Ask Slashdot: How Can We Improve Slashdot?

Hi all. Most of you are already aware that Slashdot was sold by DHI Group last week, and I very much enjoyed answering questions and reading feedback in the comments of that announcement story. There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.

I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward. I am not talking about a full re-design that will detract from the original spirit of Slashdot, but rather: user experience, bug fixes, and feature improvements that are requested from actual /. users. We appreciated many of your suggestions in the story announcing the sale, and I have taken note of those suggestions. This story will serve as a more master list for feature requests and improvement suggestions.

We welcome any and all suggestions. Some ideas mentioned in the sale story were, in no particular order: Unicode support, direct messaging, increased cap on comment scores, put more weight on firehose voting to determine which stories make the front page, reduced time required between comments, and many more. We'd love a chance to discuss these suggestions and feature improvements and pros and cons here before we bring them back to our team for implementation.

Comments

Start with removing the malware from SourceForge

[Anonymous Coward]

SourceForge still packages malware in its users distributables. Fix that first.

Re:Start with removing the malware from SourceForg

[whipslash]

That's being fixed as we speak. In fact, we've removed the DevShare program altogether already. Now we're working to remove bundled installers added by the project owners.

Re:Not enough content

[whipslash]

That's a good point and something we will look at. Should we weight firehose voting more heavily so that highly voted stories make the front page regardless of an editor?

Re:HTTPS support

[whipslash]

This is 100% already on our list.

Re:Not enough content

[scdeimos]

Second that. Sometimes it's 3 or 4 hours between new stories on the front page - on a work day!

Re:Ossified community

[whipslash]

By "tinkering" we're aiming to fix bugs, and add oft-requested features (https) etc. We're not trying to reinvent Slashdot here.

Thank you for asking

[Anonymous Coward]

I would just like to say... Thank you for asking. I don't really have any gripes other than make sure you display paid for posts with a clear "AD" banner or something.

Re:Two simple suggestions.

[grub]

The troll problem is handled by the excellent moderation system, set your threshold higher and you needn't worry about goatse links and the like. Personally I read at -1, Raw and Uncut because I'm a masochist and often find some funny stuff down in the gutter.

Re:Allow pics

[Anonymous Coward]

Any particular reason why we couldn't allow uploaded pics, movies, etc.? It's not a text-only world--except here.

That's one of the things that makes Slashdot special. Visit the rest of the world if you want something different.

Put the "read more" link back, better mobile site

[caseih]

Put the "read more" link back after the story summary. Also put the comment count down there again. See soylent news for an example of how it use to be.

Also a couple of years ago slashdot had a wonderful mobile site that looked very much like the desktop site, but was extremely functional (commenting, moderating, filtering comments, everything). The latest mobile site is useless as far as I'm concerned. In fact I the desktop site is more usable on a phone than the current mobile site. Slashdot is not Ars Technica. Slashdot *is* the comments. The stories are just there to spur discussion.

Re:Start with removing the malware from SourceForg

[whipslash]

Yes we're committed to serving no unwanted ware. We need more than 4 days to fix this. We're working on a lot of things that we'll let everyone know about soon.

Re:Start with removing the malware from SourceForg

[whipslash]

We're gonna fix the obvious things first (adware, deceptive ads, etc) before we get a separate thread for that.. But yes that would be a separate thread.

Science Coverage is Not Thoughtful

[paradigmsareconstruc]

There is a common pattern with aggregator sites today which deal with scientific press releases to simply regurgitate press releases that other sites are posting. These stories are typically chosen because they fit a narrative which the Slashdot community already believes. But, such "news values" are not in the spirit of Silicon Valley, which has a strong tradition of leading the world on issues related to science and tech.

Modern aggregator sites today are increasingly realizing that there are two types of stories: those stories which exploit the users by feeding their worldviews back to them (directly termed "exploitation") and those stories which encourage users to learn new ideas which might challenge their preconceived notions ("exploration"). Slashdot has since the beginning focused entirely upon exploitation, which satisfies the user base, but also makes the tech community more insulated from competing views. This is most obvious with regards to what is happening at the geographical center of the tech world, in the Mission in San Francisco (where there have been some high-profile incidents with regards to gentrification and overall disrespect for the native culture), but the effects of such policies are also -- perhaps more importantly -- observable in the world of science.

Why not try a bit harder to educate the tech community on some of the most vocal critics of both science and tech? There is a rather long list of such critics to work with, some of them have very impressive CV's, and some of the claims they've made have been really quite extraordinary.

