Yeah, we definitely appreciate that there are a number of people who just don't want to watch video on Slashdot. What we'd like is to keep producing video content (a small amount, always vastly outnumbered by the normal content),without actively offending those readers.
The hoodie in particular was something that demonstrated to us the difference between how an idea is conceived versus how it is perceived. Timothy thought it'd make for a quick, silly, completely non-serious video. But our presentation of the video didn't make that clear, and people hated it.
Anyway, lesson learned -- you won't be seeing anything like that hoodie video again.
Well, I guess we got ripped off, then. As far as the inner workings of the products, would you rather see/hear about the science and engineering that went into design, or something simply explains that product (i.e. this is part X and it does Y)?
Several companies... that's an interesting idea, and not something we really thought about. Though then perhaps people will just think we're getting paid by each of those companies. Thanks for the suggestion.
We're open to suggestions, particularly of the mentos-and-soda types. And we've got some more visually-appealing ideas in the pipeline. There's been talk of breaking stuff with lasers.
Believe it or not (and many won't), none of the videos were paid for. The thought process behind most of them has been somebody saying, "Hey, I know so-and-so at [X tech company], let's make a video about it," or "Let's send timothy to such-and-such convention."
But we understand it's hard to tell that when it's just a video about some company you may or may not have heard of. Now, is the solution to never reference any particular company in a video? People have been accusing us of slashvertising for years -- it generally just makes us chuckle, since it's so far removed from reality. If some random company -- or some person who happens to work for a company -- is doing something legitimately cool, would you want to hear about it? What about reviews? (Serious question -- a lot of people get angry when we review something, assuming it's an endorsement. Really, we're just tech nerds who like playing with new gadgets/reading new books/playing new games.)
In the meantime, we're going to try to get some science/maker videos into the mix and see how those go.
When a comment is flagged, it gets sent to the editors to review on a case-by-case basis. We then pick from two options: ignore and downmod. Nothing gets deleted, and reporting a comment that is already at -1 won't do anything either way.
Plenty of people have tried to abuse it already, but because it's not automated, they're just wasting their time. Feel free to test it out if you'd like.
Hitting the flag icon will bring that comment to the editors' attention. Nothing is automated. (For example, several comments in this thread were flagged.) When we look at it, we'll downmod it if it's spam, or something like the racist copypastas.
It's basically just an avenue for people without mod points to get the worst comments downmodded more quickly.
That might work if the volume of flags never gets to the point where it gets outsourced to low-paid labor.
There's no conceivable circumstance in which this would ever happen. Heck, right now there are a few people trying to flood us with reports, but it only takes a few seconds to mass-ignore all their effort.
It's basically just an easier avenue for people without mod points to get spam downmodded more quickly.
There's no automation. Flagged comments will be sent to the editors to review. Our two options once we see them will be to ignore the report or to downmod the comment.
The comments will still be readable for anyone who wants to browse at -1. The purpose is simply to more quickly find and downmod spam and things like the racist copypastas.
If you're curious, there were about 60 reported comments when I pulled up the page this afternoon (including the one I'm responding to). I've gone through half so far, and haven't downmodding any yet today.
It's not quite as hopeless as it sounds. Part of the problem is that we're all mobilizing at once for SOPA and PIPA, when this is really an issue that should generate constant feedback. The internet community has gotten involved in the lawmaking process after it's become political. It's easy for people in Congress to dismiss hundreds of callers when they've already taken a stance on something. But before there's a call to action, hardly anybody actually takes the time to contact their representatives these days.
The unfortunate fact is that most lawmakers lag behind in understanding of technical issues. You can assign blame for that how you will, but part of it is that their constituency often doesn't do a good enough job of informing them on the ramifications of policy before something like SOPA comes along.
Everybody at Slashdot was in favor of a blackout to protest these pieces of legislation. That said, we're part of a publicly-traded company, and we don't just get to shut down the site when we want to.
We did, however, get full support for these anti-SOPA/PIPA posts, which will be remaining at the top of the page for the day in lieu of new stories.
