Rolan was the first one to write with the heads-up about Wired's story about Slashdot-things are in much the same vein as other stories, but give it a gander if you'd like. And stop submitting the story *grin*.
194 comments
Re:Experts vs Crackpots
by
ucblockhead
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· Score: 2
...since I don't post stuff I know nothing about...
"But as an advocacy community, Slashdot is upfront about its biases. Microsoft stories are identified with a graphic of Bill ates mocked up as a Borg from Star Trek Generations."
You'd think someone writing for Wired (tired) would know something about Star Trek.
-Sloth503
It's metajournalism
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
I think Slashdot is a kind of metajournalism. It embodies news, opinion, ignorance, expertise and spin, all of the things that define de facto journalism. However slashdot improves upon this by adding direct peer review -- I don't know how many times I've been grateful for the "collective bullshit-detector" that the comments provide.
I read slashdot, nytimes, memepool, the onion, salon, and The New Yorker (on paper).
Slashdot is to journalism what logic is to the study of mathematics. This worries all of the mediocre journalists out there who think that being a journalist entitles them to try to hide thier biases and agendas.
The Slashdot era will bring newfound vitality to American Journalism, as well as a refreshing polish to the first amendment.
We loaded up slashdot just so we could read an article in wired about slashdot, and then we popped the stack back to slashdot and wrote a message about wired's article about slashdot, which we read by going to slashdot and reading a wired article about slashdot, and then we popped...
Of course, I write a message about your message about wired's article about slashdot which you found out from slashdot...
I love it!
(I wonder, will you write a message about my message which is about your message which is about wired's story about slashdot which HOSTS ALL THESE MESSAGES?????)
OK, I'll stop now. I agree with you though, we're definitely into meta journalism.
A point which Mr. Glave repeatedly bring up, and rightly so, is the issue of trustworthiness and bias in reporting. He points out that in a forum such as Slashdot, you have no assurance of tne legitmacy or truthfulness of a story. This is completely true. As he observes, the reader must make their own assessment of stories based on their source, others' comments, and whether or not facts can be confirmed through other sources. There is, however, the implicit assumption that this is not the case with traditional journalism.
I think it may not be correct to assume that traditional journalism can be, should be, or is trusted. I do not believe that many (in the Slashdot community) distrust journalist's motives, but rather their technical competence. It doesn't take much work (in any field) to find mutually contradictory traditional articles discussing the same event or issue. This implies that at least one of them had their facts wrong. Not a rarity. Moreover, when two journalists agree about the facts, the interpetation, analyses, focus and conclusions are often wildly different. So if a reader wants any assurance of the accuray or insightfulness of an article, they really need to look at multiple articles, consider the gredibility or the journalist and his or her sources, and check out the primary sources themselves. Just as with Slashdot.
One particulaly relevant issue is the nature of Slashdot's subject matter. It is usually technical and computer related. This implies two things: The first is that due to the highly specialized nature of the material, it is possible, even probable, that the journalist does not have enough expertise to separate truth, spin, and downright fiction. This is through no fault of the journalist - computing is just too broad a field for any magazine to have an expert in every possible subject. It is also the case that tech company claims are notoriously unreliable: Most copy is written by people who specialize in marketing and PR, not by engineers. Which makes it likely that the writer doesn't understand the truth, and (even with the best of intentions) doesn't want to burden the reader with technical information they won't understand anyway. So even with no malice, curicial errors and omissions are the norm. Becaus very few people really understand it, the computing world is driven as much by perception a fact. So companies have every reason to put their particular spin on things. So you have a lot of places for truth, and especially an understanding of what's significant, to get lost or distorted.
The second is the availability of confirmation. The intenet makes is possible to put primary sources like unvarnished data and scholarly writings at the readers' fingertips. People in the technology field are likely to have the ability and inclination to do so. If this information is not available, that's information in and of itself. So it is a subject area that is conducive to the kind of verification that a forum like Slashdot calls for. Thus, Slashdot is in the enviable position of covering material that plays to it's own strenghts and its competition's weeknesses.
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
"the flip side is that you don't have [an editor's] assurance in what is to be trusted and what isn't to be trusted."
Hi there. I wrote the article, and yeah, I screwed up by overlooking the moderation system. We updated the article to add a paragraph that explains that it is here, in operation. Thank god for peer review!
You know what would be really cool actually, is if along w/ moderation points we allowed people to push up/down stories that were in the queue (along w/ commentary from the people who are moderators only) This would 1) satisfy all the/. addicts who need new stories every 30-60 minutes:) , get rid of the unfeasible queue and prevent stories from being duplicated. i.e. give say 400 random (post often kidz) stories and say when 10 % of the people approve of the story it gets posted. The problem w/ the system now is that (unfortunately) is that rob and friends seem to be a bit overworked and the system is (even more unfortunately) basically taking them on as our editors.. (deciding what stories are worth posting). The critique/commentary system is what makes/., it could be cool to apply it further?
-avi
Re:Slashdot article reposts
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Right, that's all we need. The contents of the article offend a group of over-zeolous moderators and the rest of us have to fuck with our settings just to see the damn stories.
You forgot First Contact, which, although munges things up a LOT, still has the Borg. Who aren't in Generations. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
-- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine. Quine "quine?
Thank goodness for Slashdot -- it's the most intellectually stimulating part of my daily routine.
That's just so sad...
;) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
-- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine. Quine "quine?
Re:Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
joshv
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· Score: 1
If you had some reasons behind your banal negativism please trot them out.
-josh
Re:First Posters (-1 Offtopic)
by
hungry_ear
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· Score: 1
I agree with you. People seem to (at times) get really, really upset about the First Post! but it just doesn't bother me. And, the longer it goes on, it has just become a part of the landscape for me, or, as you said, "a cultural phemonenon". Not that its usefull--doesn't have to be--its just there. There was even one a while back that had me laughing. It was close to: (sigh). ..just can't help myself. ..First Post! Sure its silly, but Slashdot isn't our jobs.
'objectivity' & 'trained, professional journalists
by
spasm
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· Score: 1
"Whenever discussing do-it-yourself reporting as exemplified by Slashdot, traditional newshounds inevitably return to the issue of integrity and reliability. They say that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas."
What!!??? Any journo who honestly believes they're totally free of all cultural, political & personal biases is, pretty much by defenition, not worth trusting.
Hmmm, I'm an expert at some things. Not so good on others. I've posted on something I thought I knew about and was blasted a time or two (rightly so). I'm not (I don't think) a complete crackpot. So I guess I'm somewhere between expert and lounger.
Well...it completely misses the point
by
Zoltar
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· Score: 1
"Whenever discussing do-it-yourself reporting as exemplified by Slashdot, traditional newshounds inevitably return to the issue of integrity and reliability. They say that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas."
This sort of crap gets under my skin. Slashdot is great because instead of wasting time going from site to site I can get a quick list of things that might interest me and read the ones I want. What does integrity or reliability have to do with it? It's a place for people with a common interest to post opinions and get links. Why twist it into something else...
OTOH I question the integrity of some of the so-called tech sites (Uh..can you say Jessie Burst)...many of them are full of pure crass sensationalism... they are driven by getting my click, not by integrity. Unfortunatly many "trained proffesional journalists" are shills.
Why does wired remind me of MTV.. lots of flashy colors, and stuff seems to be happening, but it's all so vapid in the end.
Re:Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
yorgi
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· Score: 2
I think that the term "Open Source Journalism" makes a very interesting comparison to "Open Source Software." It is very similar on many different levels.
It seems to bring similar, mixed feelings from professional journalists as open source software brings to professional software coders. Some software companies have really gotten into the act of open source software, and love the idea. From having read the Wired article, it seems that some journalists seem to think it's a cool idea, and there is some real value there.
On the other hand, there are software companies that feel threatened by open source software, and see no future in it. There are many journalists that feel threatened very much in the same way by open source journalism. There are other negative views as well, such as software companies believing there is no future in open source software. (I think that perhaps these sort of views are to cover up the threat they feel.) I'm sure there are journalists that claim the same of open source journalism.
Maybe those that don't believe in Open source/journalism are very strong in sticking to the old saying, "nothing in life is free." I would say that the majority of those which subscribe to open source/journalism believe that there are a few things that are free.
Okay, sure, if you wanna get technical, someone has to pay for the bandwidth, the electricity, the hardware. However, the information is free. YOU, the END USER, don't have to pay one red cent directly to the journalist or open source programmer.
Slashdot does have a "reputation" system.
by
AtariDatacenter
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· Score: 2
Slashdot does give a minor 'reputation' to posts. This post, for example, is starting out as a 2 instead of the normal 1. The reason is that in the past, I have posted replies that were often moderated upwards. So there is a starting point for my messages to begin at.
But there are advantages to NOT having a 'reputation tracker' running. For one, anyone can create a new ID at a whim. If your old one has a bad rap, come up with a new pen name. Second, the system seems to give the impression that every thought should be judged on its own merit. I've seen stuff that I would swear were written by Linus, but were cut down by a few Slashdotters.
Actually, that's a good thing. Just because a well reputable person has something to say, it doesn't make it interesting by default. Judge the ideas for themselves, I say.
I thought that the moderating system *was* a kind of 'rating' system. You can set your moderation to what you find acceptable. Might not be the most perfect system, but it works for me. In terms of 'trust', there might not be any immediate trust for any of the posts, however, like you mentioned, after you check out posts from the same people over and over and they are accurate, a kind of trust developes. 'Earned trust' rather than 'Blind trust'. Always the best kind.
Dissagreement with a point in the Article
by
Basalt
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· Score: 2
I strongly dissagree with one comment in the Wired article:
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
I think he has it backwards, I go to/. to get commentary on the validity of the "journalist" publications. I have very little trust of what I see in print, because I don't think journalists have enough time to do good research. Admittidly, an individual commentor is no better, but the statistical nature of the mass of commentors provides a lot of total research effort.
"All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority."
It's called the moderators applying a score to the message. Did the author even visit Slashdot?
It's kind of a backhand comment, though. The article they referred to was a fluff PR piece from Microsoft that was actually pretty interesting. ZDNet, though, thinks the article made Microsoft look stupid.
This may have already been mentioned but I'm kinda jumpy today so I haven't read the other threads.
A couple of quotes that kinda stuck in my head.
They say that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas.
While it's true that slashdot makes its feeling known about certain companies, since when has journalism ever been unbiased. I can only think of a few sources where I feel like they are being unbiased and agenda-free. Everyone has an agenda and everyone has biases. Have you ever heard a news person, via the tone of his voice , or read an article , via the tone of the article, that made you subtley (sp?) feel differently about the subject in the end? I have. When we hear or read something we are called to form an opinion on it in our own minds. People will try to be subtle about swaying you but they will attempt it none the less. "Enlightened racism is still racism". People who refer to people of different ethnicity with terms, while not derogetory (sp?), are still trying to get you to believe that in the context of the point they are making, the fact that this person is whatever race, is the reason for whatever. (I know that probably made no sense but maybe SOMEONE can follow my train of thought here)
The next point that was made that bothered me was
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
Hell, more often than not I find slashdot posts to be independant discrediting of the links in the stories. Peer review obvoiusly works in the scientific and medical fields, and it works here. When someone posts something obviously wrong, there is no shortage of people to point that out.
okay I htink I've babbled on enough. Bitch away.
p.s. this wasnt meant to be a slam against wired or unabashed slashdot devotion. Just something that some people may have missed.
-- "Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!"
"Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
When is a professional journalist unbiased? We all carry some bias. At least with/. I know what the bias is. More than I can say for the main stream media.
I believe I have a better chance at receiving unbiased information from/. than from most of the other over paid talking heads.
Re:Couple of things....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"...consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas." Give me a break. Anyone who believes that modern journalism as presented by ZDNET, CNN, ABC, Time/Warner and the other usual suspects is a far more flexible Yogi than I. I could NEVER get my head that far up my own ass.
Truth in ournalism
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"In this model you don't have editors deciding what is legitimate and what isn't," said Jonathan Dube, a senior associate producer with ABCNews.com. "The flip side is that you don't have [an editor's] assurance in what is to be trusted and what isn't to be trusted."
Re:Truth in Journalism
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Sorry about the partial... "In this model (Slashdot) you don't have editors deciding what is legitimate and what isn't," said Jonathan Dube, a senior associate producer with ABCNews.com. "The flip side is that you don't have [an editor's] assurance in what is to be trusted and what isn't to be trusted." This is all good, however the only one that has the assurance that the 'Trusted' source is true is God. The writer just knows that his job isn't in jeopardy (too much) when he get's the editor's ok. At least SlashDot doesn't make a pretense toward the creditability of their stories (often they express doubt in the blurb). News and media agencies would have you believe that their news is iron-clad true to fact. I personally can't stand their "truth"-y portrayal of the news. When someone like Dateline makes a story "to touch your heart" and tells you what to do and think about something that they show as absolute fact it really pisses me off even if the slightest error is in what they say. If they mean to program America through the TV they better be 100% sure about what they say. I guess the real problem is that you really shouldn't believe everything you see or hear from the media, and you should seek to discredit their attempts to 'give us the truth'.
600,000 hungry eyeballs?
by
j+a+w+a+d
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· Score: 1
I had no idea it was that many. Is that pageviews?
j-a-w-a-d------------------------------ replace,'s in e-mail address with.'s.
-- i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss/. policies
Re:600,000 hungry eyeballs?
by
chromatic
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· Score: 1
No... just 50,000 12-eyed aliens. Or didn't you read between the lines of that Interplanetary Internet Protocol story yesterday? heh heh
Re:600,000 hungry eyeballs?
by
juggleme
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· Score: 1
If you click "preferences" in your left-hand navbar (better word for all the links on the left of every/. page?), you can click on the link for "Slashdot Stats" under the slashboxes (between 10 Hot Comments and News From Userland (haven't they heard of *complete* alphabetical order round here?!???:). However, as I do this I come up with the message "The rest of the stats are currently offline while we wait for some new hardware." so you won't get all the stats right away of course...
as a registered user, surely you would know that you can go into your prefs, and see the site stats for the previous 24 hours
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
Re:Renisance Man
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
specialization is for insects
Re:Gross inaccuracies
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Note the tremendous speed of the response of the/. community;) Whereas open-source models shorten the release cycles from months or years to days or weeks, Slashdot shortens the news feedback cycles from hours or days to minutes.
Maybe it means Wired wants a lot slashdotters to visit & look around. Thing is, most slashdotters came here after finding Wired insufficient (or so I think. Believe it or not, I may be wrong)
j-a-w-a-d------------------------------ replace,'s in e-mail address with.'s.
-- i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss/. policies
Upon further review, maybe Wired knew that Slashdotters don't come as much as they used to? And they wanted to know their shortcomings, so a guaranteed way to be on slashdot would be.. to have a story on slashdot. That way, slashdotters annoyed with Wired would voice their comments, and bam, user (non-user?) feedback for Wired.
j-a-w-a-d------------------------------ replace,'s in e-mail address with.'s.
-- i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss/. policies
Totally agree...why else would they spend so much time complimenting Slashdot? I think the article should've been categorized under The Almighty Buck"
mainstream media unbiased? yeah, right
by
beroul
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· Score: 1
Are they talking about, say, the trained professional journalists at the New York Times, whose pro-big-business, pro-financial-markets, pro-military bias is... well, kind of hard to miss? (See Noam Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent.)
I think we should ignore this story completely because the author referred to the borg as being in Star Trek: Generations. Pah. Dolts. I'll never read wired again.
Re:Gross inaccuracies
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
wooo... they updated the page to read "Star Trek: The Next Generation"
Re:Gross inaccuracies
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Now if they want to be accurate they will change it to Star Trek: The Next Degeneration.
See, according to the article, this is why we NEED professional journalists and a crack editorial staff: to weed out just these sorts of inaccuracies. D'Oh!
-- by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
They updated the sentence about a half hour after the story appeared on the web. It used to read Star Trek: Generations.
-Sloth503
Re:Brain? Brain? What is brain?
by
C.Lee
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· Score: 1
>Who could resist this classic Star Trek quote. (Uh, I think it was >from Generations.)
Umm,no. It from one of the *WORST* classic Star Trek epidsode, "Spock's Brain". Yep someone actually stole Spock's brain. Ripped the sucker right out of his head. It's absolutely amazing that 99% of the Star Trek:The Next Generation,Deep Space 9 and Star Trek:Voyager epidsodes actually manage to make "Spock's Brain" look good. Would anyone actually notice if someone had actually stolen Westly's,Denna's or Worf's brain? I honestly don't think so...
The stories being trustworthy is a little silly. I mean, alot of slashdots content is linking to credible sites or credible people.
Perhaps they have a point, some of those Journalists might be a little off target on there arrows of truth. Hmm, maybe commercial news sites aren't as trustworthy as we think?
And who here trusted that IETF guy? Or even would have fell for the april fools user friendly gag.
Oh, err, scratch that last one...
anyway, i'm trying to point out that slashdot readers aren't expected to be idiots, we can think; act; and judge, building trusts on there own.
