Rusty Foster Isn't Dead

While he was vacationing with his wife, Kuro5hin founder Rusty Foster was killed — at least in the eyes of Facebook. NBC News details how it happened: a "pal" pranked both Foster and Facebook by notifying the social site of Foster's supposed death, providing as documentation the obituary of another, much older man by the same name. Getting the Facebook version of his life back took some doing; based on this article it seems much easier to convince Facebook that you're dead than that you're alive.

Comments

Murder by Internet?

[toygeek]

http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/01/03/049209/security-firm-predicts-murder-by-internet-connected-devices

Looks like they were mostly correct.

It was an understandable mixup

[Anonymous Coward]

While he's not dead, his site certainly is.

I first reported on this

[Arno Stark]

received bad karma for it. Looks like the repost made it to the front page. I contacted Rusty on Twitter after it was found out to be a hoax, but he blocked my account. Before he blocked me, he admitted he knew Josh did it. I think it was done on purpose for free publicity for Kuro5hin and Rusty Foster to breath life into their dying web site.

Re:I first reported on this

[mcgrew]

Did you even read the article?? Facebook's methods are retarded. Send an obit of someone with a similar (not same) name, wildly different age and place of residence and that's that. They couldn't have made a more stupid design if they tried.

If you're really dead, so is your password.

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Kuro5hin is still online.

Re:In other news

[Arno Stark]

I guess even trolls need a web site to hang out on that only supports ASCII text, no images, and a broken cancel button?

The worst part of it was

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as Rusty was getting his FB life back on track, Zygna shut down Petville and he lost his pets too.

A truly tragic story...

Re:Slow News Day

[feedayeen]

"Posted by timothy on Saturday January 05, @12:24AM"

posted a whole 24 min after the day started, tell me ... are you a natural fucktard, or a trained dipshit?

I don't think you have a comprehensive knowledge of either time zones or phrases in the English Language.

First point, in some places of the world, like Sydney, it's after 5PM, the workday is over. This is due to the Earth being round, a discovery made a few years ago and a bias by the majority of the population to being active when it's bright outside. Second point, the phrase, 'slow news day', is a figure of speech refering to publisher quotas and a demand to publish crud over nothing at all.

Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[Seumas]

I stopped over at Kuro5hin a couple years ago. Curious as to how things had come along, since I last was there. It used to be a decent mix of deep content, generated by its users. Usually heavily tech oriented and definitely geek oriented, otherwise.

HOLY SHIT WHAT HAS IT BECOME?!

When I last looked, it was just article after article about the most vile shit that makes the comments on articles that drudgereport links to look intelligent. It was just a bunch of crap by anti-abortion nuts, anti-gay nuts, and shit about Sandra Fluke being a slutty cunt. I am completely baffled as to what happened. It used to be on par with slashdot. Maybe even better, in some ways. Now it looks like it's just a place of navel-gazing propoganda for hate-filled truthers, birthers, anti-everything idiots. I thought it had been attacked, actually, and returned a couple weeks later to see if they had fixed their website. Then I googled a bit and found that it had been in this disgusting state of ruin for *years* and nobody really knew why.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[plover]

A lot of people bitch about the slashdot moderation system being crap, but when you see sites like kuro5hin fail like that, you have to consider that it adds huge value.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[martin-boundary]

K5's demise was self inflicted. Rusty pissed off the regulars when he took donations and didn't improve the site. Instead, he went off to work for daily kos. The site's main attraction, the moderation queue which filtered out crappy articles was ruined by making the rules too easy. The diaries was the worst idea ever - just a blog roll with trivial personal content nobody cares about. Worst of all, the trolls weren't actively terminated.

