The thing with Reddit is there is just a +/- system. There is no taxonomy in why you moderate someone + or -.Everyone also gets an equal vote, which for some types of discussion, is best.
With Slashdot points are randomly distributed and you can't both moderate and comment, which is appropriate for other types of discussion.. In that way Slashdot got a lot of things right.
The problem neither site is a one size fits all solution for moderation. For actual tech discussion I want Slashdot's moderation. For pictures of Cats I want Reddit's.
Slashdot's moderation and "Anonymous Coward" account also prevented bandwagoning on the Brianna Wu Interview despite her trying to get her twitter followers to do exactly that. They didn't have the same power that they did on Reddit or Twitter so they really didn't affect the conversation.
Usenet just needed a good moderation system built on top of it.
Personally I wouldn't be opposed to 3 separate types of 'moderation' that can be enabled/disabled.
- No moderation. 4Chan, Usenet
- Everyone gets to moderation Reddit
- Not everyone gets to moderate. Slashdot. Mod points are handed out at random.
Each have their advantages or disadvantages. The "inline sharing" is something that should be done client side anyway. After using reddit for a few years and coming back to Slashdot I realize how much more I like markdown for just doing forum posts. Not that I have a problem with HTML but it takes a bit longer to type out the same content. Add a web front end and call it a day.
The best part is if you made it a RFC people could run their own usenet circles. I would love to get a slashdot replacement going outside of corporate control. If you host nodes in a few countries it would be hard to take down. (It's how Usenet was designed).
I'm ready to jump ship from Reddit and Slashdot to somewhere else and would prefer if that somewhere else was a protocol rather than a specific site.
It's kind of come to a head now that there is nothing really left for people to just discuss stuff. Slashdot sold out to Dice. Fark and Reddit sold out to SJWs and "mainstream". Voat is just reimplementing Reddit, but poorly (IMHO).
Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.
I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running & modify for most people it wasn't worth it (and we see how that turned out).
The nice thing about it being an RFC is that most of this stuff can be implemented client side. I can write my own app to discuss things. NNTP just needed distributed moderation like Slashdot.
I read all 300 toxic questions for my @slashdot interview, here are the ones I can answer 1. Yes, I like peanut M&Ms
She got exactly what she was going for. She never intended to answer any questions. She's just run out of venues to call her out on her bullshit. She heard Slashdot used to do 'tech', probably knew someone at Dice and got it put in. I wonder what Slashdot's traffic looked like today when she actively tried to get her followers to brigade Slashdot
And it's pretty easy to tell who they are. They have no Karma, didn't even Create an account
Meanwhile some of us have been on Slashdot for 10+ years and have decent post histories to fall back on. She claims it was GamerGaters that did this but most of them are too young to have ever found Slashdot.
Personally the Windows UI topped out around NT/2000. I've tried as hard as I could to make XP and Windows 7 look exactly like it. My task bar has 3 rows because that's how I work. It doesn't work for other people and I understand where Microsoft is going with the 'tabletification'. It's just a rehash of Microsoft Bob and Apple's At Ease. It's a computer interface for non computer people.
My wife loves her Windows 8 laptop. I try to use it and it's probably one of the most frustrating things I have ever used. Who decided you could only have a few apps up on a screen and they would try to take full control? How about the 'full screen' start menu.
All I want is a simple "Windows Classic" theme that makes Windows 10 look exactly like Windows 2000. That's it. Keep all the fancy kernel improvements and everything else, I just want to interact with the computer how I've found it best.
"We're a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids or morally quesitonable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of free speech on a site like this."
"We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States – because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it – but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse)."
There are two kinds of free speech. It's not the 1st amendment free speech, it's Voltaire's "I disagree with what you say but will defend you to the death to say it" freedom of expression.
No one is claiming that the government is stepping in to censor Reddit. What they are claiming is that Reddit attracted users on the basis of "Free Speech" anything goes. Moderators volunteer their time (Free as in beer) to moderate based on the premise that Reddit allowed Free Speech.
Comments, moderators, content is all built by the users. Users that were told "This is a free speech zone". The 1st amendment equivalent would be 'free speech zones' and then censoring what people said in them.
I disagree with FatPeopleHate, I loathed the subreddit. However I defend their right to exist. The freedom of expression exists in many other forms than just the US Government's interpretation of it.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, states that:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
England’s Bill of Rights 1689 legally established the constitutional right of 'freedom of speech in Parliament' which is still in effect.
> If you're interested in a Reddit-like site that won't arbitrarily close your subreddit and shadowban you because they don't like what you're talking about, voat.co [voat.co] is shaping up pretty nicely.
But I'm not. What I'm looking for is a Reddit style site with Slashdot's moderation and accessibility through APIs and Usenet. I love Slashdot's moderation system and wouldn't want to discuss tech any other way. It also helps to slow down brigading since only a small number of users have mod points at any given time. Even then you got a choice between modding or commenting, not both. I'm wasting my points right now because I really want to post on this.