--
fou aje oym asoyf ueyf jaffaq afset su!6j!/\ op
'ua>|7!>| ppn7
Down with variation of default scores!
by
antizeus
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· Score: 1
>>> The fact that some posts default to a higher score than others is ludicrous... At least Rob should allow us to turn off these kinds of "smart" rankings.
Yeah, I agree. I used to have my "display full post" threshold at 2 (replies with a score of 1 or less only displayed headers), but I got sick of reading mediocre posts by people whose default scores were 2. Recenlty I cranked this number up to 3, which lets me skip those mediocre yet higher-scored-than-average posts, but now I'm missing posts that got to 2 on their own merit (unless I start looking through the threads).
Sure, it's not the end of the world or anything, but it kind of sucks.
-- -- $SIGNATURE
Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
AtariDatacenter
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· Score: 2
The term "open source journalism" is just a little odd... since it isn't quite journalism anymore. And I feel funny participating in a peer review of a singular review of a peer review system.
Anyhow, if journalists are afraid of an open-source journalism system, what they should get excited about is one w/compensation. The model is very close to Slashdot.
Open participation, with random readers ranking the results. The pariticpants (story providers) are compensated by the rankings of their readers. Imagine if Slashdot paid decent money for articles that rated a "5". That's incentive for you.
Albiet, there is a number of nagging flaws here and there, and such a system wouldn't have to be pure slashdot, but the basic concept seems to be relatively sound for providing an open-source journalism system that the journalists would buy into (or be bought into!).
Re:Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
jfunk
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· Score: 1
Better yet, imagine if they paid for posts that rated a 5. You think the site is full of score whores now, wait till you get posts like "Psst... Hey buddy, moderate this up and I'll cut you in for 10%"
Fortunately, that won't happen. A poster cannot know who moderated up their post.
"I did it."
"No, it was me."
Posts like that will end up getting moderated down by those of us who actually care about keeping Slashdot a good place.
Moderator points have gotten quite rare these days for individual users. I doubt two people would have something "on the go" where one would post and the other would moderate. The other guy would have to get those rare points for that to work, and they couldn't stop someone from moderating it down.
This would be fine, as long as it were only targeted at one niche... Why not use collaborative filtering to point readers to articles that they will likely enjoy based on their preferences so far and the preferences of everyone else.
I find that I am consistantly disappointed with the scoring system used by/.; it's as though I read the same comment (which gets a score of 2 or 3) 8 times in a row, no matter what the story is about, each time I read comments and limit the ones I read to a score of >2.
I think some kind of adaptive or collaborative scoring system is much needed. Come to think of it, I should be starting such a site instead of complaining about/. Gee, please moderate this comment down so I don't embarrass myself.
Or maybe you get what you pay for. More so in journalism than in software.
Re:Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
dsfox
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· Score: 1
I don't see how you concluded that this would work. I don't understand what technical challenges you are referring to. I don't understand why you think they are surmountable.
Re:Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
dsfox
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· Score: 1
Ted Nelson ``created'' that system too, about twenty years earlier. It is called Xanadu.
Re:Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
joshv
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· Score: 2
I've been thinking about something like this too. Utlimately you don't really need editors (CmrdTaco, Hemos, et al). Let anyone post a link, or a story or feature.
Let the readers sort out what is good and bad. There are certainly some technical challenges in implementing that, but they are not insurmountable.
If you get enough eyeballs and ad-revenue you could offer to pay the authors of the best content.
-josh
Re:Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
Biff+Cool
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· Score: 1
In Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson created a similar system, where people would submit intelligence information to the Library of Congress, and get paid money anytime someone downloaded it.
--
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
Re:Open Source Journalism w/compensation
by
Shoeboy
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· Score: 2
Imagine if Slashdot paid decent money for articles that rated a "5". That's incentive for you. Better yet, imagine if they paid for posts that rated a 5. You think the site is full of score whores now, wait till you get posts like "Psst... Hey buddy, moderate this up and I'll cut you in for 10%" --Shoeboy
Comments on the ratio of Experts vs Crackpots? I don't think that there are that many crackpots, but neither do I think there are that many experts, either. At least not that many experts who post.
Maybe we should have a Poll? Are you a: 1. Expert 2. Lounger 3. Crackpot
Well, I'm not an expert by any means, I'm not really a crackpot since I don't post stuff I know nothing about, so I guess that makes me a lounger.
Re:One of the more telling comments...
by
ninjaz
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· Score: 1
.is from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNN Tech news.
"The slant is so weird," Foley said, citing a recent Slashdot-linked interview on the Microsoft Web site. "What they highlight from the interview is not what a journalist would highlight. They like to highlight things that make Microsoft look stupid."
I think anyone who can make this statement is profoundly biased, more so than who they're accusing. The fact that the interview (presumably with someone important in Microsoft) contained things that makes Microsoft look stupid, and a "journalist" *wouldn't* highlight that implies that said journalist is hiding the fact that the supposed "computer industry leader" is deficient.
It's like saying that the boy who mentioned "The Emperor has no clothes!!" is biased against the emperor. Then she goes on to say there's no editor to say what's "legitimate"... Given what's seen coming from the direction of ZDNN Tech News, the definition of "legitimate" is tied more to finances (with clear bias favoring Microsoft) than truth.
I think if Mary Jo Foley wants to see a balanced view of Tech news, she should have a look at C'T magazine and Linux news at Linux Weekly News These are part of the very small group of publications I've seen who try to get to the actual meaning behind current events (and tend to do a good job of it).. Highlighting Microsoft's "roadmap", "vision", etc., while ignoring the fact they've been known to be less than honest & unethical in the past is what strikes me as bad journalism.
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired. I can go read news.com and wired.com in the morning, and in the afternoon there will be 3 or 4 stories posted (on Slashdot) that just point back to those. If anything, maybe Slashdot is a good way to, er, gather together the more interesting news and comment on it, but they're not 'scooping' anyone, except for when they post major software releases before they're supposed to be released, so the mirrors haven't gotten their copies yet, and the hordes kill the main site and the mirrors never get their copies.
Mix in the occasional JonKatz yellowish journalism (it's designed to create controversy and draw more hits/pageviews/ad loads), an article a day about "amazing high storage at amazingly low price sometime in the future" (I swear, there's at least one of these a day), and ever so often an empty essay from a slashdot reader or a book review.
And of course Slashdot "coexists" with the traditional news sites -- it's where they get half their stories.
I believe since you have logged into Slashdot you know about the Preferences, from which you can select to ignore stories.
If you don't want to listen to Jon Katz, you don't have to! And if you don't like stories from Wired, i'm sure if there's nothing there to ignore it with, Slashdot could add something.
Suggested addition to Slashdot: A text box delimited by commas where you can ignore stories from addresses like.wired.com. You could poll what people like to ignore and add option on the preferences to ignore that specific site.
But then again, this could already be in the works. But I haven't entirely understood the preferences, just mostly understood.
--
fou aje oym asoyf ueyf jaffaq afset su!6j!/\ op
'ua>|7!>| ppn7
Slashdot is routinely days, even weeks ahead of Wired, InfoWeek, PC Week, NYT, and several periodicals that I read on a daily basis. AND, you don't get teh reaaly weird stuff in NYT.
-- by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
I come to slashdot because I'd rather have other people filter out the crap for me. I know I could read the same stories by going directly to the other sites, but why expend my effort? Anyway, Its much more interesting to read people's comments and point out the inconsistencies or whatever, because I don't have the knowledge to be able to do that on my own, usually.
j-a-w-a-d------------------------------ replace,'s in e-mail address with.'s.
-- i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss/. policies
if you already read the major news sites, then yeah, a lot of the submissions in/. must seem quite redundant for you. I've found that/. is a good way to read stories that I'm likely to be interested in, so I never go to the main pages at the big traditional news sites. For non-nerd news, I follow newsgroups and other websites that, again, point me to traditional-news stories at times. I don't know how many of the/. readers do things this way too, but for those of us who do, it really is a time saver -- and the comments about "needing to supplement with less biased sources" are pure bullshit. everything is biased, but at least here we know in which way, and we have comments coming from all directions. so yeah, if you're stupid enough that you need to read exactly what you're going to believe, then/. is not for you. I don't think most people aren't like that though.
I guess they missed the whole post-moderation aspect of/., not to mention they got the definition of 'slashdot' wrong.
Also, and non-practicing 'trained and professional journalist', I can say that 'journalistic integrity' is 99% of the time, simply and excuse to tell people to fuck off.
The truly unbiased journalist has never been invented, as heretofore they have all been somewhat-recognizably human.
Don Negro
--
Don Negro Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
The traditional news media says the same thing about The Drudge Report. It's bad journalism, but we look at it all the time for scoops.
The beauty of being part of the technology world is that engineering people in established companies at least recognize systems that work, even if they work differently from their own designs. Journalists seem obsessed with the orthodoxy of their process.
did I miss something? when exactly did the general public cease to be a bunch of retards? the average american _cant_ sort out fact and fiction. hello blair witch, hello war of the worlds, hello urban legends.
Now my question is, are moderators on/. decided by posts alone? If so, the guy who's always "I posted first! Phhht" will be in quite a good position!
According to the moderator guidelines, moderators are chosen at random from a fairly wide cross-section of the slashdot population. Anyone who posts a bit and reads a fair bit is elligeable if I understand correctly, which means at least a third of the people visiting the site (a guess - don't flame me for this).
The only people who can't become moderators, again if I understand correctly, are ones who either never post, never read, or constantly hit "reload". Check out the guidelines themselves for more detailed information.
Re:Major problem with the NNTP protocol and Usenet
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
slashdot.org is a single point of failure, it's almost always slow (since it's basically uncacheable as currently implemented), and it doesn't have anywhere near enough horsepower to offer useful (by which I mean keyword) filtering to everyone. My web browser doesn't know anything about moving along threads or quoting followups or filtering or skipping what I've seen already, and even with Nested mode I can't just keep banging on the spacebar across stories as long as I want to keep reading.
/. has the only content compelling enough to make me put up with such an annoying medium, and I'd be much happer if I could point trn or nn at it. Hell, even Netscape Messenger would be less painful, and it's barely worth calling a newsreader.
Instead of knowing something about a lot of things
by
SpaceGhost
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· Score: 1
The point that seems to be missed by many is that the author is talking about a reputation rating system.
Slashdot's moderation system is in no way based upon reputation. This is in a way a good thing: posts are judged and rated according to their attributes, not biased by who wrote them. But, since each post starts with a rating of 1 (or 0 for anon.), reputation does not come into play. On eBay, the situation is quite the opposite.
I for one think it would be a good idea for slashdot to have a rating system based upon reputation. Something as rudimentary as the average score of all posts by the particular author might even work. Something such as this, displayed apart from particular post's scores, could give the reader an overall understanding of the author's credibility which would be much more reliable than any credible-sounding posts could warrant.
Re:open-source journalism
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
In open (source|journalism), the (users|readers) can publish (upgrades|comments) and (fixes|corrections) for the authors and each other. If the authors licensed us in advance to distribute updated versions of a news article (rather than preserve the unmodified original and add separate third-party comments), we'd be all set.
Re:Major problem with the NNTP protocol and Usenet
by
pen
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· Score: 1
Rob has thought about making/. available through NNTP. Unfortunately, NNTP means no ads, unless you want to append a sig-like ad to every message.
The point is, there is a big difference between moderation based on 'quality' of individual posts, and a rating system based on credibility.
I might create a new account for myself, pretend to be from Cisco, or Microsoft, or Red Hat, or whoever, and post lots of interesting, detailed but totally bullshit comments. Many of them would get moderated upwards; after a while I might even become 'elite' and get all my comments posted at score=2. But unless you checked all my previous postings, you'd have no way of knowing that I were talking rubbish.
Ideally, there would be some way of replying to a post saying 'yes, this is factually correct', or 'no, this is rubbish', citing URLs or other facts as proof. We could then build up a credibility profile of each author.
Am I confused, or is it that every time someone wrights an article about Slashdot, they come up with a "better" moderation meathod - one that Rob already considered and rejected.
Oh well. Heck, I think we should get more moderation points than 5... mabie 8 or 10, so that more moderation gets done, especially on posts 3 or four levels deep (In a thread).
-- -- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Wired is VERY reputable ... Oooops!
by
AProgrammer
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· Score: 1
Very funny to notice on the last page of the Wired article that the first mention of Scott Bernadito (?) is as follows:
"With eBay you are trading goods. At Slashdot you are trading ideas," said PC Week reporter Scott Bernadito, who has been "slashdotted" . . .
then only 7 paragraphs later in a most ironical twist:
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato
...
I am glad to have mags like Wired that always get it right, but I wonder who Berinato is, as there is no other mention of a Berinato in the article. Or is this Berinato some ancient mystic that most other people know about, like Confucius.
Very funny.
-- --Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Re:'objectivity' & 'trained, professional journali
by
apathetik
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· Score: 1
Professional journalist work mainly for big corporation such as News Corp, Time-Warner etc or state run orgs such as the BBC.
They therefore tend to not to run stories which go against the status quo too much.
In Britain we have a media dominated by Murdoch which engage in spinning favourable stories about its media operations such as Sky, supporting political parties which let Murdoch do anything he basically wants and setting the political agenda in Murdoch's terms.
Objective journalists... Try reading the Sun newspaper.
Murdoch is basically equivalent Bill Gates in British media terms..
For some reason that struck me as fsck'n hilarious.
Guess it achieved its goal;)
-- "Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!"
"Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
not putting anyone out of a job.
by
AugstWest
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· Score: 1
No way. Three people cannot replace a team of journalists. Slashdot aids them, really. Most of the things posted on Slashdot are a paragraph of commentary on, and a link to, someone else's articles. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I think it's great. I hit Slashdot probably 8 or 10 times a day looking for some new newsbit, and I'm more than happy to visit all the other sites linked to, bringing them traffic, supporting their writers and advertisers, etc.
Save deep linking!:]
News for nerds? I think not.
by
Hobbes_
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· Score: 1
Unless a nerd is someone who loves Linux. Seriously though 99% of the stories are Linux Biased. I wouldn't come here as often if it wasn't for the diverse comments on the stories correcting and pointing out things I missed.
A bit more impartial editing would be intresting.
And what is with the urge to "Hey wouldn't this be cool if we could turn it into a Beowulf Cluster" in most of the posts?:)
Independent Verification?
by
Squeeze+Truck
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· Score: 1
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
I beg to differ. Other publications work behind closed doors, and hence can never be trusted. With slashdot, the sausage-making process is laid bare for all to see and critique. There are things Rob et al do that piss people off, and by golly people call them on it! A lot!
In my estimation, this article was designed to: a) attract the attention of slashdotters, and
b) remind them how important real journalists are! Like Wired! Good plan, but I don't buy it.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Your anecdote points out the value of Slashdot and its ilk (nee Usenet) - the comments are often more valuable to the reader than the original article, which is often no more than a spark on the tinder. Try that, "Old" Journalism!
As an aside:
The conversation that follows is part expert commentary, part peer review, and part cocktail-party banter, as credible sources and experts weigh in alongside crackpots in a rapid peer-review process.
The author left out "part childish behavior" (as in 'first post.')
As a second aside, I want to say how tiresome 'first post' is, and yet who will claim they weren't tempted to add that at the bottom of their post? Whenever I feel that temptation, it means I'm not paying enough attention to composing my comment and I go back and look it over again.
Perhaps there could be an option to automatically moderate down the first post if it's from an AC. Then moderators could moderate down non-AC's claiming to be first.
Open Participation vs Open Source
by
AtariDatacenter
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· Score: 2
Thinking about this issue, Slashdot really isn't "Open Source Journalism". It is "Open Participation Journalism" which happens to run on open-source software and covers open-source issues. There is a big difference.
Take The Killer List of Videogames (arcade games information database) for example. Open participation? Very. Open source? No. Open participation works for databases and discussions, certainly. (KLOV owns the "open participation" database, but people still contribute. Interesting, no?)
Actually, I'm having a bit of trouble seperating some of the aspects of the two in some respects (aside that open SOURCE refers to source code, obviously). Perhaps these terms don't quite cover the full distinction of differences between, say, Slashdot, and the Linux kernel.
?? Help ??
Traditionnal media journalist afraid of /.
by
Etyenne
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· Score: 2
An interesting quote :
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
I personnally read/. because I have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that trade press (like PC Week) don't always get it right, and I need peer opinion to make up my mind on a particuliar subject.
Sure they're a lot of BS being said on Slashdot, but this BS usually end up being point out by more clueful or honest peers. In traditionnal media, the best you can expect to correct incompetent journalism is a polite "Reader's Letter" in the next issue, if anything.
Let's face it : media independance is an utopy. Journalism always end up being tainted by the opinion of the journalist, the context in wich he gatered his information or his publication interest (sensationnalism, political correctness, etc.). IMHO, you can't trust traditionnal media any more than you can trust any stranger for truthful, unbiased, complete and verified information. It's all about using your own judgement.