I'm surprised the site has "survived" this long - it's been a troll crapfest for at least 8 years now, longer than it was a great site. A great shame.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[DNS-and-BIND]

I always wondered whatever became of the low budget Filipina horror movie in DC.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[Seumas]

Wow, I didn't realize all of that. I had forgotten about K5 for so long, until I saw it mentioned one day. It's really hard to say it has "survived', of course. I mean, it looks like someone's abandoned blog that has been over-taken by spambots. There is zero content on there and it's a solid mix of idiotic and incoherent. If you remember K5 during its prime and you return today, you seriously think something is wrong with the site -- like you've somehow wound up at a domain squatter's site or something. I can't understand what the point of keeping the site up is? It's not even worth the $10/yr for domain registration. I don't even know if anyone even shows up anymore -- bots included. When I looked last, the Sandra Fluke is a Whore stuff (fine, whatever your opinion, not sure what it has to do with a geek tech site) was about the only new thing that had been posted since 2010.

Also sad to hear about Advogato.

What's left? I mean, Slashdot is a shadow of its former self and, other than that, there's nothing -- unless you accept Reddit, which has basically become the 1990s AOL hub of internet forums. Blech.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[TheLink]

Doesn't matter if you have a good moderation system if you have crappy moderators. The Slashdot admins do ban some people from moderating. The moderation at Kuro5hin was presumably done by sock puppets of various warring factions.

FWIW I've stopped getting mod points for years. Maybe I was a crap moderator. But whatever it is, Slashdot is doing better than kuro5hin.

That said, Slashdot does seem to be declining in quality - lots of troll stories that seem to be designed just to get comments and hits. Heck sometimes I think they purposely leave in or even add editing errors to generate more comments. So the top 25% of the comments end up being comments about the crappy editing and nothing to do with the story.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[Kjella]

FWIW I've stopped getting mod points for years. Maybe I was a crap moderator. But whatever it is, Slashdot is doing better than kuro5hin.

Try metamoderating, I have excellent karma but pretty much never get mod points. If I do then I usually get a batch of mod points soon after. I don't generally bother since the people who want to troll the mod system use non-moderated choices like "-1, Overrated" anyway.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[b1t r0t]

In may ways it's been a pale shadow of adequacy.org, but with a lot more lame troll articles. It's also Michael D. Crawford's aspergement and abuse blog, and Sye's bad poetry aspergement blog. And watching for the inevitable idiot who pays $5 for a new account to plaster spam or a press release for something stupid, and we all get to laugh at the "nullo". Sometimes there's an article that's a good enough troll for everybody to agree to put it on the front page. I particularly like the phrase "Schizoasshole Disorder". And I still miss Turmeric.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[maynard]

> As I recall it -but it's been a while- Rusty made a point of it that he wasn't going to delete the trolls himself.

No. Rusty actively deleted accounts from people who _weren't_ trolls. He threw his hat in with the worst of the worst on the net and drove off his best users and potential customers. He took a hot internet property, one that could have been profitable and socially valuable, and drove it into the ground for reasons entirely his own. Now the site is cobwebs and tumbleweeds.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[b1t r0t]

I think part of the problem is that K5 has a mod system that lets everybody, even new accounts, rate every post with no limits, which encourages sock-puppeting and circle-jerking. (Kind of like... Digg and Reddit? Two down, one to go.)

Slashdot literally makes you lurk more, as an important factor in getting mod points is simply reading a lot of articles. Among other things, this makes it difficult for sock puppet accounts to ever get mod points. I guess it does require a certain critical mass of users to work properly, but below that level is probably admin-moddable anyhow.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[mcgrew]

It wasn't just Rusty, the admins were retards. I was once banned for crapflooding (Pete Jongular is a retarded asshole). Rusty told me he didn't know how it happened and blamed a bug when I posted six stories at once and five were voted to the front page.

How to kill a web site: piss off your users. Sites are a dime a dozen, eyeballs are precious.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[maynard]

There were several waves of mass exodus. It's been a long time, but maybe in '03 a bunch of regular users left to go hang out at Hulver's Site to avoid pervasive and cruel trolling.

http://www.hulver.com/scoop/

Rusty waved sayonara to some of his most active and committed community members then. Hulver put it up just for the old community to hang out and didn't pursue general readership or expansion. It's still around and arguably more active than K5 is now, though also pretty slow.