You also put a bit more effort into writing a post because everyone else put effort into "Should I spend one of my 5 points on this post". You also had throttling of how fast you could post. Posts were longer and more developed. I still go back and read comments I made from years ago because I put effort into writing them. (And it doesn't mean that you can't still have funny discourse).
It's hard to explain to kids these days what doxxing is and what it is not.
If I can take your/. or reddit username and go to http://facebook.com/%5Busernam... then it's not Doxxing. YOU are the idiot that used the exact same username for multiple sites. The most hilarious violators are the ones that post on the porn sites with the same name as Reddit, with their full location. It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to find the average Redditor from their posts and similar usernames.
Some will even post enough photos for you to reconstruct other username with google image search or tineye. This isn't super stalking sleuthing it's google 101.
I've floated this idea multiple places but I think that/.ers could actually pull it off. It's a bit scattered, and if anyone would like to discuss this further respond here. I really want/.ers opinion on this...
Nothing was wrong with Usenet for discussion, it was distributed, scaled well, worked well on low CPU and low bandwidth machines. It just needed a better moderation system on top of it. Nothing was wrong with IRC for chat, it was distributed, scaled well, worked well on low CPU and low bandwidth machines.
They just needed moderation and better interfaces. IrcCloud is attempting to make IRC available for the 'mass public' on modern devices and HTML5. Why isn't the same approach being taken to Usenet?
While trying to chat with 5-10 people on Facebook my machine will grind to a halt. Even slower if I have it open in multiple tabs Meanwhile irssi runs perfectly fine on a RaspPi even with dozens of channels and hundreds of users.
Can a group sit down and make a RFC for moderation?. Include all the types of moderation so people can setup their own subreddit/newsgroups anyway they want. If people want a 'free for all' anyone gets to vote (Reddit), that's fine. But understand that with certain types of discussion it goes to shit. If people want a limited moderation (Slashdot), also allow that. Slashdot has some distinct advantages in that you can't really bandwagon like you can on Reddit because not everyone has mod points and not everyone has mod points at the same time. I've floated the idea of a "Coin" that could be used for moderation. "Slashdot2.0" hands out expiring moderation coins
Publish it as a spec and let other people figure out the implementation. You could have a completely integrated stack like Slashdot and Reddit but you could also distribute it. The discussion (usenet) is hosted on one server and the moderation is on another. I would even pay money to 'subscribe' to the moderation server that had all the slashdotters but not all of the redditors. I liked the taxonomy of "Funny" vs "Insightful". With the exact same news story you could have the exact same comments but displayed completely different for the audience.
This way you could host it in any form you wanted. You could spin up an EC2 instance and host a.onion only chat/discussion/moderation server for people that need it in places where the government tries to limit it. But it'll also help to limit being DDOS'd like Voat's new servers are as well as all the *chan servers.
And for the love of god, make it support unicode.
Slashdot is dead. Reddit is dying. We've all seen that corporations running discussions always turn to shit. Surely there has to be someone on/. that can at least help me hash out this idea. Even if I have to implement it first in Python before someone that knows more than me can do it in C better and faster.
Yes, it's a bit slanted, but that's the tone of Encyclopedia Dramatica posts. But it's about far slanted the otherway as Brianna's story is slanted towards her.
And then Dice will ignore them and shoehorn in what ever the most profitable agenda is at that time.
Right now they're banking on SJWs being profitable. It's a short term solution that is going to alienate a lot of people, especially when the SJW house of cards comes down
For those of you that want to know how Wu plays into this:
So...how did Brianna get involved anyway? All I remember is she just appeared one day making accusations and that whole house thing.
She involved herself. No one knew about her until she tweeted some ridiculous crap, got called out on her bullshit and instantly cried harassment.
Fark has become Reddit lite. They went full SJW, removed boobies from the front page, redesigned it, etc.
With all of the coders on here you'd think someone would figure out a way to update INN to include moderation of some sort. Put a nice web front end on it and make it all open over API/RFC and let other people make your clients.
Not everyone is cut out for making effective Power Point presentations but we got rid of standalone presentation makers years ago. It's what my dad used to do. Now everyone puts together their own presentations (For better or worse). Coding is going to end up being the same may.
You'll have mid level managers that can do it effectively to convey their idea. There will be mid level managers that put together terrible pieces of code.
My manager learned VBA and uses it for everything. It's gotten to the point where his year end reviews, budget, etc are all one massively interconnected set of spread sheets. But it means he works 1/10th as hard as his counterparts who still do it the old way 'by hand'
Why does everything have to be on a single site? The whole point of the internet was to not put all the eggs in one basket so what did people do? Put all their eggs into one basket.
Why/r/tdi instead of Tdiclub.com? Why/r/coontown instead of Stormfront? (Plus I can keep myself from accidentally ending up there).
Reddit has a great grasp on the breadth of knowledge but not on the depth. Sometimes a forum dedicated to something with separate subjects broken down into separate subjects.
