic next-generation Slashdot index. It's got a lot of really cool features, and a lot of equally annoying new problems for us to find and fix for the next few weeks. I've attached a rough draft of the FAQ to the end of this article. A quick read of it will probably answer most questions from how it works, what all the color codes mean, to what we intend to do with it. What is 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 like

Well 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.

Comments

The "firehose" reference...

[KingSkippus]

In case anyone misses the reference, the invitation to "drink from the firehose" is referring to UHF, the 1989 movie by "Weird Al" Yankovic, in which Stanley Spadowski (played by a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards) treats a kid who wins a game on his Captain Kangaroo-type show to drink from the firehose. The kid opens his mouth wide to the hose's nozzle, Stanly pulls the lever back, and the kid is promptly blown several feet off his seat.

Really funny stuff, including lots of television and movie genre parodies. If you like Weird Al's music and haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend you check it out. It's gained a cult following (obviously, with obscure references on Slashdot and all...) after having a disappointing theatrical release.

(But to be fair, that summer was particularly strong, with the release of Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, Back to the Future Part II, Ghostbusters II, The Little Mermaid... Any other year, and it probably would have been a moderate success. As you can tell, I wish Al would make another.)

Story submission now based on subject quality?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

The firehose view just lists the story subjects and allows the user to click +/- from there. Yes, you can view the entire story, but I think most people are just going to vote based on the subject alone. Is this good or bad?

Re:Story submission now based on subject quality?

[lawpoop]

...I think most people are just going to vote based on the subject alone. Is this good or bad? I think it's wonderful. In the few times I've used the firehose, I immediately canceled stories that had sensationalist or uninformative headlines ( "Amazing New Findings!" ). For the headlines that were pithy, informative, and intriguing, I went to the article ( yes, I actually navigated to the internet article ) and decided whether the story was worthwhile, appropriate for slashdot, and accurately summarized in the subject, and voted accordingly.

Re:Story submission now based on subject quality?

[eln]

You seem to be a conscientious and thoughtful person who is interested in quality articles that will spur interesting discussions. Once you and the 5 other people on Slashdot who are like that do your thing though, what about the thousands of other Slashdot readers?

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that not even the paid editors of Slashdot put that much time or thought into deciding whether a submission is good or not, how do you expect the average Slashdot reader to do so?

The Firehose is an easy way for the editors to reduce the number of story submissions they have to look through in order to find the good stuff. It will not reliably bring the best stories to the top, but it should be pretty effective at burying the most obvious garbage. Basically, it's like a spam filter for the editors, and is essentially doing part of their job for them.

Re:Story submission now based on subject quality?

[CmdrTaco]

We've seen a marked increase in spammers flooding us with garbage. hopefully the additional eyeballs will help in squashing that stuff faster. As with anything like this, it has mixed results, but I think overall the effect is good. People like feedback and participating... we've had a few dozen active taggers in the hose and their help is noticable. It's really more about scalling the system cleanly to handling as many readers as choose to participate.

My hope is that the net result will be that we can 'cast a wider net' by importing RSS feeds and such from commonly cool sites. If you throw your slider down to indigo, you will see CNet, Bruce Schneir's blog, Penny Arcade etc. Things that we generally like to see. The hope is that with more participants we can add more RSS feeds and eventually be quicker at finding the good stuff.

Re:Story submission now based on subject quality?

[CmdrTaco]

Each of those could easily be a tag. Users can assign whatever tags they choose... we just provided a short cut list to a few simple ones to get you started. 'biased' 'badsummary' 'boring' 'dupe' 'selfpromotion'? Start tagging entries. As we see useful tags gaining traction, we'll incorporate them into the short cut list, but there's nothing stopping you from tagging anything you want... 'requiresregistration'? 'interstitial'? The sky is the limit.

And you aren't kidding about the interestingness of stories falling apart upon click. I've rejected 10s of thousands of submissions ;)

Re:Story submission now based on subject quality?

[lawpoop]

Basically, it's like a spam filter for the editors, and is essentially doing part of their job for them. That's wonderful. The more the editors get out of the way, the better. If slashdot totally got rid of the editors, I think that would be paradise. They don't even edit ( as in, correct and revise text for clarity, spelling, and grammar)!

I can read articles days in advance on digg. However, digg is cluttered up with crappy "Amazing Photos! title sez it all" articles and insightful, highly rated comments such as +157 "Doucehbag [Reply] ".

I come to slashdot for the community. Not for the articles, not for the crappy non-editing that the mods-called-editors do, but for the intelligent discussion from karmalized nerds with modpoints. If the slashdot community could also have complete control of the story posting system **and summary editing**, that would be the Shangri-la of internet message boards.

Re:Story submission now based on subject quality?

[CmdrTaco]

There are ways of dealing with that I think. We can wrap low-rated content in search engine aware tags and use the no-referral thign to make sure search engines don't crawl lowly rated content. It's something we'll need to deal with no doubt.

As for your 'thinly veiled slashvertisements' I take offense at that. We pick what we pick because we like what we like. Sometimes we pick stuff that may be a simple press release. Hell, I might post a straight up commercial if I thought it was interesting. But we still to this day pick what we pick because WE want to pick it, and not because we're paid to pick it.

The other practical reality is that we're trying to post a story every 40-50 minutes. By the end of the day, the best stuff is gone... sometimes you choose stories that simply aren't as good. And sometimes those may be advertising or something. We're still choosing it because we think it's the best of what's available, but I don't like when people accuse us of taking bribes for the homepage. Believe me, if we did that, this would be a different site (Like I wouldn't be here).

Re:Story submission now based on subject quality?

[CmdrTaco]

If your only concern is that 'Editors' have an inaccurate job title, then I think we are doing just fine.

If you want community oriented tools to actually edit content wiki style or whatever, www.slashcode.com has sourcecode. I've had a user contributed patch/diff system on my TODO list forever, but it's a hard job and I've got another dozen hard jobs ahead of it on the list. We'll get there someday, you could get there tomorrow :)

Not so sure

[kalpol]

If it makes Slashdot more like digg, then bad idea. It's a train wreck of sex and conspiracy theories over there. Well...on second thought maybe we can make it half like digg.

A much older reference "firehose" reference...

[i_like_spam]

"Drinking from a firehose" was coined long before UHF.

MIT President ['71-'80] Jerome Weisner coined the phrase "getting an Education from MIT is like taking a drink from a Fire Hose."

Color coding, bad idea.

[Remus Shepherd]

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?

Re:Color coding, bad idea.

[CmdrTaco]

We considered color blindedness early on and decided to deal with it by providing alt-text and mouseovers wherever it made sense for now. There are philisophical reasons for this... I could see us labeling things more blatantly or having a more ugly version of the color tags where you see 'red' spelled out or something, but I figured I'd wait and see what actual color blind people had to say on the subject before we coded something that there wasn't a demand for. So thanks for your feedback (as well as the other folks who've had other comments on the subject)

cryptic flags?

[nmrs]

Why use cryptic flags like -story and -journal that the user has to just magically know (i don't see any list of available flags by the filter box). Why not just use checkboxes or something of things to include? [x] stories [ ] journal