By '05-'06 K5 was nothing but a trollfest. At that point, I believe rusty was actively seeking large readership and advertising revenue by promoting troll content. For example, there was that "Fuck Natalee Holloway" article, which generated vast numbers of page views. From there the site continued its slide downhill, as rusty pursued more and more salacious material to drive traffic. It became a business model. Those who objected had their accounts summarily shitcanned one by one.

I think rusty was of the opinion that the general community couldn't write well, and he was interested in attracting professionally written material. But he didn't care about substantive content - per se - only prose style. Many of the site trolls were actually good prose writers, so he coddled them.

But a troll's interest was not in crafting useful content that would drive sustained readership. The interest is in shocking and offending the sensibilities of average readers. And so K5 transitioned from publishing useful - if marginally well written - articles about computing, technology, and social issues to the kind of thing that might drive short-term bursts of high traffic by an offended and angry anonymous readership.

rusty made the bet that if he sacrificed an active community producing marginal but useful content in order to coddle those who produce offensive but quality written offensive material, that his site could generate the pageviews necessary for a successful business model. He was wrong.

Now it looks as though they're engaged in a publicity effort to generate a burst of final advertising revenue. For example, we have this story. And at the same time on reddit over in /r/WTF we see this story hit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/15ye9g/girls_guide_towtf_really/

Which generated significant short burst traffic to the site. Timed within a day of each other. But it's a story about bestiality with dogs. Seriously.

And I suppose writing in character a bogus female first person account of having sex with her dog is probably more fun than detailing the latest OS tricks or talking industrial policy. But Slashdot is still around and kicking. It still provides at least a marginal service to its user community that has meaning beyond just pissing people off. K5? Not so. And that's why rusty's site is dead while Slashdot employes people and retains a large user base.

Because a to run a successful forum the community _does_ matter more than a few well written - if obscene - articles.

May rusty enjoy his well deserved obscurity.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[bedouin]

I mean, Slashdot is a shadow of its former self and, other than that, there's nothing -- unless you accept Reddit, which has basically become the 1990s AOL hub of internet forums. Blech.

I actually like Slashdot in its current state: the community is not absurdly large, nor is it stagnant. Most of the comments are fairly intelligent, something I quickly realized when Digg became a phenomenon and was able to contrast both user bases: well structured paragraphs and sentences, versus one line quips. I read many articles that may not be pertinent to me, just because the comments here often help me understand the subject better. There's teens here, but there's also real old schoolers here. It's well balanced and has survived more than a decade; I'm fairly confident that Slashdot will still be thriving in five years while the Reddit users move onto the next fad.

I go to Reddit or The Verge to laugh at trolls or do some trolling myself. I have more respect for Slashdot for some reason.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[dr_dank]

They already released The Hobbit.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[MichaelSmith]

How to kill a web site: piss off your users. Sites are a dime a dozen, eyeballs are precious.

Yeah this is why I can't believe Bruce Perens killed off technocrat.net. It had a great bunch of users and if I had been thinking ahead I would have created a subreddit to move them on to.

Catch-22 Doc Daneeka

[Required Snark]

In Joseph Heller's Catch-22 the flight surgeon, Doc Daneeka, is declared dead even though he is very much alive and waking around.

One day when Yossarian is staring over the skyline and wondering where Clevinger and Orr are, McWatt suddenly skims over the surface of the water and slices Kid Sampson in half with his propeller. Chaos ensues at the grotesque sight. Yossarian yells futilely at McWatt to come down. His cries are useless as McWatt flies higher and higher and then flies into a mountain. In response to these deaths, Colonel Cathcart increases the number of missions to sixty-five.