We do, but apparently not frequently enough. Part of the problem, I think, is that we've changed our design scheme several times, deprecating certain pages along the way, without automatically pointing people to the new "correct" URL instead. Then, as the design drifts further away, things break on pages we don't expect people to be using anymore.
For a long while we were pretty starved for engineering time, but that's changed lately, and we're making more progress. I will say this: any time you find a bug, or have a question about how something works, or find a specific bit of design that strikes you as unintuitive, feel free to email us and let us know. We get fewer bug reports than you'd think, but we fix 'em when we know about 'em.
I've filed a bug report to get this looked at. As far as writing a new entry, you can use ( https://slashdot.org/journal ), which should just show a clean entry form.
We deprecated most of our *.pl pages a while ago, but occasionally find links to pages that don't play well with the new layout. In this case, ( https://slashdot.org/~stoolpigeon/journal ) provides a list of your journal entries, but obviously not a comprehensive list like the journal.pl page, which I presume is what you'd prefer.
Believe it or not, we do read and sign off on every story. Alas, when you've posted thousands upon thousands of stories, a dupe occasionally slips through the cracks.
Still, we try hard not to let it happen (and we do catch the vast, vast majority of duplicate submissions). When it does, we're usually aware of it within a couple minutes of the story going live. But, at that point, there are usually comments, and we're strongly against deleting or hiding what you folks write. So we leave them up, and the few thousand that see it quickly become a few tens of thousands, which inevitably brings a certain amount of disparaging comments. But that's ok.
For any of you who take a peek at the Firehose every so often, tagging things as a dupe there, or leaving a comment saying as much, certainly helps. We do look.
We fixed the cutoff bug a couple weeks ago, and we're working on adding "More" and fixing a journal deletion bug. If there's a layout problem other than that, I haven't seen a report, so any detail you could provide would be helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for the ideas.
Thanks for this, we'll take a look.
Yeah, we definitely appreciate that there are a number of people who just don't want to watch video on Slashdot. What we'd like is to keep producing video content (a small amount, always vastly outnumbered by the normal content),without actively offending those readers.
The hoodie in particular was something that demonstrated to us the difference between how an idea is conceived versus how it is perceived. Timothy thought it'd make for a quick, silly, completely non-serious video. But our presentation of the video didn't make that clear, and people hated it.
Anyway, lesson learned -- you won't be seeing anything like that hoodie video again.
Well, I guess we got ripped off, then. As far as the inner workings of the products, would you rather see/hear about the science and engineering that went into design, or something simply explains that product (i.e. this is part X and it does Y)?
Several companies... that's an interesting idea, and not something we really thought about. Though then perhaps people will just think we're getting paid by each of those companies. Thanks for the suggestion.
We're open to suggestions, particularly of the mentos-and-soda types. And we've got some more visually-appealing ideas in the pipeline. There's been talk of breaking stuff with lasers.
Sorry. I'll ask our ad department for some more appropriate pre-roll ads, but it's not something editorial has any control over.
Believe it or not (and many won't), none of the videos were paid for. The thought process behind most of them has been somebody saying, "Hey, I know so-and-so at [X tech company], let's make a video about it," or "Let's send timothy to such-and-such convention."
But we understand it's hard to tell that when it's just a video about some company you may or may not have heard of. Now, is the solution to never reference any particular company in a video? People have been accusing us of slashvertising for years -- it generally just makes us chuckle, since it's so far removed from reality. If some random company -- or some person who happens to work for a company -- is doing something legitimately cool, would you want to hear about it? What about reviews? (Serious question -- a lot of people get angry when we review something, assuming it's an endorsement. Really, we're just tech nerds who like playing with new gadgets/reading new books/playing new games.)
In the meantime, we're going to try to get some science/maker videos into the mix and see how those go.
Thanks, I'll add this to the summary.
The former, definitely.
When a comment is flagged, it gets sent to the editors to review on a case-by-case basis. We then pick from two options: ignore and downmod. Nothing gets deleted, and reporting a comment that is already at -1 won't do anything either way.
Plenty of people have tried to abuse it already, but because it's not automated, they're just wasting their time. Feel free to test it out if you'd like.