This spring, I had an urge to subscribe to as much free trade press as I could (I receive, among other, PC Week, Interactive News, Computer World, etc.). Now I feel bad about wasting so much paper. These rag carry so much bullshit, I can't believe any cluefull CIO (their target audience) can take them seriously. Blatant bias and lake of technical understanding of the subject covered is the norm, not the exception. And I am not only speaking about Linux coverage.
So in the end, if I can't trust the "real" media, I am always left with the option of trusting (or not) peer reader of my virtual community of choice, and use my own judgement, instead of being blindly fed half-truth and outright lies.
The Borg (a race of cybergenetically enhanced beings) were instituted in an episode of ST-TNG where Picard denies Q a chance to be part of his crew. When Q hears this he tries to teach Picard a lesson and transports the ship to a distant part of the galaxy where they find a borg vessle which has the ability to scan them and determine that they are weak. After taking a real beating from the Borg and Picard begs for mercy Q moves them back to their current position. Another 3 episodes in the series address the borg as well. The next is one where the borg try to assimilate the planet earth. Second one happens where a crashed borg scout vessle leaves a single injured borg and he is taken and given free will and sent back to the collective in leu of killing the whole race through a interative debilitating algorithm. The next is where Lore (data's older twin brother) assists the borg in trying to become fully cyborgenetic by doing his bidding. Then we have a major break. The next we see the borg we find them in the Delta Quadrant with Janeway and that has a lot of episodes (manely because they have a person who is sort of borg herself on board constatly now. So to make a long post longer the borg were most definately not conceived in Generations.
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
At least Wired listens to readers and admits when they're wrong... and they obviously read Slashdot.
-- rooooar
Re:They fixed it
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Why do you assume they read Slashdot to find out about it? Probably 10,000 trekkies already have sent them feedback directly.
Total contradiction ...
by
LizardKing
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· Score: 1
On the other hand, he noted that Slashdot thrives in an environment where people seek more and more fragmentation in their lives. "Instead of knowing something about a lot of things, we know a lot about a little.
So concentrtating on a few subjects rather than many is fragmentation? I don't think so some how...
Chris Wareham
Re:Absence of Editorial Supervision?
by
Chandon+Seldon
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· Score: 1
How does their being "college kids with squeaky voices" effect their ability to diferentiate between uninteresting stories and interesting stories?
-- -- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
more accurate, and more inciteful, then anything in the "mainstream" media.
Yes, and insightful too...
No criticism meant here./. articles can easily be both. Whether that was on purpose or not it was an insightful comment.:) Just being a pedant, ignore me.
Having ACs start at 0 instead of 1 is a Good Thing (TM) because it promotes getting a user account. This is good for a bunch of reasons, but the best one is that Rob and co. want people to get user acounts and are therefore promoting it.
So, if you want to start at 1, Log In! It's not that hard, and all it does it lets people tell if the same person made two different posts. (I am ignoring the issue of people with a default rating of 2)
-- -- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Though it would seem, alas, that spelling is in the 1% you don't know.
Re:open-source journalism
by
Priestess
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· Score: 1
Yet in the past journalists have gone to jail to protect their sources. I guess all that's going to change now?
Heh.
Pre........
Slashdot: a review of journalism
by
renoX
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· Score: 1
> I think Slashdot is a kind of metajournalism.
I do fully agree with you! What makes Slashdot interesting is the discussion that follows each topic, the only bad point is that sometimes the discussion will degenerate into a flame war instead of talking of really interesting topics.
But the moderation system is really nice, it generates a "summary" of the really interesting points. Even if sometimes, it feels weird to read a reply to an unknown post.
Unfortunately even this moderation system has limits, for example there has been recently discussion about the shortcomings of X, should it be replaced or not which generated 500+ comments of susprisingly good quality (mostly), so I was kind of lost due to the volume, but hey nothing is perfect.
The only suggestion I could make is to have someone payed to make summaries of topics which have generated a big interest...
It doesn't have to be like that.
by
Squeeze+Truck
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· Score: 1
I forsee a day when people will post info directly to slashdot without mucking about with the high-priced intermediaries. Like: "Hi!, I'm Linus. Let me tell you about what we're thinking about putting into kernel 2.3.x!"
As it is, I'd say maybe 50% of "news" comes from sources other than news publications.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Although you have to agree, the summaries themselves as posted on/. do often have inaccurancies in them.
However, the community of intelligent commenters makes up for that. It seems like 8 times out of 10, someone from the 'inside' of the story, be it someone who works for the company, or the project, or whatever, comes forward and we get a better view of the situation than any news site out there.
Conventional journalism as "reliable".
by
nyet
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· Score: 3
It amazes me that conventional journalists have the gall to repeat this mantra over and over again. Every single time the "conventional" news media covers a story that I, or a good friend, have personal knowledge of, they invariably screw it up and add some bizzare audience grabbing spin to it. EVERY TIME. And this isn't just for "nerd" or technical news. Anything is fair game.
It makes you wonder about the rest of the "honest", "reliable", "unbiased" journalism they churn out that you don't have a way to independantly verify. Sure, its not all malicious and/or self serving munging of the news, but anything that can't be attributed to a conspiracy can certainly be attributed to plain laziness.
And speaking of "un-biased" journalism... as long as the medium, or reporter, or whatever at LEAST has their "bias" out in the open, I know exactly what I'm in for. Stories that have that "I'm totally unbiased, just reporting the facts because its my job" style invariably give me the heebie jeebies.
Try to get to the main Slashdot page. We've been Wired(ed). Funny feeling, eh?
-Sloth503
Rosebud
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I watched Citizen Kane a few years back, and one piece of dialoge has stuck with me from the movie. "..what will people think? People will think what I tell them to think". Kane was referring to his power over the pages of his newspaper and how they could change public opinion. Journalist's obviously love the power to help influence public opinion, and Slashdot is a threat to their influence. The commentary on slashdot is the very auditing system they are proposing in this article. Only it monitors the legitimate and established journalists. Instead of one editor making a determination on what is true or valid news, a community is making the decision.
Never really thought of a cute little penguin as a major communist.
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Re:Absence of Editorial Supervision?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They're deciding what will generate the most banner reloads and clickthroughs. Listen to the Shashdot In Outer Space (or whatever it is called) audio programs. They're a bunch of college kids with squeaky voices.
I would fancy that people who read these types of sites are renisance men who actually know a great deal about a great number of things. I for one know a great deal about history: american/world/geologic/science fiction, etc. I also am proficient in biology, astronomy, philosophy, and cultural ananlysis; all this as well as what I love to be involved with: linux. This stated I believe that one can know almost everything 99% of attainable material that the general population would know about almost every subject.
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Re:Renisance Man
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Though it would seem, alas, that spelling is in the 1% you don't know.
Funny, he said he knew history. I would have thought that he would at least be able to spell the names of the major European historic periods.
Leonardo Da Vinci is spinning in his grave...:)
Re:Renisance Man
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Lazarus Long was mistaken. Specialization is the basis of trade and technology - I can be better at some things if I ignore other things and let other people take care of them for me, and everyone comes out ahead.
There's only so much you can learn in one lifetime (especially if your life is shortened because all the people who would have been doctors and engineers were busy learning to hunt and weave and try to build huts instead).
Maybe they're coming over to the OSS side?
by
miahrogers
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· Score: 1
This article seemed to be kissing a lot of slashdot a**. Looks like wired has seen where having their palms greased with microsoft's cash is going to get them. If you've visited WebMonkey lately you've seen the articles about setting up apache and IP masquerading with Linux. There was also an article about gnome and another about VMware in wired(magazine) a couple months ago. I think wired may be coming over to the OSS side of things now. I hope they do, I used to look up to wired for reliable information, but lately they've been catering more to the multi-million dollar ceo's of large companies than to all us little geeks. This looks like an effort to clean up their act.
There's also "alignment". If a poster's comments are consistantly moderated up (or down), his default posting score is increased (or decreased).
-- I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
That's Infotainment.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yes, it's scary. The journalism profession has sunk so low that they acutally beleive "that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas." There hasn't been an unbiased, free of agendas report written in journalism. EVER!!!
Indeed. There is no such animal as an unbiased anything if humans are anywhere involved. Every human has opinions, and everything a human writes is colored by his or her opinions.
As the Vorlons say, "Understanding is a three-edged sword - your side, my side, and the truth in between." The ideal way to understand an issue is to collect as many viewpoints as you're able to process, and sift them. Ideally, include viewpoints whose spin is opposite your own. And since you don't have time to read everything, evaluate your sources - the more honest a source is about its spin, and the more facts opposing its position that source is willing to include, the more useful is that source.
--
-- Do I look like I speak for my employer?
There no such thing as unbiased information
by
bogado
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· Score: 1
The simple fact that a person writen/recorded or created a news piece means that this news piece is biased by that person's point view. The most he can do is try to be unbiased. Unbiased jornalism is like a phisic problem where you ignore the friction to make things easy. And don't even think that you can get as close as you want to "unbiased".
In fact most of the time news agencies are realy biased, they have advertisers that they can't piss-off. They usualy have a editorial-line that they follow so they are usualy very-very biased.
All that said, I would like to add that slashdot-like news is the closer you can get to unbiased news. Still a biased (just look at MS discussions and you will see the bias flowing) source but at least you have thousand of diferent biases.
Well of course this is biased by my opinion that love slashdot.
-- "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
--
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Wired's Journalist integrity (the lies they say)
by
Inoshiro
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· Score: 1
"In that sense, the site is no different from the tradition of alternative weekly newspapers published in just about every large American city -- papers that praise a few holy cows and lambaste regular targets. "
Casini was loaded with 75 pounds of plutonium. The only people to raise a ruccuss when NASA lauched it (on a rocket with a 1 in 12 failure rate), were the alternative news media. The "Tradditional" media often either glosses over, for _FAILS_ to cover some very serious subject material. Hell, Rob knew about Casini, and not because of CNN or Wired.
Has anyone here ever heard of Project Censored? It's a wonderful project for journalism majors at a US university in California (can't remember which one). Each year, they pick and review the 10 least published but potentially very important stories. Remember echelon? Reported in alternative news papers. Cancer causing agents in makeup and skins lotions in 10x the amounts they showed up in meats like Bacon int he 1970s (anyone remember that scare?), only alternative news covered that.
Alternative news may seem to have an agenda, but it doesn't. These papers are usually put out by University students, or other people who care about getting the word around about potentially important stories.
Just look up "Project Censored" in AltaVista, it will take you to what you want.
I'm tempted to add cnn.com and wired.com to my Internet Junkbuster filter, or just axe off access with IPchains.
-- -- Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I totally agree: is it me or has it gone all corporate. Its more adverts than content (which mirrors the net, so that is okay!).
Are you being funny or what?
by
Crick
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· Score: 1
Are you being serious?
Moderation and reputation
by
Cuthalion
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· Score: 1
One of the properties of per-post moderation (rather than per-poster moderation) is that it understands that different people know different amounts about different things. There certainly is some element of eloquence which makes for 'good posts', but.. nobody knows everything about everything, and it's safer not to assume that some people do.
--
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Not only that, but the external links that are added have exceptional value. There was tremendous evidence of this is the aforementioned evolution discussion.
Researchers are working on paper that can be printed on and erased and reused. I think that'll be great for us geeks who print out web pages, code listings, etc.
There is, of course, a very good system in action right here. It is caled a "username". When combined with a "brain", it allows the reader to determine whether to trust articles written by someone who they've already read before.
When I read this in the article, I thought that it's pretty obvious the author hasn't discovered what those numbers behind the reply titles are for... (Abuse-free) moderating is a reputation rating system... And (with the exception of abuses) it works pretty damn well, IMHO.
Wired almost gets it right. Kudos to /. again
by
CodeShark
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· Score: 3
Like other posters/readers, etc. I think that/. does a much better job of depth reporting and analysis than Wired, Salon, etc. and that Rob is just being a little too humble when he says that/. isn't all that deep.
Numerous examples come to mind:
When an "Ask Slashdot" question gets going, often a new project or project direction will open up, improving Linux and Open Source in the process.
When a video card mfr or other board maker gets feedback from the screaming Linux masses via/. that we'd love to use their product -- if only it was Linux compatible...
When a new kernel, security item, or OS product is released for testing,/. often tips us off, and we all go bang the heck out of the code, resulting in fast bug detection.
When quasi- and various- governmental agencies screw up,/. blows the whistle and we nail them with the Slashdot Effect.
A more "mainsteam" f's up a story --/. not only gets the corrections (via more clued in posters), we often submit replies to the mainstream media which ofter lucid, well thought out counterpoints to the original articles.
Finally, we compete with the Beast From Redmond by making sure that other OS's and technologies get adequate, honest reporting.
Not bad for (as Wired puts it) "a three-person web site" in the middle of Michigan, eh? It used to be "....news at 11 (p.m.)...." IMHO what we're seeing here is....
Slashdot--- the future of interactive journalism...why the hell wait 'til 11!!
-- ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Star Trek is not Degenerate but if it was...
by
bliss
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· Score: 0
I really wouldn't care if I had to order star trek videos in brown paper packages I would do almost anything to get ahold of star trek info. It's just better than average sci-fi stuff. The rest of it just looks like The Jetsons or something out of Looking Backward with people wearing crappy clothes or using technology that is not even researched out when they wish to even give a far fetched account of logic. At least star trek backs up most of their data with facts that have some basis in reality.
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
He says - "("It is, in essence, a democratization of journalism from the consumer's end," he said, though he cautioned that readers must be more cautious than ever about trusting the sources.
Whenever discussing do-it-yourself reporting as exemplified by Slashdot, traditional newshounds inevitably return to the issue of integrity and reliability. They say that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas.)"
Bwwaaaaaaaahhhhh! I am much more comfortable listening to a bunch of my peer's(1) comments, than I am taking a "real Journalist's"(2) word for anything being gospel... I firmly believe that this forum most accurately portrays the validity of a news item through it's peer review process.
(1) as demented as they may be..... (2) Geraldo R. is a "Trained Professional Journalist"
-- Rick B.
AC's are people too
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I've seen a lot of quality posts by AC's... I've seen a lot of worthless posts that have been by registered users.
the moderation system is the biggest flaw of slashdot... The fact that some posts default to a higher score than others is ludicrous... At least Rob should allow us to turn off these kinds of "smart" rankings.
Maybe a system using collaborative filtering would be better -- let each reader filter out the comments that others who he/she usually agrees with about appropriate ratings don't like.
Well, once upon a time it was a Good Thing to have journalists and editors to determine "news or not news." See, there used to be a thing called "Journalistic Ethics."
Much like we trust doctors because they've got a degree, we used to be able to trust journalists with degrees. These days you can really replace the old "what is truth?" question with "what is news?"
I'm SO sick of the crap that gets put forth as news that it makes me ill. I've cancelled all of my newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and choose my own news from the web, plus I listen to public radio (God, please help Pacifica). Local news is crap, TV news is even worse, CNN and MSNBC and the like are SO owned by Disney (Cap-City/ABC) and GE that they're nothing but marketing with ads besides... Noticed how many WB stars have been on the cover of Time lately?
Wired is Wired. Mostly useless, but occasionally informative. And just for the record: knowledge of Star Trek trivia is about the worst test of a journalist you can come up with. Get a life, will you people?
You could say that most of these sites are really just compilations of other sources which come from places like company web sites, observable trends, etc. Everyone compiles except those who actually do or create. I must admit comments are cool and interesting. Seriously I look for long comment ammounts and print them out in hard copy and read them for kicks during the slow periods. Quite entertaining and helps the process of deforestation and bringing about an eco-friendly anti-utopia that I will never be alive to see he he he.
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Slashdot rewards the users and the press!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I read a note about the "growing a**-kissing of publications to Linux". Do you know what is causing some of that? Slashdot! Slashdot is much more than a place to read about Linux and nerd issues.
What Slashdot does is it gets a concentrated mass of people all interested in the same subject. When an online publication creates a story of interest, (marketing speak begins here) Slashdot focuses the collective clickstreams of its users to create a massive reward for the publishing entity (end of marketing speak).
So, not only does Slashdot advocate the use of Linux, but it turns the general media towards the issue of Linux by delivering a direct and tangible reward. The reward is additional pageviews. The reward is also getting the name of the publication in front of the reader.
Sneaky that Malda. He's created a sort of Political Action Committee that serves both ends of the chain!
First post prevention...
by
SuperKendall
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· Score: 1
Another way would be simply to not let AC's post at all until a "real" user has posted a reply. Then an AC would know they could not be a first post, and would hopefully be intelligent enough not to claim they were...
-- "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Did you read the rest of the article or just stop there? The next paragraph mentions that Slashdot does indeed have a moderation system....."
Yes I did read the rest of the article it's just this stuck out to me as being wrong and I felt like commenting on it. You're right though, they do mention the moderation system later on. This article is full of contradictions it seems. From "It needs something like eBay has... It has something like eBay has" to "It isn't journalism... is this really journalism?" (someone else pointed it out)
They need to proofread... sheesh. Or at least skim for consistency.