When Colonel Cathcart finds out that Doc Daneeka is dead, he increases the number of missions to seventy. Sergeant Towser is the first one to realize Doc Daneeka is dead. He tells Gus and Wes, and when they take Doc Daneeka’s temperature, it is half a degree lower that the usual 96.8 degrees--when Doc Daneeka, who is actually still alive, complains about being cold, they point out that he has been dead all this time, but never realized it until now. Doc Daneeka screams with anger when they say they will tell his wife that he is dead. At first, Mrs. Daneeka is very upset when she finds out. She then receives conflicting letters from her husband and from the War Department regarding the life of her husband. But as Mrs. Daneeka begins to receive widow pensions and other monetary benefits, she appreciates her new measure of wealth.

Meanwhile, Doc Daneeka is considered dead by the squadron, and he has to depend on Milo and Sergeant Towser for food. He is ostracized by everyone and almost starves to death. He writes a final intense appeal to his wife, but she moves away with the children when she receives the generic official notification from the army of his death.

http://www.gradesaver.com/catch22/study-guide/section5/

Re:Catch-22 Doc Daneeka

[TuringTest]

It makes you wonder if we technicians aren't creating a new class of 'codeless' people -like the 'homeless'- those who fall through the gaps of the system, in this case because they have their digital ID revoked. They wouldn't have a way to get in the system again, because lacking an identification they wouldn't be able to use even the basic communication tools.

Re:Rusty Foster? Is this the same guy whose wife i

[plover]

Supposedly, that was photoshopped by someone just to piss Rusty off. It worked.

That's the thing when you run a successful site. The trolls aren't just posting garbage, they're making it personal. Community policing works only as long as the community doesn't tolerate the trolls, and I think K5 just got overrun.

Re:Typical Bullshit

[ChunderDownunder]

'Frosty Piss' being a loose anagram of First Post stating the obvious and tending to drift off towards an editor bashin' slant is probably the intent of the moderation.

The topic here is the content of the submission, viz some web forum founder's faked death - not whether the submission should have indeed made it to the story page...

Re:Facebook still isn't obligatory.

[MichaelSmith]

As long as you don't need facebook to get a job

But what if this happens on LinkedIn?

Once upon a time...

[RKBA]

I wrote "Deceased" on a junk mail envelope hoping that they would stop sending junk to me, and put the envelope back into my mailbox. A day or two later I stopped getting any mail at all! The post office was returning ALL of my mail because they assumed I was actually dead. Convincing them otherwise cost a lot of time and trouble.

Re:Once upon a time...

[Reschekle]

This is a urban legend. Attaching "Business Reply Mail" envelopes and cards to parcels is an invalid use of those mailings and will be discarded. You are either lying (this incident never happened) or your postman has never worked in sorting and has no clue about this.

See here and here.

If you want to piss them off, send them something nasty that will gum up the letter-opening machines at the CC company. Of course you may well end up being sued or charged with a crime, depending on the circumstance.

Re:Two Facebook articles in a row

[MysteriousPreacher]

Congratulations. You're the cancer.

That would be fallacies #21 and #37

[Lorens]

See http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Re: Slow News Day

[Rational]

"Right number of apostrophe's but in the wrong places." If that was sarcasm, well played.

Re:Slow News Day

[mcgrew]

First, Rusty's well known in the nerd world. Second, there was a submission yesterday "Rusty Foster is Dead" which sort of startled me. Third, if you didn't want to see the story posted you could have tagged it "slow news day" in the firehose. Fourth, you're in the minority -- it was voted up. Sixth, you didn't have to click the link. Seventh and most important, TFA was a good one and worth a read. How can FB be so sloppy? Doesn't anyone there have database experience? Names are terrible identifiers!

Re:Two Facebook articles in a row

[Zontar The Mindless]

You do realise this story is posted under tech.slashdot.org, yes?

Are you sure about that?

Kuro5hin

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Wow.

I haven't seen than name in 5 or more years...

Remember when it was challenging "the dot"?