Y2K Movie Followup: The Slashdot Effect Gone Wrong

A couple of readers pointed us to one of Wired's stories that is journaling the aftermath of a recent Slashdot story. The story was about a web hosting company that pulled a Y2K spoof movie, under pressure from the FBI. The disappointing part is the tone of the e-mails that were sent to the one-man operation. Wired has some samples from said e-mails. Please, before hitting send on e-mails and postings, think about the whole situation. In this case, after checking with legal people, the web-hosting company put back the movie and does not deserve the flame generated against it. The FBI is the culprit in this case, and rather then rail on one guy, we should be banding together to fight against actions like the FBI's. For more discussion read Thoughts from the Furnace, Rob's feature about flaming on the Web.

Addition: 11/30 by michael : I thought I'd chime in here, since I started the fracas.

Blaming the ISP is sometimes appropriate, and sometimes not. Huge national ISPs have legal staffs to evaluate whether something should or should not be pulled. In general, they display an astonishing lack of backbone in defending customer sites, because even minor hassle from law enforcement just isn't worth it to them, and they don't have much excuse when they knuckle under. Small ISPs are a much different matter. No legal staff, facing the loss of your entire business if you guess wrong. Let's say he stood up for this guy and refused to pull the site, and the FBI seized the ISP's computers. Would all you flamers have stood up for him, sent him money to fight the good fight, talked to his other customers and begged them to stay on even though their sites were down? Yeah, sure you would. He made the best business decision available to him. The difference between this guy and one of the national ISPs is that they wouldn't have put the site back up again at all.

And if Wired has it right and you people are writing to the ISP's other clients, that's just sad. Save your anger for someone who's actually done something wrong. You want to get pissed off, give the FBI a call and ask them how their "investigation" is going.

Comments

Please, no, not again. I'm tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is at least the fifth or sixth Slashdot story where something was flamed and the flames got publicity, and Slashdot readers were admonished to be more polite.

It's not going to do one bit of good. It *can't*. Because in any crowd, there's always going to be *some* flamers writing nastygrams. It's not because Slashdotters are particularly rude, it's simply because the huge number of responses means that even a vanishingly small percentage of flamers will still produce enough of them for a news article or a section on a web site. If Wired *wants* to run a story about nasty flamers, they will, even if the flamers are only 0.01 of all the replies--you can't stop them. The media likes to sensationalize.

Telling people here not to be rude, in an attempt to avoid situations like the Wired article, is like getting a bin of ten thousand apples and expecting there not to even be a single bad one. It doesn't work that way.

Re:FIRST POST!!!!

[technos]

I know what you mean.. There is a comforting feeling to get that dose of 'Petrified/Grits' along with the regular commentary. Kind of like the moronic poking/prodding/slapping bit the Three Stooges did; Moe always won, Curly always got it the worst, and we always laughed.

I must say that 'Mr. Petrified' has gone above and beyond his usual effort for this one. He's moving beyond the standard one-line 'xxxx xxxxx NAKED AND PETRIFIED'. Either that, or we're seeing a new 'Mr. Petrified'.

Keep up the good work!

Journalistic integrity

[Rilke]

Go ahead and moderate this one down if you want, but I think it needs to be said.

Lately, /. has done an awful lot of posts that are just fanning the flames, and what's really wrong is that this is generally done without looking into the issue at all.

/. used to be a small site, that basically gave 'sightings' rather than stories. But /. has grown, and grown huge, and with the growth should really come some responsibility.

When /. started, it was perfectly reasonable for Rob to just post some pointers to stories on other sites; it was more of a personal thing, like sending e-mail to friends. But now slashdot has really become a news service, but still refuses to adopt the responsibility that news services should have; the responsibility to at least try to independently verify a story before publishing it.

The last few weeks have seen a lot of stories that would have read very differently if /. had tried to contact the people involved before posting the story. And in many cases, the commentary on the /. posting has turned out to be plain ol' wrong.

It's easy to blame the flamers for getting out of control, but at some point slashdot has to accept the responsibility for what is posted here by the staff. When somebody like CNN posts a story without checking the facts, everyone here gets very upset. Slashdot has grown to the point where they should begin adopting the same kind of journalistic integrity they insist from others.

Nobody expects a full private investigation into stories from /. (at least I don't), but a minimal re-checking of the source is a pretty reasonable expectation.