Hitting the flag icon will bring that comment to the editors' attention. Nothing is automated. (For example, several comments in this thread were flagged.) When we look at it, we'll downmod it if it's spam, or something like the racist copypastas.
It's basically just an avenue for people without mod points to get the worst comments downmodded more quickly.
That might work if the volume of flags never gets to the point where it gets outsourced to low-paid labor.
There's no conceivable circumstance in which this would ever happen. Heck, right now there are a few people trying to flood us with reports, but it only takes a few seconds to mass-ignore all their effort.
It's basically just an easier avenue for people without mod points to get spam downmodded more quickly.
There's no automation. Flagged comments will be sent to the editors to review. Our two options once we see them will be to ignore the report or to downmod the comment.
The comments will still be readable for anyone who wants to browse at -1. The purpose is simply to more quickly find and downmod spam and things like the racist copypastas.
If you're curious, there were about 60 reported comments when I pulled up the page this afternoon (including the one I'm responding to). I've gone through half so far, and haven't downmodding any yet today.
It's not quite as hopeless as it sounds. Part of the problem is that we're all mobilizing at once for SOPA and PIPA, when this is really an issue that should generate constant feedback. The internet community has gotten involved in the lawmaking process after it's become political. It's easy for people in Congress to dismiss hundreds of callers when they've already taken a stance on something. But before there's a call to action, hardly anybody actually takes the time to contact their representatives these days.
The unfortunate fact is that most lawmakers lag behind in understanding of technical issues. You can assign blame for that how you will, but part of it is that their constituency often doesn't do a good enough job of informing them on the ramifications of policy before something like SOPA comes along.
Everybody at Slashdot was in favor of a blackout to protest these pieces of legislation. That said, we're part of a publicly-traded company, and we don't just get to shut down the site when we want to.
We did, however, get full support for these anti-SOPA/PIPA posts, which will be remaining at the top of the page for the day in lieu of new stories.
Fixed. Thanks for keeping us on our toes.
I swapped out the original link with one pointing to the statement on their website, so it should work now.
Thanks, we'll take a look. Does it show up properly if the font size is scaled down?
We do, but apparently not frequently enough. Part of the problem, I think, is that we've changed our design scheme several times, deprecating certain pages along the way, without automatically pointing people to the new "correct" URL instead. Then, as the design drifts further away, things break on pages we don't expect people to be using anymore.
For a long while we were pretty starved for engineering time, but that's changed lately, and we're making more progress. I will say this: any time you find a bug, or have a question about how something works, or find a specific bit of design that strikes you as unintuitive, feel free to email us and let us know. We get fewer bug reports than you'd think, but we fix 'em when we know about 'em.
I've filed a bug report to get this looked at. As far as writing a new entry, you can use ( https://slashdot.org/journal ), which should just show a clean entry form.
We deprecated most of our *.pl pages a while ago, but occasionally find links to pages that don't play well with the new layout. In this case, ( https://slashdot.org/~stoolpigeon/journal ) provides a list of your journal entries, but obviously not a comprehensive list like the journal.pl page, which I presume is what you'd prefer.
Thanks for the report.
Believe it or not, we do read and sign off on every story. Alas, when you've posted thousands upon thousands of stories, a dupe occasionally slips through the cracks.
Still, we try hard not to let it happen (and we do catch the vast, vast majority of duplicate submissions). When it does, we're usually aware of it within a couple minutes of the story going live. But, at that point, there are usually comments, and we're strongly against deleting or hiding what you folks write. So we leave them up, and the few thousand that see it quickly become a few tens of thousands, which inevitably brings a certain amount of disparaging comments. But that's ok.
For any of you who take a peek at the Firehose every so often, tagging things as a dupe there, or leaving a comment saying as much, certainly helps. We do look.
Can you elaborate?
We fixed the cutoff bug a couple weeks ago, and we're working on adding "More" and fixing a journal deletion bug. If there's a layout problem other than that, I haven't seen a report, so any detail you could provide would be helpful.
Ironically, your comment refers to word that no longer appears in the summary.