If you look at articles like the recent one on evolution that split the readers into factions, something kind of different appears. I would bet that people trusted different "experts" in their evaluation of the comments following the article, depending on their own predisposition on the matter.
Slashdot sometimes provides a multi-valued filter on stories. There are well written conflicting comments that are highly rated. I find this more interesting and yes, entertaining, than a traditional news source promoting just one view.
Jim
Re:The "Neutral" Press
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The entire article seems one large defense of the "slant free" "unbiased" and "credible" nature of mainstream press... which, as everybody who pays any attention knows, is a MYTH! Newspapers and news networks are owned by big corporations interested in their own bottom line... does anybody honestly believe that any viewpoint that might threaten the dominance of corporations over everyday citizens could ever make it into the "unbiased" mainstream press??? News sites like/. allow people to analyze news and question prepackaged knowledge, which is almost always slanted to deceive.
Weblogs are the new journalism.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"Real" journalists all steal from each other anyway. Watch the 11 o'clock news. It's all the same thing on ABCCBSNBCFOX. WashingtonPost=NYTimes=NPR. Big deal, different freqeuncy, same corporate sponsored garbage. The Associated Press is a propganda tool for the Establishment. The small one/two/three man operations like Slashdot, Drudge, Robot Wisdom, mempool, Progressive Review are a return to the days of competition in news. Sure, they all have "agendas". So what? Michael Eisner doesn't have an agenda? Katherine Graham doesn't have an agenda? The arrogance of the big media is pathetic. They are finally getting what they deserve.
Re: What makes other news service more accurate??
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pingouin
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· Score: 1
On one hand it says "Slashdot is not journalism but rather just a list of links to other people's articles", then on the other hand it questions the accuracy of Slashdot's journalism -- how can Slashdot be innaccurate if all it has is links to other people's articles, such as Wired and ZDNN???
There's also, on occasion, links to rumors and PR, or inaccurate info in the submittor's summary. It's not simply a bare link to an article at a news site.
Personally I think Slashdot is/more/ accurate because of the moderation system. Eventually the truth shines through as comments get scored upward.A great example is yesterday's post of a guy who claimed he solved the IPv4 addressing shortage.
[...]
But here on Slashdot there are many techies who know better and clued the rest of us in that the guy is a nut -- that's the kind of insight you get here on Slashdot.
Fine, if the matter is a straightforward technical or historical issue. But the moderation system -- in general -- is only as good as the subject matter and the moderators./. provides the means for a poster to be more accurate than the journalist in the linked article. But often it's all just a matter of opinion. The moderation itself doesn't always do the trick -- it can, and will at times, devolve into fruitless Mob Rule. I keep my threshold at -1, because the moderators often miss out on good comments; conversely, it means I get to see all the worst pack-mentality or adolescent-preening posts. Sometimes it isn't worth it for me to wade through the muck to find one of the "good" posts.
The only cure for bad journalism is good journalism. It doesn't matter what sort of "new paradigm" (or old one) produces it. Sometimes getting a useful nugget from/. is like an evening of root canal.
Microsoft stories are identified with a graphic of Bill Gates mocked up as a Borg from Star Trek Generations.
And another reader already pointed out that that is a _major_ flub.
But the article was poorly done in other ways. It was, simply put, a comparison of apples and oranges: Slashdot compared to "traditional" journalism. The quotes from people from "traditional" news sites were stale and meaningless. The best part about the article was Rob's quote that he's not a journalist. Other than that it was like all of the other Slashdot stories I've read: superficial.
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
As far as I'm concerned he's got it backwards. When I see a Wired News story posted on Slashdot, I usually read the story, then read through the comments looking for someone who knows more about the story's subject than the author (and I usually find such a person).
With as many readers as Slashdot has we're bound to have SOMEBODY with more experience with a technical project, phenomenon or area of study than the author, who, well, sits in an office writing all day.
-- /* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
That is exactly it. The nice thing about/. is not the indepedent journalism so much as a forum to poke holes in the bullshit real journalism keeps coming up with.
But lately most of their articles seem to be about business and $$$.
And not just the articles, either. The September '99 issue sits on my desk, open to page 126, where there's an ad for a business jet, for heaven's sake! I got the subscription as a gift, but I don't know if I'll renew -- this just doesn't seem to be the in-your-face magazine it once was.
-- "How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I've always been impressed with Wired's layout, and 50% of the time, its content. I have very few beefs with Wired. The Borg-Generations blurb was just plain silly, though...
On the subject of Breadth vs. Depth:
by
fable2112
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· Score: 4
IMHO, too much of either is bad. Rob is quoted as saying that now "we know a lot about a little," rather than vice-versa.
I've seen many posts here on/. complaining that the focus here should be narrower than it is -- Star Wars, the Hellmouth series, etc aren't really "news for nerds," in their view.
Needless to say, I disagree. As I've posted in the past, a purely Linux-focused or even computer-focused site only makes sense if "computer" is a necessary and therefore unstated modifier of "nerd." It is not. I am an English nerd (aka technical writer with a journalism degree), and I'm sure there are more of us here, as well as a good-sized handful of "science nerds," etc.
I think that/. strikes a relatively good balance between having a main focus and having a reasonable breadth and diversity of news. (In other words, I don't think/. is necessarily "a lot about a little" -- don't sell yourself short, Rob!)
And I think the not-strictly-computer threads are necessary in much the same way that in the SCA, you can't become a knight JUST because you're a good fighter, even though fighting is the main focus of the knighthood. At a minimum, you're also expected to teach fighters, and to know how to dance, play chess, and some other things I'm forgetting right now.;)
Super-hyper-overspecialization isn't a very good thing -- we still need common ground with the rest of the world. But having a major focus, and supplementing with bits and pieces slightly outside of that focus that are still interesting, is a good way to go. I like and appreciate it.:)
-- "Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today... but it wasn't anybody I knew" -The Moody Blues, "Dear Diar
Re:Jounalism?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>It presupposes the public are a bunch of retards,
Heh. The thing is, the public *IS* a bunch of retards.
I agree with your assesment of the state of news media, but it's that way for a reason.
It's what people want.
There's plenty of good news on PBS.
Does anyone watch it?
Of course not.
People don't want real news, they want informative entertainment, and that's what they get.
What really offends me is the notion that just because someone works for a traditional media outlet they are trustworthy and free from bias. that is such obvious crap, obviously perpetuated by people who work in traditional news.
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority.
I found this facinating... There is, of course, a very good system in action right here. It is caled a "username". When combined with a "brain", it allows the reader to determine whether to trust articles written by someone who they've already read before.
Seems to me this used to be the way the "old" media worked.
Anyway, I find this "old media" fascination with the need for a "trusted" source ironic in the sense that the biggest problem they face right now is a complete lack of trust among the general population. I don't for a second trust any of those I see talk about the need for sources that can be "trusted".
To use a sadder example of web journalism, Matt Drudge, while completely lacking in the sort of reputation that would earn my trust is no different from the mainstream media in this respect. I see people I have no trust in complain about how Drudge isn't a "real journalist" because he is not trustworthy. Well, yeah... That's what makes him a journalist.
I trust those who post to slashdot to the extent that I can check them out, and to what checking I've done, posters here are often more accurate, and more inciteful, then anything in the "mainstream" media. It is nice to have a media outlet that actually pokes bullshit stories full of holes within the hour. This is far better than the idiocy that gets printed in most newspapers or news magazines today.
From the way he wrote the article, it almost looks like he was applying for a job with Slashdot!
Otherwise, he did bring up some interesting points: the people who are reading/. today, are very different from the type of readers a few months ago. Also, the fact that no one person is controlling the views and opinions posted seems to erk some of the editors of the other news sources.
Now my question is, are moderators on/. decided by posts alone? If so, the guy who's always "I posted first! Phhht" will be in quite a good position!
Re:no rating system???
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Mike+Buddha
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· Score: 1
Well there has to be a place for more of a bureaucracy. There's always room for a Corporate style bureaucracy. How could you function without quarterly performance ratings and Middle managers and Professionals to do all that stuff that we're doing right now... D'Oh!
-- by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Re:'objectivity' & 'trained, professional journali
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Mike+A.
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· Score: 1
A quite different system of comment upon non-news on the Web is CritLink. It allows you to post and read comments on webpages, from links inline with the webpage being critiqued. It also tracks backlinks. Very nice, makes the Web more useful.
Allen
That is a little too difficult and censoring.
by
bliss
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· Score: 0
What is wrong with this is that if you filter out comments then you cannot see the whole picture. For example if someone posts responses to an article about linux and says that for this and this reason windows has a better solution (it could happen) then if the rest of the community which was oriented towards linux would moderate that comment down to -1 and prevent you from reading it. Paying people for stories will make the site crappy. When people are trying to get money for anything the whole outlook changes. What would stop me for example to be the first one to post a story if I get say an 0C3 line and get a huge server to peg several sites for html files and links and do a crc on the files and if it changes just flag it have the person on the console wirte a short review and suddently one person can get all the goods. Plus the idea of getting money involved defeats the purpose entirely when I am through with my day of classes (one does not work when one is supposed to be attending a college level course and applying mental activity to the breaking point) I expect to head to a site with like minded individuals who are not seeking profit in any way, shape, or form; this is the best thing that I can think of in the way of entertainment. Most any site that any one individual does will never hold a candle to slashdot however if you put up such a site and remind me (provided it's free for the looking) I will stroll on by. Exactly how can someone get such a complex relational model up and running easily? This is something for a dissertation.
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Did you read the rest of the article or just stop there? The next paragraph mentions that Slashdot does indeed have a moderation system.....
But they are the accurate authority :)
by
Trith
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· Score: 2
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
See, they now better. It's Star Trek Generations! :-)
With that said, let me ask you this.
1. Who knows more about the reliablility of MS code? A. Someone who as read up on the subject through a technical book. (MCSE) B. A Journalist who hears something from the company who made the software. C. People who have thousands of hours of experience in dealing with it. D. Bill Gates E. Al Gore
On the other hand, he noted that Slashdot thrives in an environment where people seek more and more fragmentation in their lives. "Instead of knowing something about a lot of things, we know a lot about a little."
"News for Nerds" is a title. I'd say most people here (At least all of my Comp Sci friends and I) know more than just computer stuff. Granted, we talk about computer stuff on here. Why? Please don't make me fill out another multiple choice question. But anyway, I play most sports decently, read science fiction, play piano, run 2 miles a day, fix cars, listen to all kinds of music, date my wife, talk about the stock market, play pool, and drink mountain dew.
However, I can't spell very well. You'll probably see a few errors in here if your not careful.
Please don't assume something so silly as "They read about computers; therefore, that is all they know about"
One of the more telling comments...
by
Maledictus
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· Score: 3
...is from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNN Tech news.
"The slant is so weird," Foley said, citing a recent Slashdot-linked interview on the Microsoft Web site. "What they highlight from the interview is not what a journalist would highlight. They like to highlight things that make Microsoft look stupid."
Again -- "What they highlight...is not what a journalist would highlight." So? Is that supposed to detract from/.'s credibility somehow? Does Mary Jo Foley have some sort of omniscience that is granted to all journalism graduates that makes what she and others would "highlight" something I need to know, even something I need to live my technical life by? What about the things journalists wouldn't "highlight?" Are those issues that we don't need to worry our pretty little heads about?
She then goes on to say that she checks/. five times a day...heh. To see what she should have "highlighted" I guess.
I have bookmarked Salon, Upside, Andover, CNet, Ars Technia, Macintouch, Slashdot, TechWeb, and The Motley Fool, among others. And what isn't bookmarked is usually found as a link from one of these sites. All have different styles, different priorities and all -- including and especially the "traditional" news avenues -- highlight different issues. After I sift and filter, I think I come up with my business and technical best guess. But without the "non-traditional" avenues, I don't think I'd have the whole story. The inside, "hey, we're sittin' here working with this stuff" story.
And I'm not some kid surfing around for kicks in the basement of the university computer building. I'm an administrative type that recommends and makes hardware purchases -- things like multiple midrange servers, workstations of all flavors, manufacturing shop floor data collection software...but I digress. The point is, I take my technology news seriously because I buy stuff and management expects that stuff to work. I track the technology market from here, among other places.
Not everyone gets their news from only one source. If truth be told sometimes there have been more intriguing articles in my local newspaper than at slashdot I just go here to feel like I am something other than the product of one area's reasoning or biases. I have never even been able to leave the western US. Most of the ideas, people, areas that are mentioned are foreign to me and must be studied in depth.
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
One difference between the mainstream press.
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mrsam
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· Score: 1
Unlike (cough) traditional webnews media,/. does not chop up a single story into multiple pages, just for the purpose of serving as many banner ads as possible (you can get/. to spew the whole discussion thread at you, at once). --
Re:One difference between the mainstream press.
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Rombuu
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· Score: 1
Not since they put this stupid low comment threshold on flat mode pages. I mean, I've got like a 300Mb/s connection on my corporate LAN, why can't I see 800 comments at a time?
Oh, becuase/. needs to serve more banner ads from adfu.
--
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Major problem with the NNTP protocol and Usenet
by
bliss
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· Score: 0
You need a seperate program typically to gain access to it. There are almost no web-based nntp access points. You must connect to a particular server to gain access to it. Messages are not always on every server. You need to have "transfer rights" to get a message from most servers or along a server path. The minute that anyone gets a system with web based nntp access that will work without crappy cookies or https urls maybe I will check them out but until then?
-- The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Ya know, for all the crap that first-posters get, I kind of like it. Or at least it doesn't really bother me. They always gets moderated down (perhaps a waste of mod person, or perhaps a reason for them), and cause no real damage. I like to think of as more of a cultural phenomenon. You know, the stupid sh*t everyone, at some point or other, tries but no one is willing to condone. I agree with the "part childish behavior" part, but it helps to lighten what are often very serious, very technical discussions, like the ones for polls:-)
/. is "new media" defined, as in there was nothing like it before but new technology has made it possible and even commonplace, kudos to the/. team (and the Andover whipcrackers)
It presupposes the public are a bunch of retards, that we can't be critical to sort the truth from the fiction, and the news from the non-news, and we _need_ editors and "journalists" to do that for us.
Actually, I think the article said that this is what journalists are saying about Slashdot. I think the whole point was that with the Slashdot model, the readers are the ones who do the editing. The author seemed to be reserving judgement about whether this was a Good Thing or not.
Wired Magazine wants to be Forbes (paper edition)
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Duke+of+URL
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· Score: 1
Has anyone noticed that the paper edition of Wired magazine has lately printed so many boring stories on tech companies, and how we too can all be rich like them? Its kinda like Forbes except not as boring. I like the old Wired magazine style better before they sold out. More information and more interesting information.
Won't work. You'd just start seeing "Phrst P0st" and every variation under the sun.
Re:Wired Magazine wants to be Forbes (paper editio
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Duke+of+URL
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· Score: 1
I should have emphasized the following:
Its kinda like Forbes except not as boring.
Brain? Brain? What is brain?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Who could resist this classic Star Trek quote. (Uh, I think it was from Generations.) About the username and credibilitiy issue, you could probably take a step back and say that the username is like the name of a modern publication (Libery Press, New York Times, 2600). Some have more credibility than others. Some are far more slanted one direction or another on certain topics. But it doesn't really matter. We are the reality-check for anything that is said. I don't care if Bill Gates wrote it. If the thought is sound, then it is sound.
What about that ZDTV Silicon Spin?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Slashdot may have editors decided what stories to focus on, but they (the editors) are not (actively) editing at the COMMENT level. But then again, Silicon Spin isn't editing the comment of every pundant either. Is Silicon Spin a good model?
Yes and no. The people on the show have an air of credibility to them because of one fancy title or another. But their credibility often escapes through their hole the minute they open it and jump in on a topic that isn't their center field. There's some good stuff and some bad stuff. But they've got a halfway decent reality-check system going on with their handful of people.
Slashdot is like this, except the number of pundants and reality-checkers are in the hundreds. (Read: Silicon Spin with critical mass.) BTW... that's the problem with a number of shows like that and "Call for Help". Not enough critical mass in the way of idea generation or peer review.
What makes other news service more accurate??
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2
I don't get it, the article contradicts itself.
On one hand it says "Slashdot is not journalism but rather just a list of links to other people's articles", then on the other hand it questions the accuracy of Slashdot's journalism -- how can Slashdot be innaccurate if all it has is links to other people's articles, such as Wired and ZDNN???
Personally I think Slashdot is/more/ accurate because of the moderation system. Eventually the truth shines through as comments get scored upward.A great example is yesterday's post of a guy who claimed he solved the IPv4 addressing shortage. Now, if their had been no discussion of the article (as on other news sites) many of us and many tech jouranlists would have believed the guy may be on to something. But here on Slashdot there are many techies who know better and clued the rest of us in that the guy is a nut -- that's the kind of insight you get here on Slashdot.
journalists don't like us....
by
HBK-4G
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· Score: 2
it seems as though "mainstream" journalists are more obliged to read Slashdot as a matter of user interest rather than feel like it has any true value.
