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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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.

Re: Slow News Day

[Rational]

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