Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
here's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
You must be new here.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
Used to be. Can you return it to that?
SourceForge still packages malware in its users distributables. Fix that first.
There's not enough content on the front page every day. I know there are many submissions that are made everyday that never make it to the front page. Perhaps loosening the filter or helping people post quality front page material would help. Sometimes good stories never make it through because the guy who wrote it has bad grammar or something. That's a shame.
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.
Because seriously.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Fresh, solid and intelligent articles on TECH, and a banning of any and all trolls. Start there.
It's lamentably inconsistent with the business sense of "moving forward", but it should be stated that the old "no_beta" slashdot was superior in nearly every way. That is, the less you manage to do, the more the loyal old farts (myself among them) will sing your praises. Make glitzy choices which head opposite to a clean text interface and you will lose four geeks to only one newbie gained.
Give me more ways to make people understand just how wrong they are when I write a reply that contradicts everything they said. Some way to really make them realize their stupidity and experience terrible shame because of it.
I think that would help your bottom line quite a lot, since that seems to be what the majority of people come to slashdot to do.
(Yes, this post is a troll. I won't apologize though, as that would violate slashdot tradition.)
By "tinkering" we're aiming to fix bugs, and add oft-requested features (https) etc. We're not trying to reinvent Slashdot here.
You're welcome and thanks for the feedback. We will make sure of this.
He used to work on this site, would sometimes post stories as "Cmdr Taco".
Oh, yeah, and started the friggin' thing.
It'd be like Apple bringing Steve Jobs back, only not as expensive.,
Judging by the number of AC comments modded up to +5, I think that's throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I haven't seen much of a difference in quality between AC and logged-in comments. Both have trolls. Both have thoughtful insight. I'm not sure the ratio is much different.
HTTPS though, yeah. Agreed on that.
In no particular order:
* Editors who can spell correctly and understand english grammar.
* Some form of control over dupes, perhaps a commitment along the lines of "we won't repeat stories within 2 weeks of each other". This isn't about updates to previous stories, but ones where they are effectively the same posted back to back.
* Fix the mobile interface or get rid of it. As an example of busted - the "top commented" story does not display on my iPad4. I literally cannot see the most active content on the site when I visit using it (it's up to date and using Chrome).
* Expand the friends/foes list limit. I've got a hell of a lot of trolls permanently downmodded from over the years and am capped out. Either this, or find another way to control trolls. I realize this doesn't affect ACs at all.
* Consider rewarding users with good karma with less delay between posts. I write pretty darn fast and have wandered away from more than a few good posts due to the speed limit.
* Come to think of it, I've never noticed a place to report bugs or a bug tracker. Is there one? I haven't gone looking.
I hate it when a summary says "frobozz version x.y.z has been released, this release has many new features and bugfixes", yet never tells me what frobozz does.
I also hate summaries along the lines of "Researcher discovers exploit in ABC using TSR algorithms tweaked with RNG enhancements. This can lead to new discoveries in FNG with QRZ and CDR possibilities". Then the summary never tells us what any of those acronyms mean.
Finally, remember this is news for nerds. Keep the BS articles (I'm looking at you Forbes) to a minimum.
I want the power to decide who lives and who dies.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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.
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward.
Let's start by banning the phrase "moving forward" unless you're talking about physical motion in a forward direction. Without a time machine there is no other direction for the "movement" of which you speak.
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
Polls belong on the sidebar. But don't believe just me. Go back and look at all the prior discussions about it.
Actually just go back and look at /. history. Whenever the old management did something contentious there was always a lot of vocal and well reasoned arguments as to why what they did was BS. The trouble was that nobody at /. actually listened.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Think carefully about the AC's motivations. He's not offering to help you or Slashdot.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
There's a reason for two decades of success on a fickle internet.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
More specifically, it appears that some of us (such as myself) are on a list of people who never get mod points. I have not had mod points in ~2 years IIRC. My karma is consistently excellent here. Others have reported the same.
There also have been times when people have been given differing numbers of mod points. It used to be that people would only get 5. Then some people started getting 10. Some people claimed they got as many as 15. I never heard an explanation for that, either.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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
Anonymous posting has become a haven of trolls, far from it's original goal of protecting people when discussing work conditions and the like.
Allowing anyone to post as anonymous without login simply paves the way for endless trolling. The value of the comment section has diminished greatly over the years because of stupid comments.
Enforcing authenticated login, federated from elsewhere to tender to the laziest if need be, would at least allow for some accountability by weeding out repeat abusers of the comments section.
Logged-in, members could still post with anonymity to allow a return of the original intentions.