I read Slashdot for the fun of it. Sometimes the news is funny, sometimes serious, sometimes even untrue, but the way in which it is presented is the draw. Also, being run by people who *know* what they're talking about is a big plus. Big sites like ABCNews or ZD may cover more topics, but their writers/editors are rather in the dark about some things.
As for the remark about biased news, name me a newspaper in the US whose editors aren't pro-Republican or pro-Democrat or pro-whatever. Biases exist everywhere. You can count on ABCNews having a slightly more favorable stance for Disney than MSNBC or Yahoo. They'll deny it, but its there; who wants to lose their job because of a flippant comment? Slashdot (i believe) was at first a Linux news site. Naturally, there's going to be a bias against Microsoft. Does that mean the news is any less true? No. Will the way of reporting it be different? Perhaps. But when *you* run the site, *you* get to choose how the information is conveyed.
to end this rant, I think that mainstream journalists need to wake up to the way people are getting their information today. Slashdot attracts viewers because of its individuality and the way news is presented. It may not take over the world, but it is a force to be viewed with respect, not with disgust.
From the article: "All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority."
wtf??? Isn't the moderation system like this? It seems to fit the description above, albeit it has a few flaws (probably mostly to do with varying personal opinions, tho).
Hrm. Maybe I'm just missing what they're trying to say. Comments?
Bah. I am offended by that article. It presupposes the public are a bunch of retards, that we can't be critical to sort the truth from the fiction, and the news from the non-news, and we _need_ editors and "journalists" to do that for us. If I were an average citizen I'd be annoyed, but being a geek, it's doubly insulting. Besides of which, all the "jounalism" I ever see on TV or newspapers, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, looks exactly like Entertainment Tonight, and they call that "news".
Not to mention the TNG flub. Stupidstupidstupid.
Nothing new here, why is it news?
by
gad_zuki!
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· Score: 1
Like many others I'm curious why/. is suddenly news? The article *seems* like the kind you'd pay to have publish to push your product - fluff. Heh, not that I'm suggesting Rob is paying Wired for this crap. Wired should be paying each of us for all that extra traffic/attention for absolutly NOTHING. No 'reliable' or 'informed' opinions there.
When has a paragraph pointing to an article or web page considered journalism? If anyone here is guilty of the crime of being a journalist its the infinite army of posters. Scary, I know.
Tech journalists float somewhere between lawyers who have been on TV and MTV VJ's on the great ladder of integrity. They are the inside jokes among anyone who actually has read the manual for what they're writing about.
Biased? Maybe. Slashdot doesn't have to sell ad space to Microsoft, thus they can speak their minds. Bill as borg too much? Its called humor, martian, we take pleasure in it.
i sent the author a note about this (and I'm probably not the only one - poor guy:) Anyway, read the following...
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority. One such system is up and running on eBay, ensuring that buyers and sellers on the auction site can trust one other.
Three paragraphs later...
A version of the eBay system is in place at Slashdot. Participants can earn moderation points, and readers can pick a threshold that will screen posts accordingly. Registered users automatically begin with a higher rating than anonymous users.
Either the article wasn't edited well ("Wait, there is a rating system - better add this paragraph here") or I missed his point...
Theme music makes for a better read!
by
Wonko42
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· Score: 1
Woah. I clicked on the link to visit the Wired article, and just as I did so, the MP3 playing in my playlist ended and the next one started...and it just happened to be Toto's Main Title theme from the movie Dune.
I read the entire Wired article with the Dune Title Theme playing in the background, and got this weird feeling...as if Slashdot and Slashdot-like sites were (much like the Fremen) inciting a revolution and about to take over the planet. Hmm. I suggest everyone get that MP3 and go read the article again while listening to it. Wow, that was unnerving.
i'm having serious issues with this phrase... i mean, really...there's no source to open i think something like massively-paralell journalism or distributed journalism would better describe it...but then again open-source is becoming such a nifty buzzwerd that i almost expect the drooling monkies runing the media to use it in all sorts of inappropriate places
/** End Disgust here **/
-- -dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
Nobody scoops anybody (almost)
by
dillon_rinker
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· Score: 4
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired
i agree, BUT...
Almost all of the tech news I read fits into one of these categories:
1. Rehash of some company's press release "Cool new product (tm) available Real Soon Now" (I used to work for Gateway and was both saddened and amused when corporate press releases were reworded slightly and printed under a tech reporter's byline major PC magazines).
2. Rehash of come company's financial statement - or "UberTeq posts record sales".
3. Media / corporate collaboration to produce "news" (ZD anyone?).
4. Opinion pieces, where one person lets their thought ricochet around their skull and writes about it. The level of interestingness depends on the cluefulness of the writer.
5. The reporter talked to someone who knew something and then wrote about it.
In short, there is very little originality in tech journalism. Slashdot makes an excellent filter for categories 1-3, and produces categories 4-5 by default.
I was wondering whether I was the only one who thought Wired has gone downhill. I started reading it a couple years ago (I'm referring mainly to the printed magazine) and got turned on by the good quality technical and philosphical content. But lately most of their articles seem to be about business and $$$. Thank goodness for Slashdot -- it's the most intellectually stimulating part of my daily routine.
They need to proofread... sheesh. Or at least skim for consistency.
Indeed, they do need to. I'm thinking that the article was written in stages, or something like that, for it to be so contradictory. (As in, for it to contradict itself so, it makes it seem as if the author(s) found something to write/wrote a paragraph, and then later, upon more research, etc., they found a new statement to make, which contradicted what they'd already said, but they didn't know that because they apparently chose not to review the final draft before submission.)
Oh well, c'est la vie.
--
Insert mind here.
LOL
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1
> They say that consumers must rely on > trained, professional journalists to ensure a > report is unbiased and free of agendas. LOL! Is that the same group of trained, professional journalists who bothered to pay attention to the Drudge/Goldberg/Tripp muckraking, or the trained, professional journalists who have gleefully been digging into the GWB muckraking? Few reporters have scruples, and in technology reporting even fewer journalists have a clue. The nice thing about/. is that a lot of (or at least a few) experts are here, so wide-eyed reports on the newest product from the monopoly-of-the-month can be deflated.
Jon Katz must be going nuts!!
by
PeterMiller
·
· Score: 0
Who wants to take bets that Jon is saying "Damn, why didn't I write that!?";-)
Absence of Editorial Supervision?
by
dave_aiello
·
· Score: 3
The Wired article says:
"In this model you don't have editors deciding what is legitimate and what isn't," said Jonathan Dube, a senior associate producer with ABCNews.com.
What are CmdrTaco and Hemos doing when they decide which stories to post? Aren't they serving as editors, and determining what is legitimate and what isn't?
I liked this story but mostly I was interested in the views of the journalists interviewed. My favorite was the derision of the stories because there is no editor to look things over and approve them. This shows a clear lack of understanding of the process of sites like Slashdot. A perfect example was the story on the 25th about the supposed "new" way the guy found to make the ipv4 address structure last longer. I don't really have the know-how to know if this was alright or not (beyond the horrible grammar) but within 30 minutes of reading the comments here, I knew it was crap because I had a hundred people way more knowledgeable than I am reading the story and picking it apart. There's no way to do something like that in a traditional news source. They expect us to trust our info to some editor we are completely unfamiliar with, no thanks. What made me laugh the most was the fact that the reporter talked about how Slashdot was unreliable, then she says she checks the site 5 times a day looking for news. I guess as soon as she reports it the news will be reliable?
Slashdot Mirror
...since I don't post stuff I know nothing about...
Youll never be a journalist with that attitude.
The cake is a pie
"But as an advocacy community, Slashdot is upfront about its biases. Microsoft stories are identified with a graphic of Bill ates mocked up as a Borg from Star Trek Generations."
You'd think someone writing for Wired (tired) would know something about Star Trek.
-Sloth503
I read slashdot, nytimes, memepool, the onion, salon, and The New Yorker (on paper).
Slashdot is to journalism what logic is to the study of mathematics. This worries all of the mediocre journalists out there who think that being a journalist entitles them to try to hide thier biases and agendas.
The Slashdot era will bring newfound vitality to American Journalism, as well as a refreshing polish to the first amendment.
-- don't hate me because I'm anonymous.
A point which Mr. Glave repeatedly bring up, and rightly so, is the
issue of trustworthiness and bias in reporting. He points out that in a
forum such as Slashdot, you have no assurance of tne legitmacy or
truthfulness of a story. This is completely true. As he observes, the
reader must make their own assessment of stories based on their source,
others' comments, and whether or not facts can be confirmed through
other sources. There is, however, the implicit assumption that this is
not the case with traditional journalism.
I think it may not be correct to assume that traditional journalism
can be, should be, or is trusted. I do not believe that many (in the
Slashdot community) distrust journalist's motives, but rather their
technical competence. It doesn't take much work (in any field) to find
mutually contradictory traditional articles discussing the same event or
issue. This implies that at least one of them had their facts wrong.
Not a rarity. Moreover, when two journalists agree about the facts, the
interpetation, analyses, focus and conclusions are often wildly
different. So if a reader wants any assurance of the accuray or
insightfulness of an article, they really need to look at multiple
articles, consider the gredibility or the journalist and his or her
sources, and check out the primary sources themselves. Just as with
Slashdot.
One particulaly relevant issue is the nature of Slashdot's subject
matter. It is usually technical and computer related. This implies two
things: The first is that due to the highly specialized nature of the
material, it is possible, even probable, that the journalist does not
have enough expertise to separate truth, spin, and downright fiction.
This is through no fault of the journalist - computing is just too broad
a field for any magazine to have an expert in every possible subject.
It is also the case that tech company claims are notoriously
unreliable: Most copy is written by people who specialize in marketing
and PR, not by engineers. Which makes it likely that the writer doesn't
understand the truth, and (even with the best of intentions) doesn't
want to burden the reader with technical information they won't
understand anyway. So even with no malice, curicial errors and
omissions are the norm. Becaus very few people really understand it,
the computing world is driven as much by perception a fact. So
companies have every reason to put their particular spin on things. So
you have a lot of places for truth, and especially an understanding of
what's significant, to get lost or distorted.
The second is the availability of confirmation. The intenet makes is
possible to put primary sources like unvarnished data and scholarly
writings at the readers' fingertips. People in the technology field are
likely to have the ability and inclination to do so. If this
information is not available, that's information in and of itself. So
it is a subject area that is conducive to the kind of verification that
a forum like Slashdot calls for. Thus, Slashdot is in the enviable
position of covering material that plays to it's own strenghts and its
competition's weeknesses.
"I still believe that people go to sites
like Wired News and PC
Week because they have this curiosity for
the truth and this
underlying belief that services [like
Slashdot] don't always
get it right, and they need an independent
verification," said Berinato.
"the flip side is that
you don't have [an editor's] assurance in
what is to be
trusted and what isn't to be trusted."
Thanks for pointing out my Star Trek goof. We corrected it as soon as we could.
Hi there. I wrote the article, and yeah, I screwed up by overlooking the moderation system. We updated the article to add a paragraph that explains that it is here, in operation. Thank god for peer review!
You know what would be really cool actually, is if along w/ moderation points we allowed people to push up/down stories that were in the queue (along w/ commentary from the people who are moderators only) This would 1) satisfy all the /. addicts who need new stories every 30-60 minutes :) , get rid of the unfeasible queue and prevent stories from being duplicated. i.e. give say 400 random (post often kidz) stories and say when 10 % of the people approve of the story it gets posted. The problem w/ the system now is that (unfortunately) is that rob and friends seem to be a bit overworked and the system is (even more unfortunately) basically taking them on as our editors.. (deciding what stories are worth posting). The critique/commentary system is what makes /., it could be cool to apply it further?
-avi
You forgot First Contact, which, although munges things up a LOT, still has the Borg. Who aren't in Generations.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
That's just so sad...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
If you had some reasons behind your banal negativism please trot them out.
-josh
I agree with you. People seem to (at times) get really, really upset about the First Post! but it just doesn't bother me. And, the longer it goes on, it has just become a part of the landscape for me, or, as you said, "a cultural phemonenon". Not that its usefull--doesn't have to be--its just there. There was even one a while back that had me laughing. It was close to: (sigh). . .just can't help myself. . .First Post! Sure its silly, but Slashdot isn't our jobs.
"Whenever discussing do-it-yourself reporting as exemplified by Slashdot, traditional newshounds inevitably return to the issue of integrity and reliability. They say that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas."
What!!??? Any journo who honestly believes they're totally free of all cultural, political & personal biases is, pretty much by defenition, not worth trusting.
Hmmm, I'm an expert at some things. Not so good on others. I've posted on something I thought I knew about and was blasted a time or two (rightly so). I'm not (I don't think) a complete crackpot. So I guess I'm somewhere between expert and lounger.
"Whenever discussing do-it-yourself reporting as exemplified by Slashdot, traditional newshounds inevitably return to the issue of integrity and reliability. They say that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas."
...many of them are full of pure crass sensationalism... they are driven by getting my click, not by integrity. Unfortunatly many "trained proffesional journalists" are shills.
This sort of crap gets under my skin. Slashdot is great because instead of wasting time going from site to site I can get a quick list of things that might interest me and read the ones I want. What does integrity or reliability have to do with it? It's a place for people with a common interest to post opinions and get links. Why twist it into something else...
OTOH I question the integrity of some of the so-called tech sites (Uh..can you say Jessie Burst)
Why does wired remind me of MTV.. lots of flashy colors, and stuff seems to be happening, but it's all so vapid in the end.
I think that the term "Open Source Journalism" makes a very interesting comparison to "Open Source Software." It is very similar on many different levels.
It seems to bring similar, mixed feelings from professional journalists as open source software brings to professional software coders. Some software companies have really gotten into the act of open source software, and love the idea. From having read the Wired article, it seems that some journalists seem to think it's a cool idea, and there is some real value there.
On the other hand, there are software companies that feel threatened by open source software, and see no future in it. There are many journalists that feel threatened very much in the same way by open source journalism. There are other negative views as well, such as software companies believing there is no future in open source software. (I think that perhaps these sort of views are to cover up the threat they feel.) I'm sure there are journalists that claim the same of open source journalism.
Maybe those that don't believe in Open source/journalism are very strong in sticking to the old saying, "nothing in life is free." I would say that the majority of those which subscribe to open source/journalism believe that there are a few things that are free.
Okay, sure, if you wanna get technical, someone has to pay for the bandwidth, the electricity, the hardware. However, the information is free. YOU, the END USER, don't have to pay one red cent directly to the journalist or open source programmer.
Slashdot does give a minor 'reputation' to posts. This post, for example, is starting out as a 2 instead of the normal 1. The reason is that in the past, I have posted replies that were often moderated upwards. So there is a starting point for my messages to begin at.
But there are advantages to NOT having a 'reputation tracker' running. For one, anyone can create a new ID at a whim. If your old one has a bad rap, come up with a new pen name. Second, the system seems to give the impression that every thought should be judged on its own merit. I've seen stuff that I would swear were written by Linus, but were cut down by a few Slashdotters.
Actually, that's a good thing. Just because a well reputable person has something to say, it doesn't make it interesting by default. Judge the ideas for themselves, I say.
Hhahahahaah
I thought that the moderating system *was* a kind of 'rating' system. You can set your moderation to what you find acceptable. Might not be the most perfect system, but it works for me. In terms of 'trust', there might not be any immediate trust for any of the posts, however, like you mentioned, after you check out posts from the same people over and over and they are accurate, a kind of trust developes. 'Earned trust' rather than 'Blind trust'. Always the best kind.
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
I think he has it backwards, I go to /. to get commentary on the validity of the "journalist" publications. I have very little trust of what I see in print, because I don't think journalists have enough time to do good research. Admittidly, an individual commentor is no better, but the statistical nature of the mass of commentors provides a lot of total research effort.
"All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority."
It's called the moderators applying a score to the message. Did the author even visit Slashdot?
I'm LMAO @ Marj Jo Foley's comment:
They like to highlight things that make Microsoft look stupid.
This coming from the Microsoft mouthpiece has to be taken for what it's worth.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
This may have already been mentioned but I'm kinda jumpy today so I haven't read the other threads.
A couple of quotes that kinda stuck in my head.
They say that consumers must rely
on trained, professional journalists to ensure a
report is unbiased and free of agendas.
While it's true that slashdot makes its feeling known about certain companies, since when has journalism ever been unbiased. I can only think of a few sources where I feel like they are being unbiased and agenda-free. Everyone has an agenda and everyone has biases. Have you ever heard a news person, via the tone of his voice , or read an article , via the tone of the article, that made you subtley (sp?) feel differently about the subject in the end? I have. When we hear or read something we are called to form an opinion on it in our own minds. People will try to be subtle about swaying you but they will attempt it none the less. "Enlightened racism is still racism". People who refer to people of different ethnicity with terms, while not derogetory (sp?), are still trying to get you to believe that in the context of the point they are making, the fact that this person is whatever race, is the reason for whatever. (I know that probably made no sense but maybe SOMEONE can follow my train of thought here)
The next point that was made that bothered me was
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired
News and PC Week because they have this
curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief
that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it
right, and they need an independent verification,"
said Berinato.
