Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Coming Attractions
- Most Discussed: Highlighting recent stories with the most active discussions
- This Day on Slashdot: Featuring the biggest Slashdot stories of the day all the way back to the beginning.
We also pushed through a number of fixes to the user experience and upgrades to the site infrastructure in recent months including:
- Upgrading Slashdot to modern hardware and new versions of MySQL and Apache
- Cleaning up the topics pages
- Improving methods for sharing submissions
- Thumbnails for articles with videos
- Flag-a-comment abuse reporting
- Removal of old and unused Slashboxes
- A much overdue overhauling of the FAQ
- Fixes to user preferences
- The launch of the Slashdot Hall of Fame (that little badge icon next to the logo)
- Fixes to the D2 comment system. Highlights include bug fixes to the comment score slider, a better abbreviated view (if you quote the parent, that's removed so people can see your first sentence instead), and general reliability improvements to the AJAX magic
- And many more...
In addition, we're working on modules to highlight top submissions and we've launched Slashdot TV at http://tv.slashdot.org/ . We plan on launching more in the weeks to come. Some of these new sections will feature original content that isn't normally run on the front page. We're also planning a new mobile experience and we'll need your feedback to help us with the look and usability. Our goal through all these changes is to make your Slashdot experience a good one. We are listening to your complaints and concerns and promise to keep giving you News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters.
So, readers, what do you want to see in the coming months?
Seriously... a bit late, no? A lot of this flies directly in the face of stuff that Slashdot has been saying for years... comment reporting for abuse? Does this mean that abusive comments can be removed? That kinda defeats the point of the kind of discussion that Slashdot has been built on....
Finally proper unicode support.
I want Slashdot back!
Lose the gimmicks. Slashdot was great because it focused on hard tech news, and tended to post things that the Slashdot community were interested in. Now, it seems to be at the whims of a few submitters (MrSeb, Hugh Pickens) with the editors asleep at the switch and posting stuff that's not even remotely tech news, typically biased political propaganda.
Stop creating your own vanity projects. You need to stop fantasizing that you're a news *source* and get back to being a tech news *aggregator*. We don't want you to create custom content, and especially not tripe like device destruction porn, reviews, reports from conventions (is there any bigger waste of video than a "from the convention floor" type report?) You're such a late entry to this space that it'll take years to get even remotely good at it, if ever. Find the great content out there, and post stories and links. That's it!
It's just absurd to think that these recent missteps were simple errors in judgement. The claim that the infamous hoodie video was intended (per Soulskill) as "a quick, silly, completely non-serious video" is suspect. Why would something *intended* as a silly video even be on the front page and not in Idle? How out of touch do you need to be to think that the readers wouldn't be offended and instantly assume an ad masquerading as a story?
And in spite of the massive negative feedback (which must have been massive indeed to rouse the editors from their slumber to actually acknowledge the problem), you *still* ran that atrocious Plantronics tripe, and pretended to be surprised that people hated it.
Honestly, the recent changes stink of you trying to pad your resumes.
Your website's profitability depends on the comments posted below. You depend on User Generated Content (UGC). This is where most users extract value from your site and the reason why people actually still visit Slashdot.
It's not the articles themselves, people only rarely read those.
If you allow your user base to be diluted by commercial interests, your profits will dwindle as less users come here to socialize and learn. That is why you need to keep the comments off limits for gaming by media and PR companies. If you post a Slashvertisement, not that I like them at least it is separate from the comment section so you're not pretending to be anything but a shill for another company. However, the comment section should represent real users and trolls -- not shills.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
The problem I think is that geeks no longer run Slashdot, they no longer choose the stories to post. Instead it's by social media/blogger types which is not what Slashdot's target audience is interested in...
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Slashdot used to have a perfectly working front page for "today", plus specific URLs for the day before, the day before that, and so on. It used to employ some of the good principles of Roy Fielding's thesis on REST, where each page is a resource with a distinct address that makes sense. You could give someone a link and know exactly what they're seeing. Well no more.
Instead of that sane technical design, now we have some kind of utterly broken page expansion system linked through "Many More", and you never know what the hell you're looking at, and when you return from a nested page you're seeing something totally different. It's a technical disaster, and given that this pretends to be a technical site, its technical design is quite beyond the pale.
Bring back a bit of sane web technology please. Lose the totally unhelpful "Many More" which is a wholly broken design, and bring back dated pages.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I'm disappointed to see utter bullshit like "Flag-a-comment abuse reporting" and "Thumbnails for articles with videos" and "general reliability improvements to the AJAX magic" included in this list.
I intentionally avoid sites like reddit, StackOverflow, and especially Hacker News, because of the high degree of censorship that goes on at such places. You can't hold, never mind express, a non-mainstream opinion there. It really stifles the discussion. At least Slashdot allows differing opinions and ideas to be expressed, without the outright censorship we see elsewhere.
The worst part about the censorship is that it happened to people who were expressing absolutely correct, yet unpopular, ideas. Many of them were merely years ahead of the rest of the crowd. For example, some people who I saw get targeted a lot were those who didn't have a raging hard-on for Ruby on Rails. They'd correctly point out that Rails is a pretty typical framework, and similar functionality had been available in Perl, PHP and Python years earlier. They'd correctly point out that there's nothing special about Rails' ORM. They'd correctly point out that Ruby's and Rails' performance is actually quite horrible. Yet despite being completely correct, they'd receive hundreds or even thousands of unjustified "mod-downs" and in some cases would have their comments removed and they'd then be banned from the subreddit. As somebody who came from Slashdot, I found that behavior to be abhorrent. At least I could see such discussion at Slashdot, where it was just gone at some of these other sites.
What's all this video crap, too? Reading is so much more efficient than watching video. I'm not going to waste 15 minutes watching some useless video when I could read a transcript or even an article expressing the same information in one or two minutes. So don't even bother with this thumbnail bullshit. As users, we don't want videos. The only people really pushing videos are those who want to cram more "vibrant" advertising nonsense down the throats of "consumers".
And for crying out loud, we don't need "general reliability improvements" to the AJAX crap. STRIP IT THE FUCK OUT! Get rid of it! Go back to the good ol' dropdowns for selecting the moderation level and the number of posts to view. Go back to using to using proven techniques that, get this, actually work and are usable!
I was hopeful that we'd see some great changes when Slashdot first came to us asking for suggestions. But now I fear that Slashdot will become another intolerant shitheap among the reddits and Diggs and Hacker Newses of the Internet. We don't want censorship. We don't want bullshit videos. We don't want half-assed, buzzword-compliant functionality ruining the site.