NO NO AND NO
Anonymous is a defining feature. There are tools to tune out trolls and spam and they work (they may need fine tuning but are otherwise powerful). Do not be lazy, use them. Without the freedom to post in a TRULY anonymous fashion then speech is stifled and groupthink, echo chamber like discussion worsens. I want to be challenged by viewpoints that do not met my expectations and may run afoul of social, governmental or employment considerations. I want to be able to post them should the desire arise as well.
To repeat.. the coward should remain among us with no blocking or authentication at all.
Silence is a state of mime.
Another thought: Stop Auto-Refresh. If I have to do something else, I want to come back to a Slashdot page the way I left it.
You must really hate mobile users with a band cap if you want all comments shown by default.
Downmodding serves a purpose, and abuse is corrected by the "intelligence of the herd." Besides, if you want all comments shown by default, you should also be browsing at -1. There's absolutely nothing to prevent the individual user making that choice - but it should remain a choice.
As for identifying moderators - your " If somebody's deemed responsible enough to moderate, then they should be willing to have their name attached to any and all moderation they do - by the same logic, you should have to be logged in to post any comment. Furthermore, by that logic, nicks or nyms shouldn't be allowed, but almost everyone hides behind a nym. And you're posting AC - hypocrite much?
"When it comes to abusive moderation, even one incident is one too many." - come off it. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and really, I've been mod-bombed, and you don't see me getting upset about it. It's just people expressing an opinion, not deciding as to whether to launch WW3.
Posting limits need to STAY. The quickest way to get fewer active users s to allow anyone to crap-flood. 30 posts in 4 hours and 50 posts a day is usually enough. Yes, it's frustrating to hit those limits when you have several heated discussions going on, but let's keep some perspective here - it's only the internet.
Moderation needs to STAY. It's one of the ways to keep users engaged.
Several of your points are so obviously detrimental that it's obvious you're just trolling.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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. :)
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
More: a lot of the Slashdot crowd is hardcore on privacy issues. So you should make it a policy to not retain any more information than is necessary to operate the site - for example, no IP logs or anything like that (except to the point needed for spam fighting). As for data gathering for advertising purposes, that's going to be a controversial one - as an ad company, you probably have interest in that, but a lot of Slashdotters are going to be uncomfortable with that. If you do plan to pursue that route, may I suggest a middle ground? Make it optional, enable it by default if you must, but make it easy for those who care to shut it off.
(I'm not among those who care, but I know there are plenty of people here who do)
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
That's plan B.
I'm not sure what the higher mod cap achieves. When I have points the fact that some comments are maxed out just means I have to look for other worthy comments to mark up (or down).
Nullius in verba
Please! Don't do it! I beg of you! Say NO! to editing of comments! EVER! A person can post a response and or correction. Editing will ruin everything! Comments set in stone is Slashdot's saving grace, that and the archives. Don't ever let them be edited... And resist the temptation for unicode also. You don't need the hassles.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
For a tech site, slashdot should be an IPv6 enabled website
Being one of the greybeards who still reads Slashdot, I'll add a few:
- Add the ability to edit comments until they are moderated or have a reply
- Stop linking to Forbes articles and posting Slashvertisements
- Stop running articles about Martin Shkreli or other things that have nothing to do with "News for nerds"
- For the love of all things absurd, please add CowboyNeal back as the final poll option
- If you need money to operate the site, try asking for it from readers. That way you can reduce or eliminate advertising useless junk that nobody wants
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Would anyone be interested in the option to see the most popular stories from the firehose on the front page? They'd have to hit a very high popularity threshold and also would be marked/color-coded as such.
I just waded through this whole mess of comments. 99.9% of them are stupid ideas. By far the most important way to KEEP slashdot good is DON'T FUCK WITH IT. It doesn't NEED "fixing", and these ideas would ruin it.
Agreed. PLEASE -- Keep the mod cap at +5. It's high enough to make excellent posts stand out, and it's also high enough that a single downmod by someone who just wants to disagree isn't going to make the comment invisible. There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about... here it's just about making the decent posts stand out from the herd.
whipslash, you are doing yeoman's work...
I know absolutely nothing about the company that just bought slashdot, nothing, but judging by your comments on this post you understand the slashdot system and are trying to fix it by tweaking things like firehose weighting...I'm glad you're not trying to re-invent the site.
I've relied on slashdot for *no bullshit* and "see-it-here-first" techie news...what they call "stuff that matters"
More than anything, slashdot for me has been educational. I learn about the issue reading through the comments. Haha, yeah lol, there are trolls and idiots but I just ignored that...the good comments here can be from phd's researching the topic or the engineers who actually code the AI gadget in the article under discussion!
I've been reading since 2001, but didn't even log in to comment until 2006, because I honestly didn't think I had anything to contribute because the level of discussion was so high and relevant. True story!
As long as slashdot has the user-base and maximizes the capabilities of the slashdot CMS to foster productive discussion this will be one of the best techie news sites anywhere!
Thank you Dave Raggett