Hell, more often than not I find slashdot posts to be independant discrediting of the links in the stories. Peer review obvoiusly works in the scientific and medical fields, and it works here. When someone posts something obviously wrong, there is no shortage of people to point that out.
okay I htink I've babbled on enough. Bitch away.
p.s. this wasnt meant to be a slam against wired or unabashed slashdot devotion. Just something that some people may have missed.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
"In this model you don't have editors deciding what is legitimate and what isn't," said Jonathan Dube, a senior associate producer with ABCNews.com. "The flip side is that you don't have [an editor's] assurance in what is to be trusted and what isn't to be trusted."
Sorry about the partial... "In this model (Slashdot) you don't have editors deciding what is legitimate and what isn't," said Jonathan Dube, a senior associate producer with ABCNews.com. "The flip side is that you don't have [an editor's] assurance in what is to be trusted and what isn't to be trusted." This is all good, however the only one that has the assurance that the 'Trusted' source is true is God. The writer just knows that his job isn't in jeopardy (too much) when he get's the editor's ok. At least SlashDot doesn't make a pretense toward the creditability of their stories (often they express doubt in the blurb). News and media agencies would have you believe that their news is iron-clad true to fact. I personally can't stand their "truth"-y portrayal of the news. When someone like Dateline makes a story "to touch your heart" and tells you what to do and think about something that they show as absolute fact it really pisses me off even if the slightest error is in what they say. If they mean to program America through the TV they better be 100% sure about what they say. I guess the real problem is that you really shouldn't believe everything you see or hear from the media, and you should seek to discredit their attempts to 'give us the truth'.
I had no idea it was that many. Is that pageviews?
,'s in e-mail address with .'s.
j-a-w-a-d------------------------------
replace
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
specialization is for insects
Note the tremendous speed of the response of the /. community ;) Whereas open-source models shorten the release cycles from months or years to days or weeks, Slashdot shortens the news feedback cycles from hours or days to minutes.
Does this mean that wired might be getting good again? I doubt it. -awc
Are they talking about, say, the trained professional journalists at the New York Times, whose pro-big-business, pro-financial-markets, pro-military bias is... well, kind of hard to miss? (See Noam Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent.)
--
I think we should ignore this story completely because the author referred to the borg as being in Star Trek: Generations. Pah. Dolts. I'll never read wired again.
>Who could resist this classic Star Trek quote. (Uh, I think it was >from Generations.)
Umm,no. It from one of the *WORST* classic Star Trek epidsode, "Spock's Brain". Yep someone actually stole Spock's brain. Ripped the sucker right out of his head. It's absolutely amazing that 99% of the Star Trek:The Next Generation,Deep Space 9 and Star Trek:Voyager epidsodes actually manage to make "Spock's Brain" look good. Would anyone actually notice if someone had actually stolen Westly's,Denna's or Worf's brain? I honestly don't think so...
The stories being trustworthy is a little silly. I mean, alot of slashdots content is linking to credible sites or credible people.
Perhaps they have a point, some of those Journalists might be a little off target on there arrows of truth. Hmm, maybe commercial news sites aren't as trustworthy as we think?
And who here trusted that IETF guy? Or even would have fell for the april fools user friendly gag.
Oh, err, scratch that last one...
anyway, i'm trying to point out that slashdot readers aren't expected to be idiots, we can think; act; and judge, building trusts on there own.
fou aje oym asoyf ueyf jaffaq afset su!6j!/\ op 'ua>|7!>| ppn7
Yeah, I agree. I used to have my "display full post" threshold at 2 (replies with a score of 1 or less only displayed headers), but I got sick of reading mediocre posts by people whose default scores were 2. Recenlty I cranked this number up to 3, which lets me skip those mediocre yet higher-scored-than-average posts, but now I'm missing posts that got to 2 on their own merit (unless I start looking through the threads).
Sure, it's not the end of the world or anything, but it kind of sucks.
-- $SIGNATURE
The term "open source journalism" is just a little odd... since it isn't quite journalism anymore. And I feel funny participating in a peer review of a singular review of a peer review system.
Anyhow, if journalists are afraid of an open-source journalism system, what they should get excited about is one w/compensation. The model is very close to Slashdot.
Open participation, with random readers ranking the results. The pariticpants (story providers) are compensated by the rankings of their readers. Imagine if Slashdot paid decent money for articles that rated a "5". That's incentive for you.
Albiet, there is a number of nagging flaws here and there, and such a system wouldn't have to be pure slashdot, but the basic concept seems to be relatively sound for providing an open-source journalism system that the journalists would buy into (or be bought into!).
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
Comments on the ratio of Experts vs Crackpots? I don't think that there are that many crackpots, but neither do I think there are that many experts, either. At least not that many experts who post.
Maybe we should have a Poll?
Are you a:
1. Expert
2. Lounger
3. Crackpot
IMHO, as per.
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
It's like saying that the boy who mentioned "The Emperor has no clothes!!" is biased against the emperor. Then she goes on to say there's no editor to say what's "legitimate" ... Given what's seen coming from the direction of ZDNN Tech News, the definition of "legitimate" is tied more to finances (with clear bias favoring Microsoft) than truth.
I think if Mary Jo Foley wants to see a balanced view of Tech news, she should have a look at C'T magazine and Linux news at Linux Weekly News These are part of the very small group of publications I've seen who try to get to the actual meaning behind current events (and tend to do a good job of it) .. Highlighting Microsoft's "roadmap", "vision", etc., while ignoring the fact they've been known to be less than honest & unethical in the past is what strikes me as bad journalism.
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired. I can go read news.com and wired.com in the morning, and in the afternoon there will be 3 or 4 stories posted (on Slashdot) that just point back to those. If anything, maybe Slashdot is a good way to, er, gather together the more interesting news and comment on it, but they're not 'scooping' anyone, except for when they post major software releases before they're supposed to be released, so the mirrors haven't gotten their copies yet, and the hordes kill the main site and the mirrors never get their copies.
Mix in the occasional JonKatz yellowish journalism (it's designed to create controversy and draw more hits/pageviews/ad loads), an article a day about "amazing high storage at amazingly low price sometime in the future" (I swear, there's at least one of these a day), and ever so often an empty essay from a slashdot reader or a book review.
And of course Slashdot "coexists" with the traditional news sites -- it's where they get half their stories.
[But, hey, I read it for the comments.]
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
I guess they missed the whole post-moderation aspect of /., not to mention they got the definition of 'slashdot' wrong.
Also, and non-practicing 'trained and professional journalist', I can say that 'journalistic integrity' is 99% of the time, simply and excuse to tell people to fuck off.
The truly unbiased journalist has never been invented, as heretofore they have all been somewhat-recognizably human.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
The beauty of being part of the technology world is that engineering people in established companies at least recognize systems that work, even if they work differently from their own designs. Journalists seem obsessed with the orthodoxy of their process.
-- Dave Aiello
Read the Moderator Guidelines, silly!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Typos a-plenty, flame away.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
did I miss something? when exactly did the general public cease to be a bunch of retards? the average american _cant_ sort out fact and fiction. hello blair witch, hello war of the worlds, hello urban legends.
According to the moderator guidelines, moderators are chosen at random from a fairly wide cross-section of the slashdot population. Anyone who posts a bit and reads a fair bit is elligeable if I understand correctly, which means at least a third of the people visiting the site (a guess - don't flame me for this).
The only people who can't become moderators, again if I understand correctly, are ones who either never post, never read, or constantly hit "reload". Check out the guidelines themselves for more detailed information.
...we know a lot about a little.
what does this mean?
The point that seems to be missed by many is that the author is talking about a reputation rating system.
Slashdot's moderation system is in no way based upon reputation. This is in a way a good thing: posts are judged and rated according to their attributes, not biased by who wrote them. But, since each post starts with a rating of 1 (or 0 for anon.), reputation does not come into play. On eBay, the situation is quite the opposite.
I for one think it would be a good idea for slashdot to have a rating system based upon reputation. Something as rudimentary as the average score of all posts by the particular author might even work. Something such as this, displayed apart from particular post's scores, could give the reader an overall understanding of the author's credibility which would be much more reliable than any credible-sounding posts could warrant.
In open (source|journalism), the (users|readers) can publish (upgrades|comments) and (fixes|corrections) for the authors and each other. If the authors licensed us in advance to distribute updated versions of a news article (rather than preserve the unmodified original and add separate third-party comments), we'd be all set.
Rob has thought about making /. available through NNTP. Unfortunately, NNTP means no ads, unless you want to append a sig-like ad to every message.
---
The point is, there is a big difference between moderation based on 'quality' of individual posts, and a rating system based on credibility.
I might create a new account for myself, pretend to be from Cisco, or Microsoft, or Red Hat, or whoever, and post lots of interesting, detailed but totally bullshit comments. Many of them would get moderated upwards; after a while I might even become 'elite' and get all my comments posted at score=2. But unless you checked all my previous postings, you'd have no way of knowing that I were talking rubbish.
Ideally, there would be some way of replying to a post saying 'yes, this is factually correct', or 'no, this is rubbish', citing URLs or other facts as proof. We could then build up a credibility profile of each author.
Perhaps I'm just too paranoid.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Am I confused, or is it that every time someone wrights an article about Slashdot, they come up with a "better" moderation meathod - one that Rob already considered and rejected.
Oh well. Heck, I think we should get more moderation points than 5... mabie 8 or 10, so that more moderation gets done, especially on posts 3 or four levels deep (In a thread).
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Very funny to notice on the last page of the Wired article that the first mention of Scott Bernadito (?) is as follows:
"With eBay you are trading goods. At Slashdot you are trading ideas," said PC Week reporter Scott Bernadito, who has been "slashdotted" . . .
then only 7 paragraphs later in a most ironical twist:
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato
...
I am glad to have mags like Wired that always get it right, but I wonder who Berinato is, as there is no other mention of a Berinato in the article.
Or is this Berinato some ancient mystic that most other people know about, like Confucius.
Very funny.
--Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Professional journalist work mainly for big corporation such as News Corp, Time-Warner etc or state run orgs such as the BBC.
They therefore tend to not to run stories which go against the status quo too much.
In Britain we have a media dominated by Murdoch which engage in spinning favourable stories about its media operations such as Sky, supporting political parties which let Murdoch do anything he basically wants and setting the political agenda in Murdoch's terms.
Objective journalists... Try reading the Sun newspaper.
Murdoch is basically equivalent Bill Gates in British media terms..
Wired: News for herds. Stuff that splatters.
;)
For some reason that struck me as fsck'n hilarious.
Guess it achieved its goal
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
No way. Three people cannot replace a team of journalists. Slashdot aids them, really. Most of the things posted on Slashdot are a paragraph of commentary on, and a link to, someone else's articles. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I think it's great. I hit Slashdot probably 8 or 10 times a day looking for some new newsbit, and I'm more than happy to visit all the other sites linked to, bringing them traffic, supporting their writers and advertisers, etc.
:]
Save deep linking!
Unless a nerd is someone who loves Linux. Seriously though 99% of the stories are Linux Biased. I wouldn't come here as often if it wasn't for the diverse comments on the stories correcting and pointing out things I missed.
:)
A bit more impartial editing would be intresting.
And what is with the urge to "Hey wouldn't this be cool if we could turn it into a Beowulf Cluster" in most of the posts?
I beg to differ. Other publications work behind closed doors, and hence can never be trusted. With slashdot, the sausage-making process is laid bare for all to see and critique. There are things Rob et al do that piss people off, and by golly people call them on it! A lot!
In my estimation, this article was designed to:
a) attract the attention of slashdotters, and
b) remind them how important real journalists are! Like Wired! Good plan, but I don't buy it.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
As an aside:
The conversation that follows is part expert commentary, part peer review, and part cocktail-party banter, as credible sources and experts weigh in alongside crackpots in a rapid peer-review process.
The author left out "part childish behavior" (as in 'first post.')
As a second aside, I want to say how tiresome 'first post' is, and yet who will claim they weren't tempted to add that at the bottom of their post? Whenever I feel that temptation, it means I'm not paying enough attention to composing my comment and I go back and look it over again.
Perhaps there could be an option to automatically moderate down the first post if it's from an AC. Then moderators could moderate down non-AC's claiming to be first.
Thinking about this issue, Slashdot really isn't "Open Source Journalism". It is "Open Participation Journalism" which happens to run on open-source software and covers open-source issues. There is a big difference.
Take The Killer List of Videogames (arcade games information database) for example. Open participation? Very. Open source? No. Open participation works for databases and discussions, certainly. (KLOV owns the "open participation" database, but people still contribute. Interesting, no?)
Actually, I'm having a bit of trouble seperating some of the aspects of the two in some respects (aside that open SOURCE refers to source code, obviously). Perhaps these terms don't quite cover the full distinction of differences between, say, Slashdot, and the Linux kernel.
?? Help ??
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
I personnally read /. because I have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that trade press (like PC Week) don't always get it right, and I need peer opinion to make up my mind on a particuliar subject.
Sure they're a lot of BS being said on Slashdot, but this BS usually end up being point out by more clueful or honest peers. In traditionnal media, the best you can expect to correct incompetent journalism is a polite "Reader's Letter" in the next issue, if anything.
Let's face it : media independance is an utopy. Journalism always end up being tainted by the opinion of the journalist, the context in wich he gatered his information or his publication interest (sensationnalism, political correctness, etc.). IMHO, you can't trust traditionnal media any more than you can trust any stranger for truthful, unbiased, complete and verified information. It's all about using your own judgement.
This spring, I had an urge to subscribe to as much free trade press as I could (I receive, among other, PC Week, Interactive News, Computer World, etc.). Now I feel bad about wasting so much paper. These rag carry so much bullshit, I can't believe any cluefull CIO (their target audience) can take them seriously. Blatant bias and lake of technical understanding of the subject covered is the norm, not the exception. And I am not only speaking about Linux coverage.
So in the end, if I can't trust the "real" media, I am always left with the option of trusting (or not) peer reader of my virtual community of choice, and use my own judgement, instead of being blindly fed half-truth and outright lies.
:wq
The Borg (a race of cybergenetically enhanced beings) were instituted in an episode of ST-TNG where Picard denies Q a chance to be part of his crew. When Q hears this he tries to teach Picard a lesson and transports the ship to a distant part of the galaxy where they find a borg vessle which has the ability to scan them and determine that they are weak. After taking a real beating from the Borg and Picard begs for mercy Q moves them back to their current position. Another 3 episodes in the series address the borg as well. The next is one where the borg try to assimilate the planet earth. Second one happens where a crashed borg scout vessle leaves a single injured borg and he is taken and given free will and sent back to the collective in leu of killing the whole race through a interative debilitating algorithm. The next is where Lore (data's older twin brother) assists the borg in trying to become fully cyborgenetic by doing his bidding. Then we have a major break. The next we see the borg we find them in the Delta Quadrant with Janeway and that has a lot of episodes (manely because they have a person who is sort of borg herself on board constatly now. So to make a long post longer the borg were most definately not conceived in Generations.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
At least Wired listens to readers and admits when they're wrong... and they obviously read Slashdot.
rooooar
On the other hand, he noted that Slashdot thrives in an environment where people seek more and more fragmentation in their lives. "Instead of knowing something about a lot of things, we know a lot about a little.
...
So concentrtating on a few subjects rather than many is fragmentation? I don't think so some how
Chris Wareham
How does their being "college kids with squeaky voices" effect their ability to diferentiate between uninteresting stories and interesting stories?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Yes, and insightful too...
No criticism meant here. /. articles can easily be both. Whether that was on purpose or not it was an insightful comment. :) Just being a pedant, ignore me.
Well, well, well; three holes in the ground...
Having ACs start at 0 instead of 1 is a Good Thing (TM) because it promotes getting a user account. This is good for a bunch of reasons, but the best one is that Rob and co. want people to get user acounts and are therefore promoting it.
So, if you want to start at 1, Log In! It's not that hard, and all it does it lets people tell if the same person made two different posts. (I am ignoring the issue of people with a default rating of 2)
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Though it would seem, alas, that spelling is in the 1% you don't know.
Yet in the past journalists have gone to jail to protect their sources. I guess all that's going to change now?
Heh.
Pre........
> I think Slashdot is a kind of metajournalism.
I do fully agree with you!
What makes Slashdot interesting is the discussion that follows each topic, the only bad point is that sometimes the discussion will degenerate into a flame war instead of talking of really interesting topics.
But the moderation system is really nice, it generates a "summary" of the really interesting points. Even if sometimes, it feels weird to read a reply to an unknown post.