Martín López Corredoira is an astrophysicist, philosopher and academic whistleblower. He has published more than 50 cosmology and astrophysical papers on subjects like the structure of the Milky Way, stellar populations, and observational astronomy topics which required analytical calculations, computer simulations, statistics, photometrical and spectroscopical observations and analysis. He wrote in The Twilight of the Scientific Age ...

"A superficial view may lead us to think that we live in the golden age of science but the fact is that the present-day results of science are mostly mean, unimportant, or just technical applications of ideas conceived in the past."

"There are several reasons to write about this topic. First of all, because I feel that things are not as they seem, and the apparent success of scientific research in our societies, announced with a lot of ballyhoo by the mass media, does not reflect the real state of things."

"Science is not a direct means for reaching the truth. Science works with hypotheses rather than with truths. This fact, although recognized, is usually forgotten. It gives rise to the creation of certain key groups within science which think that their hypotheses are indubitably solid truths, and think that the hypotheses of other minority groups are just extravagant or crackpot ideas ...

all through history, and even now, there have been many instances of discussion about how to interpret aspects of nature, with various possible options without a clear answer, in which a group of scientists have opted to claim their position is the good or orthodox one while other positions are heresies."

Or, how about Jeff Schmidt, who published a scathing critique of the physics graduate program titled Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives?

"My thesis is that the criteria by which individuals are deemed qualified or unqualified to become professionals involve not just technical knowledge as is generally assumed, but also attitude -- in particular, attitude toward working within an assigned political and ideological framework."

"At the end of the week the entire physics faculty gathers in a closed meeting to decide the fate of the students. Strange as it may s

Re:Create an "Devil's Advocate" moderation

[techno-vampire]

They already have it. It's called "+1 Underrated."

Re:The moderationg system needs an overhaul.

[Rei]

Indeed. A higher moderation cap is fine, and better backend tools to block persistent spam-trolls would be nice. And obviously we want unicode. But let's not go too far and end up with a WSYWIG interface or whatnot. ;) If I post a piece of C++ code or whatnot in a conversation about C++, it should post without complaining. The "basic nature" of the comment system is fine, it just has long-overdue "maintenance" to conduct.

On the other hand, I'm not a fan of the profile design of "modern" Slashdot. First off, it's archaic, with blanks for things like AIM handles and the like. The boxes on the right display information but don't have easy links to change it, you have to browse through an overly elaborate profile menu. And on smartphones it prioritizes a bunch of silly "awards" taking up the whole profile space, rather than one one generally most wants to see, their comment history so that they can keep up with discussions that they've been involved in. Remember, the key design feature people want in mobile versions is they behave like the normal website, just to display properly. The last thing people want is functionality-limited, strange-behaving interfaces. And if the user wants the full version, it should be easy to click over to it, and it should remember the user's choice.

As for stories, the biggest complaints people have are 1) the story is inappropriate (not something Slashdotters are generally interested in, something that seems like shameless advertising disguised as a story, etc); 2) the source is unpopular (such as Forbes); and 3) it's a duplicate. Rather than having people complain about this in the comments, it'd be nice if you had a simple way people could report stories that could lead to timely corrections. Story removal should be done in analogous to removing a symlink - the story's webpage should still exist, with all of the comments, but it shouldn't appear linked from the front page.

There are some squabbles that you're just not going to win at. For example, people who yell at each other as being "SJWs" or "MRAs" and blame all of the world's evils on the other group. Stopping that sort of thing isn't really your job. But stopping people like the APK spammer - people who nobody want around - yeah, feel free to do that. :)

As for your core business, advertising - people generally are fine with it so long as you "play by the rules". That is, stop the malware, don't allow anything that relies on deception, anything offensive, popover ads, etc. A button over the ad to block further from a certain source that the user doesn't like would be nice. And of course you should allow people to subscribe to an ad-free service by paying a small regular fee. Another example of "not playing by the rules" that you should avoid would be secretly inserting sponsored stories and disguising them as news. People really don't like that sort of thing. But legitimate advertising, even targeted advertising... hey, you have a business to run and sites cost money, we understand.

Be good to us, we'll be good to you. :)

Re:Stop Auto-Refresh.

[whipslash]

Also something we're looking at

Re:Not enough content

[Wolfrider]

--We already have that; in fact I've done that in the past. You can post (at least logged-in) comments on Firehose stories before they get accepted for submission. Not sure about AC.