Unfortunately even this moderation system has limits, for example there has been recently discussion about the shortcomings of X, should it be replaced or not which generated 500+ comments of susprisingly good quality (mostly), so I was kind of lost due to the volume, but hey nothing is perfect.
The only suggestion I could make is to have someone payed to make summaries of topics which have generated a big interest...
I forsee a day when people will post info directly to slashdot without mucking about with the high-priced intermediaries. Like: "Hi!, I'm Linus. Let me tell you about what we're thinking about putting into kernel 2.3.x!"
As it is, I'd say maybe 50% of "news" comes from sources other than news publications.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Exactly.
/. do often have inaccurancies in them.
Although you have to agree, the summaries themselves as posted on
However, the community of intelligent commenters makes up for that. It seems like 8 times out of 10, someone from the 'inside' of the story, be it someone who works for the company, or the project, or whatever, comes forward and we get a better view of the situation than any news site out there.
It amazes me that conventional journalists have the gall to repeat this mantra over and over again. Every single time the "conventional" news media covers a story that I, or a good friend, have personal knowledge of, they invariably screw it up and add some bizzare audience grabbing spin to it. EVERY TIME. And this isn't just for "nerd" or technical news. Anything is fair game.
It makes you wonder about the rest of the "honest", "reliable", "unbiased" journalism they churn out that you don't have a way to independantly verify. Sure, its not all malicious and/or self serving munging of the news, but anything that can't be attributed to a conspiracy can certainly be attributed to plain laziness.
And speaking of "un-biased" journalism... as long as the medium, or reporter, or whatever at LEAST has their "bias" out in the open, I know exactly what I'm in for. Stories that have that "I'm totally unbiased, just reporting the facts because its my job" style invariably give me the heebie jeebies.
Try to get to the main Slashdot page. We've been Wired(ed). Funny feeling, eh?
-Sloth503
I watched Citizen Kane a few years back, and one piece of dialoge has stuck with me from the movie. "..what will people think? People will think what I tell them to think". Kane was referring to his power over the pages of his newspaper and how they could change public opinion. Journalist's obviously love the power to help influence public opinion, and Slashdot is a threat to their influence. The commentary on slashdot is the very auditing system they are proposing in this article. Only it monitors the legitimate and established journalists. Instead of one editor making a determination on what is true or valid news, a community is making the decision.
Never really thought of a cute little penguin as a major communist.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
They're deciding what will generate the most banner reloads and clickthroughs. Listen to the Shashdot In Outer Space (or whatever it is called) audio programs. They're a bunch of college kids with squeaky voices.
Just call us the Renaissance Men of Geekdom.
:)
It is nice to have a media outlet that actually pokes bullshit stories full of holes within the hour.
It has to be a nightmare for these journalists to find out that their piece was linked to by Slashdot.
Poor bastards.
I would fancy that people who read these types of sites are renisance men who actually know a great deal about a great number of things. I for one know a great deal about history: american/world/geologic/science fiction, etc. I also am proficient in biology, astronomy, philosophy, and cultural ananlysis; all this as well as what I love to be involved with: linux. This stated I believe that one can know almost everything 99% of attainable material that the general population would know about almost every subject.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
This article seemed to be kissing a lot of slashdot a**. Looks like wired has seen where having their palms greased with
microsoft's cash is going to get them. If you've visited WebMonkey lately you've seen the articles about setting up
apache and IP masquerading with Linux. There was also an article about gnome and another about VMware in
wired(magazine) a couple months ago. I think wired may be coming over to the OSS side of things now. I hope they do, I
used to look up to wired for reliable information, but lately they've been catering more to the multi-million dollar ceo's of
large companies than to all us little geeks. This looks like an effort to clean up their act.
--Just my dime cut in to 5 pieces
There's also "alignment". If a poster's comments are consistantly moderated up (or down), his default posting score is increased (or decreased).
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Yes, it's scary. The journalism profession has sunk so low that they acutally beleive "that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas." There hasn't been an unbiased, free of agendas report written in journalism. EVER!!!
The simple fact that a person writen/recorded or created a news piece means that this news piece is biased by that person's point view. The most he can do is try to be unbiased. Unbiased jornalism is like a phisic problem where you ignore the friction to make things easy. And don't even think that you can get as close as you want to "unbiased".
In fact most of the time news agencies are realy biased, they have advertisers that they can't piss-off. They usualy have a editorial-line that they follow so they are usualy very-very biased.
All that said, I would like to add that slashdot-like news is the closer you can get to unbiased news. Still a biased (just look at MS discussions and you will see the bias flowing) source but at least you have thousand of diferent biases.
Well of course this is biased by my opinion that love slashdot.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
"In that sense, the site is no different from the tradition of alternative weekly newspapers published in just about every large American city -- papers that praise a few holy cows and lambaste regular targets. "
Casini was loaded with 75 pounds of plutonium. The only people to raise a ruccuss when NASA lauched it (on a rocket with a 1 in 12 failure rate), were the alternative news media. The "Tradditional" media often either glosses over, for _FAILS_ to cover some very serious subject material. Hell, Rob knew about Casini, and not because of CNN or Wired.
Has anyone here ever heard of Project Censored? It's a wonderful project for journalism majors at a US university in California (can't remember which one). Each year, they pick and review the 10 least published but potentially very important stories. Remember echelon? Reported in alternative news papers. Cancer causing agents in makeup and skins lotions in 10x the amounts they showed up in meats like Bacon int he 1970s (anyone remember that scare?), only alternative news covered that.
Alternative news may seem to have an agenda, but it doesn't. These papers are usually put out by University students, or other people who care about getting the word around about potentially important stories.
Just look up "Project Censored" in AltaVista, it will take you to what you want.
I'm tempted to add cnn.com and wired.com to my Internet Junkbuster filter, or just axe off access with IPchains.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I totally agree: is it me or has it gone all corporate. Its more adverts than content (which mirrors the net, so that is okay!).
Are you being serious?
One of the properties of per-post moderation (rather than per-poster moderation) is that it understands that different people know different amounts about different things. There certainly is some element of eloquence which makes for 'good posts', but.. nobody knows everything about everything, and it's safer not to assume that some people do.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Not only that, but the external links that are added have exceptional value. There was tremendous evidence of this is the aforementioned evolution discussion.
+&x
I wish it had been on purpose. It is a cool pun.
The cake is a pie
Researchers are working on paper that can be printed on and erased and reused. I think that'll be great for us geeks who print out web pages, code listings, etc.
There is, of course, a very good system in action right here. It is caled a "username". When combined with a "brain", it allows the reader to determine whether to trust articles written by someone who they've already read before.
When I read this in the article, I thought that it's pretty obvious the author hasn't discovered what those numbers behind the reply titles are for... (Abuse-free) moderating is a reputation rating system... And (with the exception of abuses) it works pretty damn well, IMHO.
Numerous examples come to mind:
- When an "Ask Slashdot" question gets going, often a new project or project direction will open up, improving Linux and Open Source in the process.
- When a video card mfr or other board maker gets feedback from the screaming Linux masses via
/. that we'd love to use their product -- if only it was Linux compatible... - When a new kernel, security item, or OS product is released for testing,
/. often tips us off, and we all go bang the heck out of the code, resulting in fast bug detection. - When quasi- and various- governmental agencies screw up,
/. blows the whistle and we nail them with the Slashdot Effect. - A more "mainsteam" f's up a story --
/. not only gets the corrections (via more clued in posters), we often submit replies to the mainstream media which ofter lucid, well thought out counterpoints to the original articles. - Finally, we compete with the Beast From Redmond by making sure that other OS's and technologies get adequate, honest reporting.
Not bad for (as Wired puts it) "a three-person web site" in the middle of Michigan, eh? It used to be "....news at 11 (p.m.)...." IMHO what we're seeing here is....Slashdot--- the future of interactive journalism...why the hell wait 'til 11!!
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I really wouldn't care if I had to order star trek videos in brown paper packages I would do almost anything to get ahold of star trek info. It's just better than average sci-fi stuff. The rest of it just looks like The Jetsons or something out of Looking Backward with people wearing crappy clothes or using technology that is not even researched out when they wish to even give a far fetched account of logic. At least star trek backs up most of their data with facts that have some basis in reality.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
He says - "("It is, in essence, a democratization of journalism from the consumer's end," he said, though he cautioned that readers must be more cautious than ever about trusting the sources.
Whenever discussing do-it-yourself reporting as exemplified by Slashdot, traditional newshounds inevitably return to the issue of integrity and reliability. They say that consumers must rely on trained, professional journalists to ensure a report is unbiased and free of agendas.)"
Bwwaaaaaaaahhhhh! I am much more comfortable listening to a bunch of my peer's(1) comments, than I am taking a "real Journalist's"(2) word for anything being gospel...
I firmly believe that this forum most accurately portrays the validity of a news item through it's peer review process.
(1) as demented as they may be.....
(2) Geraldo R. is a "Trained Professional Journalist"
Rick B.
the moderation system is the biggest flaw of slashdot... The fact that some posts default to a higher score than others is ludicrous... At least Rob should allow us to turn off these kinds of "smart" rankings.
Maybe a system using collaborative filtering would be better -- let each reader filter out the comments that others who he/she usually agrees with about appropriate ratings don't like.
It seems horribly simple to me.
Well, once upon a time it was a Good Thing to have journalists and editors to determine "news or not news." See, there used to be a thing called "Journalistic Ethics."
Much like we trust doctors because they've got a degree, we used to be able to trust journalists with degrees. These days you can really replace the old "what is truth?" question with "what is news?"
I'm SO sick of the crap that gets put forth as news that it makes me ill. I've cancelled all of my newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and choose my own news from the web, plus I listen to public radio (God, please help Pacifica). Local news is crap, TV news is even worse, CNN and MSNBC and the like are SO owned by Disney (Cap-City/ABC) and GE that they're nothing but marketing with ads besides... Noticed how many WB stars have been on the cover of Time lately?
Wired is Wired. Mostly useless, but occasionally informative. And just for the record: knowledge of Star Trek trivia is about the worst test of a journalist you can come up with. Get a life, will you people?
You could say that most of these sites are really just compilations of other sources which come from places like company web sites, observable trends, etc. Everyone compiles except those who actually do or create. I must admit comments are cool and interesting. Seriously I look for long comment ammounts and print them out in hard copy and read them for kicks during the slow periods. Quite entertaining and helps the process of deforestation and bringing about an eco-friendly anti-utopia that I will never be alive to see he he he.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
I read a note about the "growing a**-kissing of publications to Linux". Do you know what is causing some of that? Slashdot! Slashdot is much more than a place to read about Linux and nerd issues.
What Slashdot does is it gets a concentrated mass of people all interested in the same subject. When an online publication creates a story of interest, (marketing speak begins here) Slashdot focuses the collective clickstreams of its users to create a massive reward for the publishing entity (end of marketing speak).
So, not only does Slashdot advocate the use of Linux, but it turns the general media towards the issue of Linux by delivering a direct and tangible reward. The reward is additional pageviews. The reward is also getting the name of the publication in front of the reader.
Sneaky that Malda. He's created a sort of Political Action Committee that serves both ends of the chain!
Another way would be simply to not let AC's post at all until a "real" user has posted a reply.
Then an AC would know they could not be a first post, and would hopefully be intelligent enough not to claim they were...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Did you read the rest of the article or just stop there? The next paragraph mentions that Slashdot does indeed have a moderation system....."
Yes I did read the rest of the article it's just this stuck out to me as being wrong and I felt like commenting on it. You're right though, they do mention the moderation system later on. This article is full of contradictions it seems. From "It needs something like eBay has... It has something like eBay has" to "It isn't journalism... is this really journalism?" (someone else pointed it out)
They need to proofread... sheesh. Or at least skim for consistency.
If you look at articles like the recent one on evolution that split the readers into factions, something kind of different appears. I would bet that people trusted different "experts" in their evaluation of the comments following the article, depending on their own predisposition on the matter.
Slashdot sometimes provides a multi-valued filter on stories. There are well written conflicting comments that are highly rated. I find this more interesting and yes, entertaining, than a traditional news source promoting just one view.
Jim
The entire article seems one large defense of the "slant free" "unbiased" and "credible" nature of mainstream press... which, as everybody who pays any attention knows, is a MYTH! Newspapers and news networks are owned by big corporations interested in their own bottom line... does anybody honestly believe that any viewpoint that might threaten the dominance of corporations over everyday citizens could ever make it into the "unbiased" mainstream press??? News sites like /. allow people to analyze news and question prepackaged knowledge, which is almost always slanted to deceive.
"Real" journalists all steal from each other anyway. Watch the 11 o'clock news. It's all the same thing on ABCCBSNBCFOX. WashingtonPost=NYTimes=NPR. Big deal, different freqeuncy, same corporate sponsored garbage. The Associated Press is a propganda tool for the Establishment.
The small one/two/three man operations like Slashdot, Drudge, Robot Wisdom, mempool, Progressive Review are a return to the days of competition in news. Sure, they all have "agendas". So what? Michael Eisner doesn't have an agenda? Katherine Graham doesn't have an agenda?
The arrogance of the big media is pathetic. They are finally getting what they deserve.
There's also, on occasion, links to rumors and PR, or inaccurate info in the submittor's summary. It's not simply a bare link to an article at a news site.
Personally I think Slashdot is /more/ accurate because of the moderation system. Eventually the truth shines through as comments get scored upward.A great example is yesterday's post of a guy who claimed he solved the IPv4 addressing shortage.
[...]
But here on Slashdot there are many techies who know better and clued the rest of us in that the guy is a nut -- that's the kind of insight you get here on Slashdot.
Fine, if the matter is a straightforward technical or historical issue. But the moderation system -- in general -- is only as good as the subject matter and the moderators. /. provides the means for a poster to be more accurate than the journalist in the linked article. But often it's all just a matter of opinion. The moderation itself doesn't always do the trick -- it can, and will at times, devolve into fruitless Mob Rule. I keep my threshold at -1, because the moderators often miss out on good comments; conversely, it means I get to see all the worst pack-mentality or adolescent-preening posts. Sometimes it isn't worth it for me to wade through the muck to find one of the "good" posts.
The only cure for bad journalism is good journalism. It doesn't matter what sort of "new paradigm" (or old one) produces it. Sometimes getting a useful nugget from /. is like an evening of root canal.
--
--
=8^
The article said:
Microsoft stories are identified with a graphic of Bill Gates mocked up as a Borg from Star Trek Generations.
And another reader already pointed out that that is a _major_ flub.
But the article was poorly done in other ways. It was, simply put, a comparison of apples and oranges: Slashdot compared to "traditional" journalism. The quotes from people from "traditional" news sites were stale and meaningless. The best part about the article was Rob's quote that he's not a journalist. Other than that it was like all of the other Slashdot stories I've read: superficial.
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
As far as I'm concerned he's got it backwards. When I see a Wired News story posted on Slashdot, I usually read the story, then read through the comments looking for someone who knows more about the story's subject than the author (and I usually find such a person).
With as many readers as Slashdot has we're bound to have SOMEBODY with more experience with a technical project, phenomenon or area of study than the author, who, well, sits in an office writing all day.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
But lately most of their articles seem to be about business and $$$.
And not just the articles, either. The September '99 issue sits on my desk, open to page 126, where there's an ad for a business jet, for heaven's sake! I got the subscription as a gift, but I don't know if I'll renew -- this just doesn't seem to be the in-your-face magazine it once was.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Hemos, look what you've done! You've Slashdotted Wired!
There's something deeply significant about that, I think.
I've always been impressed with Wired's layout, and 50% of the time, its content. I have very few beefs with Wired. The Borg-Generations blurb was just plain silly, though...
IMHO, too much of either is bad. Rob is quoted as saying that now "we know a lot about a little," rather than vice-versa.
I've seen many posts here on
Needless to say, I disagree. As I've posted in the past, a purely Linux-focused or even computer-focused site only makes sense if "computer" is a necessary and therefore unstated modifier of "nerd." It is not. I am an English nerd (aka technical writer with a journalism degree), and I'm sure there are more of us here, as well as a good-sized handful of "science nerds," etc.
I think that
And I think the not-strictly-computer threads are necessary in much the same way that in the SCA, you can't become a knight JUST because you're a good fighter, even though fighting is the main focus of the knighthood. At a minimum, you're also expected to teach fighters, and to know how to dance, play chess, and some other things I'm forgetting right now.
Super-hyper-overspecialization isn't a very good thing -- we still need common ground with the rest of the world. But having a major focus, and supplementing with bits and pieces slightly outside of that focus that are still interesting, is a good way to go. I like and appreciate it.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
>It presupposes the public are a bunch of retards,
Heh. The thing is, the public *IS* a bunch of retards.
I agree with your assesment of the state of news media, but it's that way for a reason.
It's what people want.
There's plenty of good news on PBS.
Does anyone watch it?
Of course not.
People don't want real news, they want informative entertainment, and that's what they get.
What really offends me is the notion that just because someone works for a traditional media outlet they are trustworthy and free from bias. that is such obvious crap, obviously perpetuated by people who work in traditional news.
Some guy named Joe
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority.
I found this facinating... There is, of course, a very good system in action right here. It is caled a "username". When combined with a "brain", it allows the reader to determine whether to trust articles written by someone who they've already read before.
Seems to me this used to be the way the "old" media worked.
Anyway, I find this "old media" fascination with the need for a "trusted" source ironic in the sense that the biggest problem they face right now is a complete lack of trust among the general population. I don't for a second trust any of those I see talk about the need for sources that can be "trusted".
To use a sadder example of web journalism, Matt Drudge, while completely lacking in the sort of reputation that would earn my trust is no different from the mainstream media in this respect. I see people I have no trust in complain about how Drudge isn't a "real journalist" because he is not trustworthy. Well, yeah... That's what makes him a journalist.
I trust those who post to slashdot to the extent that I can check them out, and to what checking I've done, posters here are often more accurate, and more inciteful, then anything in the "mainstream" media. It is nice to have a media outlet that actually pokes bullshit stories full of holes within the hour. This is far better than the idiocy that gets printed in most newspapers or news magazines today.
The cake is a pie
From the way he wrote the article, it almost looks like he was applying for a job with Slashdot!
/. today, are very different from the type of readers a few months ago. Also, the fact that no one person is controlling the views and opinions posted seems to erk some of the editors of the other news sources.
/. decided by posts alone? If so, the guy who's always "I posted first! Phhht" will be in quite a good position!
Otherwise, he did bring up some interesting points: the people who are reading
Now my question is, are moderators on
Well there has to be a place for more of a bureaucracy. There's always room for a Corporate style bureaucracy. How could you function without quarterly performance ratings and Middle managers and Professionals to do all that stuff that we're doing right now... D'Oh!
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
A latter-day William Randolph Hearst, then?
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
A quite different system of comment upon non-news on the Web is CritLink. It allows you to post and read comments on webpages, from links inline with the webpage being critiqued. It also tracks backlinks. Very nice, makes the Web more useful.
Allen
What is wrong with this is that if you filter out comments then you cannot see the whole picture. For example if someone posts responses to an article about linux and says that for this and this reason windows has a better solution (it could happen) then if the rest of the community which was oriented towards linux would moderate that comment down to -1 and prevent you from reading it. Paying people for stories will make the site crappy. When people are trying to get money for anything the whole outlook changes. What would stop me for example to be the first one to post a story if I get say an 0C3 line and get a huge server to peg several sites for html files and links and do a crc on the files and if it changes just flag it have the person on the console wirte a short review and suddently one person can get all the goods. Plus the idea of getting money involved defeats the purpose entirely when I am through with my day of classes (one does not work when one is supposed to be attending a college level course and applying mental activity to the breaking point) I expect to head to a site with like minded individuals who are not seeking profit in any way, shape, or form; this is the best thing that I can think of in the way of entertainment. Most any site that any one individual does will never hold a candle to slashdot however if you put up such a site and remind me (provided it's free for the looking) I will stroll on by. Exactly how can someone get such a complex relational model up and running easily? This is something for a dissertation.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
wtf??? Isn't the moderation system like this?
Did you read the rest of the article or just stop there? The next paragraph mentions that Slashdot does indeed have a moderation system.....
"I still believe that people go to sites like Wired News and PC Week because they have this curiosity for the truth and this underlying belief that services [like Slashdot] don't always get it right, and they need an independent verification," said Berinato.
See, they now better. It's Star Trek Generations!
:-)
With that said, let me ask you this.
1. Who knows more about the reliablility of MS code?
A. Someone who as read up on the subject
through a technical book. (MCSE)
B. A Journalist who hears something from the company who made the software.
C. People who have thousands of hours of
experience in dealing with it.
D. Bill Gates
E. Al Gore
On the other hand, he noted that Slashdot
thrives in an environment where people
seek more and more fragmentation in their
lives. "Instead of knowing something
about a lot of things, we know a lot about
a little."
"News for Nerds" is a title. I'd say most people here (At least all of my Comp Sci friends and I) know more than just computer stuff. Granted, we talk about computer stuff on here. Why? Please don't make me fill out another multiple choice question. But anyway, I play most sports decently, read science fiction, play piano, run 2 miles a day, fix cars, listen to all kinds of music, date my wife, talk about the stock market, play pool, and drink mountain dew.
However, I can't spell very well. You'll probably see a few errors in here if your not careful.
Please don't assume something so silly as "They read about computers; therefore, that is all they know about"
ok dokie, that's all I got to say about that.
Civ CTP is awesome! Thanks Loki!
Romans 10:9-10
...is from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNN Tech news.
/.'s credibility somehow? Does Mary Jo Foley have some sort of omniscience that is granted to all journalism graduates that makes what she and others would "highlight" something I need to know, even something I need to live my technical life by? What about the things journalists wouldn't "highlight?" Are those issues that we don't need to worry our pretty little heads about?
/. five times a day...heh. To see what she should have "highlighted" I guess.
/. "weird."
"The slant is so weird," Foley said, citing a recent Slashdot-linked interview on the Microsoft Web site. "What they highlight from the interview is not what a journalist would highlight. They like to highlight things that make Microsoft look stupid."
Again -- "What they highlight...is not what a journalist would highlight." So? Is that supposed to detract from
She then goes on to say that she checks
I have bookmarked Salon, Upside, Andover, CNet, Ars Technia, Macintouch, Slashdot, TechWeb, and The Motley Fool, among others. And what isn't bookmarked is usually found as a link from one of these sites. All have different styles, different priorities and all -- including and especially the "traditional" news avenues -- highlight different issues. After I sift and filter, I think I come up with my business and technical best guess. But without the "non-traditional" avenues, I don't think I'd have the whole story. The inside, "hey, we're sittin' here working with this stuff" story.
And I'm not some kid surfing around for kicks in the basement of the university computer building. I'm an administrative type that recommends and makes hardware purchases -- things like multiple midrange servers, workstations of all flavors, manufacturing shop floor data collection software...but I digress. The point is, I take my technology news seriously because I buy stuff and management expects that stuff to work. I track the technology market from here, among other places.
I guess that makes
Consigned to flames of woe.
Not everyone gets their news from only one source. If truth be told sometimes there have been more intriguing articles in my local newspaper than at slashdot I just go here to feel like I am something other than the product of one area's reasoning or biases. I have never even been able to leave the western US. Most of the ideas, people, areas that are mentioned are foreign to me and must be studied in depth.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Unlike (cough) traditional webnews media, /. does not chop up a single story into multiple pages, just for the purpose of serving as many banner ads as possible (you can get /. to spew the whole discussion thread at you, at once).
--
You need a seperate program typically to gain access to it. There are almost no web-based nntp access points. You must connect to a particular server to gain access to it. Messages are not always on every server. You need to have "transfer rights" to get a message from most servers or along a server path. The minute that anyone gets a system with web based nntp access that will work without crappy cookies or https urls maybe I will check them out but until then?
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
Ya know, for all the crap that first-posters get, I kind of like it. Or at least it doesn't really bother me. They always gets moderated down (perhaps a waste of mod person, or perhaps a reason for them), and cause no real damage. I like to think of as more of a cultural phenomenon. You know, the stupid sh*t everyone, at some point or other, tries but no one is willing to condone. I agree with the "part childish behavior" part, but it helps to lighten what are often very serious, very technical discussions, like the ones for polls :-)
/. team (and the Andover whipcrackers)
/. is "new media" defined, as in there was nothing like it before but new technology has made it possible and even commonplace, kudos to the
+&x
It presupposes the public are a bunch of retards, that we can't be critical to sort the truth from the fiction, and the news from the non-news, and we _need_ editors and "journalists" to do that for us.
Actually, I think the article said that this is what journalists are saying about Slashdot. I think the whole point was that with the Slashdot model, the readers are the ones who do the editing. The author seemed to be reserving judgement about whether this was a Good Thing or not.
Has anyone noticed that the paper edition of Wired magazine has lately printed so many boring stories on tech companies, and how we too can all be rich like them? Its kinda like Forbes except not as boring.
I like the old Wired magazine style better before they sold out. More information and more interesting information.
Won't work. You'd just start seeing "Phrst P0st" and every variation under the sun.
I should have emphasized the following:
Its kinda like Forbes except not as boring.
Who could resist this classic Star Trek quote. (Uh, I think it was from Generations.) About the username and credibilitiy issue, you could probably take a step back and say that the username is like the name of a modern publication (Libery Press, New York Times, 2600). Some have more credibility than others. Some are far more slanted one direction or another on certain topics. But it doesn't really matter. We are the reality-check for anything that is said. I don't care if Bill Gates wrote it. If the thought is sound, then it is sound.
Slashdot may have editors decided what stories to focus on, but they (the editors) are not (actively) editing at the COMMENT level. But then again, Silicon Spin isn't editing the comment of every pundant either. Is Silicon Spin a good model?
Yes and no. The people on the show have an air of credibility to them because of one fancy title or another. But their credibility often escapes through their hole the minute they open it and jump in on a topic that isn't their center field. There's some good stuff and some bad stuff. But they've got a halfway decent reality-check system going on with their handful of people.
Slashdot is like this, except the number of pundants and reality-checkers are in the hundreds. (Read: Silicon Spin with critical mass.) BTW... that's the problem with a number of shows like that and "Call for Help". Not enough critical mass in the way of idea generation or peer review.
I don't get it, the article contradicts itself.
/more/ accurate
On one hand it says "Slashdot is not journalism
but rather just a list of links to other people's
articles", then on the other hand it questions
the accuracy of Slashdot's journalism -- how can
Slashdot be innaccurate if all it has is links to
other people's articles, such as Wired and ZDNN???
Personally I think Slashdot is
because of the moderation system. Eventually the
truth shines through as comments get scored
upward.A great example is yesterday's post of
a guy who claimed he solved the IPv4 addressing
shortage. Now, if their had been no discussion of
the article (as on other news sites) many of us
and many tech jouranlists would have believed the
guy may be on to something. But here on Slashdot
there are many techies who know better and clued
the rest of us in that the guy is a nut -- that's
the kind of insight you get here on Slashdot.
I read Slashdot for the fun of it. Sometimes the news is funny, sometimes serious, sometimes even untrue, but the way in which it is presented is the draw. Also, being run by people who *know* what they're talking about is a big plus. Big sites like ABCNews or ZD may cover more topics, but their writers/editors are rather in the dark about some things.
As for the remark about biased news, name me a newspaper in the US whose editors aren't pro-Republican or pro-Democrat or pro-whatever. Biases exist everywhere. You can count on ABCNews having a slightly more favorable stance for Disney than MSNBC or Yahoo. They'll deny it, but its there; who wants to lose their job because of a flippant comment? Slashdot (i believe) was at first a Linux news site. Naturally, there's going to be a bias against Microsoft. Does that mean the news is any less true? No. Will the way of reporting it be different? Perhaps. But when *you* run the site, *you* get to choose how the information is conveyed.
to end this rant, I think that mainstream journalists need to wake up to the way people are getting their information today. Slashdot attracts viewers because of its individuality and the way news is presented. It may not take over the world, but it is a force to be viewed with respect, not with disgust.
From the article:
"All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority."
wtf??? Isn't the moderation system like this? It seems to fit the description above, albeit it has a few flaws (probably mostly to do with varying personal opinions, tho).
Hrm. Maybe I'm just missing what they're trying to say. Comments?
Now I wish I'd used that pun on purpose. Damn.
I gotta learn to proofread.
The cake is a pie
Bah. I am offended by that article. It presupposes the public are a bunch of retards, that we can't be critical to sort the truth from the fiction, and the news from the non-news, and we _need_ editors and "journalists" to do that for us. If I were an average citizen I'd be annoyed, but being a geek, it's doubly insulting. Besides of which, all the "jounalism" I ever see on TV or newspapers, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, looks exactly like Entertainment Tonight, and they call that "news".
Not to mention the TNG flub. Stupidstupidstupid.
Like many others I'm curious why /. is suddenly news? The article *seems* like the kind you'd pay to have publish to push your product - fluff. Heh, not that I'm suggesting Rob is paying Wired for this crap. Wired should be paying each of us for all that extra traffic/attention for absolutly NOTHING. No 'reliable' or 'informed' opinions there.
When has a paragraph pointing to an article or web page considered journalism? If anyone here is guilty of the crime of being a journalist its the infinite army of posters. Scary, I know.
Tech journalists float somewhere between lawyers who have been on TV and MTV VJ's on the great ladder of integrity. They are the inside jokes among anyone who actually has read the manual for what they're writing about.
Biased? Maybe. Slashdot doesn't have to sell ad space to Microsoft, thus they can speak their minds. Bill as borg too much? Its called humor, martian, we take pleasure in it.
i sent the author a note about this (and I'm probably not the only one - poor guy :) Anyway, read the following...
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority. One such system is up and running on eBay, ensuring that buyers and sellers on the auction site can trust one other.
Three paragraphs later...
A version of the eBay system is in place at Slashdot. Participants can earn moderation points, and readers can pick a threshold that will screen posts accordingly. Registered users automatically begin with a higher rating than anonymous users.
Either the article wasn't edited well ("Wait, there is a rating system - better add this paragraph here") or I missed his point...
I read the entire Wired article with the Dune Title Theme playing in the background, and got this weird feeling...as if Slashdot and Slashdot-like sites were (much like the Fremen) inciting a revolution and about to take over the planet. Hmm. I suggest everyone get that MP3 and go read the article again while listening to it. Wow, that was unnerving.
/** Start Disgust here **/
i'm having serious issues with this phrase...
i mean, really...there's no source to open
i think something like massively-paralell journalism or distributed journalism would better describe it...but then again open-source is becoming such a nifty buzzwerd that i almost expect the drooling monkies runing the media to use it in all sorts of inappropriate places
/** End Disgust here **/
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
I like Slashdot and all that, but well over 50% of the content is just re-linking to stories on salon, news.com, or wired
i agree, BUT...
Almost all of the tech news I read fits into one of these categories:
1. Rehash of some company's press release "Cool new product (tm) available Real Soon Now" (I used to work for Gateway and was both saddened and amused when corporate press releases were reworded slightly and printed under a tech reporter's byline major PC magazines).
2. Rehash of come company's financial statement - or "UberTeq posts record sales".
3. Media / corporate collaboration to produce "news" (ZD anyone?).
4. Opinion pieces, where one person lets their thought ricochet around their skull and writes about it. The level of interestingness depends on the cluefulness of the writer.
5. The reporter talked to someone who knew something and then wrote about it.
In short, there is very little originality in tech journalism. Slashdot makes an excellent filter for categories 1-3, and produces categories 4-5 by default.
I was wondering whether I was the only one who thought Wired has gone downhill. I started reading it a couple years ago (I'm referring mainly to the printed magazine) and got turned on by the good quality technical and philosphical content. But lately most of their articles seem to be about business and $$$. Thank goodness for Slashdot -- it's the most intellectually stimulating part of my daily routine.
They need to proofread... sheesh. Or at least skim for consistency.
Indeed, they do need to. I'm thinking that the article was written in stages, or something like that, for it to be so contradictory. (As in, for it to contradict itself so, it makes it seem as if the author(s) found something to write/wrote a paragraph, and then later, upon more research, etc., they found a new statement to make, which contradicted what they'd already said, but they didn't know that because they apparently chose not to review the final draft before submission.)
Oh well, c'est la vie.
Insert mind here.
> They say that consumers must rely on /. is that a lot of (or at least a few) experts are here, so wide-eyed reports on the newest product from the monopoly-of-the-month can be deflated.
> trained, professional journalists to ensure a
> report is unbiased and free of agendas.
LOL! Is that the same group of trained, professional journalists who bothered to pay attention to the Drudge/Goldberg/Tripp muckraking, or the trained, professional journalists who have gleefully been digging into the GWB muckraking? Few reporters have scruples, and in technology reporting even fewer journalists have a clue. The nice thing about
Who wants to take bets that Jon is saying "Damn, why didn't I write that!?" ;-)
What are CmdrTaco and Hemos doing when they decide which stories to post? Aren't they serving as editors, and determining what is legitimate and what isn't?
-- Dave Aiello
I liked this story but mostly I was interested in the views of the journalists interviewed. My favorite was the derision of the stories because there is no editor to look things over and approve them. This shows a clear lack of understanding of the process of sites like Slashdot. A perfect example was the story on the 25th about the supposed "new" way the guy found to make the ipv4 address structure last longer. I don't really have the know-how to know if this was alright or not (beyond the horrible grammar) but within 30 minutes of reading the comments here, I knew it was crap because I had a hundred people way more knowledgeable than I am reading the story and picking it apart. There's no way to do something like that in a traditional news source. They expect us to trust our info to some editor we are completely unfamiliar with, no thanks. What made me laugh the most was the fact that the reporter talked about how Slashdot was unreliable, then she says she checks the site 5 times a day looking for news. I guess as soon as she reports it the news will be reliable?