Usenet just needed a good moderation system built on top of it.
Personally I wouldn't be opposed to 3 separate types of 'moderation' that can be enabled/disabled.
- No moderation. 4Chan, Usenet
- Everyone gets to moderation Reddit
- Not everyone gets to moderate. Slashdot. Mod points are handed out at random.
Each have their advantages or disadvantages. The "inline sharing" is something that should be done client side anyway. After using reddit for a few years and coming back to Slashdot I realize how much more I like markdown for just doing forum posts. Not that I have a problem with HTML but it takes a bit longer to type out the same content. Add a web front end and call it a day.
The best part is if you made it a RFC people could run their own usenet circles. I would love to get a slashdot replacement going outside of corporate control. If you host nodes in a few countries it would be hard to take down. (It's how Usenet was designed).
I'm ready to jump ship from Reddit and Slashdot to somewhere else and would prefer if that somewhere else was a protocol rather than a specific site.
And that's why I like not putting all of my discussion eggs in one basket.
I personally don't care if someone is a racist or a fatty when they talk about their opinions on technology. I'm sure I've picked up a great number of things over the years from people I may not have agreed with on other subjects. I'll just copy and paste my old post on what slashdot needed to do
Dice you've successfully figured out how to run one of the most best 'news' and opensource websites and run them into the ground for profit./. and Fark were the only 2 places that could handle 9/11 traffic. I rode out that entire day on both sites when CNN was crumbling.
I'm glad I had Slashdot over Reddit when I was an angsty tenager. I took pride in trying to get +5 comments and put effort into doing so. Honestly slashdot made me a better writer. Reddit is nice for short terse communication but sometimes I want to "talk with adults".
Slashdot didn't need much. Unicode support. Newer HTML5 support. CSS3. Make a decent mobile app, move away from HTML for Markdown. Moderation made sense and was much better than a simple +- system. Voting was randomly enabled and you couldn't both vote and comment on the same article. -2 to 5 also limited band wagoning. It's easier to recover from a bunch of early 'down votes'. Instead you drove everyone away to other sites (which still don't quite scratch the/. itch). You shoe horn in what ever fucking agenda is "big in IT". Looking back at all the news I got from/. I can't ever remember thinking "I wonder if a woman did this" or "Too bad a woman didn't do this" because I didn't care. It was about the tech and news for nerds.
On 'Gamergate', 'sexual equality', 'gender issues', we don't care "Trans-gendered" is a big thing in the news these days (and especially around tech) but a long, long time ago I remember a Mac developer made the transition. (This was in the late '90s.) I read her bio. Shrugged my shoulders went "Neat" and moved on. Why? Because she made some awesome Mac games. Most other person I know in IT or engineering think the same way. None of us care what you do with your body or who you take to the bedroom. I do care if you can cut it and get your work done or contribute to society.
On the other side of that is Randi Harper (FreeBSD Girl) [twitter.com] who actually write decent code. I've dug through some of her BSD commits, major props to her for doing that. But it can all be done without photoshopping traffic tickets to make it look like you got swatted, begging for money to move on twitter [youcaring.com], (When you already earn $3k/month from Patreon [patreon.com]), grandstanding on Twitter for no reason and bandwagoning users against anyone that disagrees isn't the way to do it.
You had the same opportunity to fix Sourceforge all of its' convoluted download mirrors (just use a proper CDN), update to Git, and everything else that Sourceforge isn't and GitHub is. Instead you rested on your laurels and are now trying to use this as one last cash grab before the Titanic goes down.
I don't know where I was going with this either. Just thought someone up top should know why your traffic is tanking and a lot of us are pissed off at you for what you've done.
I still won't forget the time you broke the capslock filter [slashdot.org], I remember BitTorrent being announced and people thinking it was useless, the iPod's lack of wifi and space compared to a Nomad, et al.
The people that have historically been on reddit were a 'techy' or 'nerdy' minority. They were who Slashdotters were 20 years ago. They want to attract bored housewives and people not currently on reddit and they'll never do it with fat people hate or other people having full control of subreddits or big things like Secret Santa, so they got rid of everyone that disagrees. Victoria actually made celebrities do their own AMA. Now they can just have the PR firm phone it in.
If anyone is upset at the changes then you they weren't the target demographic of Reddit 2.0. The type of people that originally came to Reddit a decade ago will find elsewhere. Reddit will continue to exist as a place for bored housewives to continue talking becoming a facebook of sorts. Right now all of those people are shoehorned into a terrible ayout of Facebook (Notice how facebook just added threaded discussion?). They're going to attract the people that want a "better" place to discuss things than Facebook but not actually have any real discussion. Why do you think CoonTown and SRS still exist? Loud vocal minority idiots are very profitable (Patreon).
Write something in a low level, portable language. Someone on slashdot should know how to roll up Usenet, IRC, voting & a web front end into a single set of packages that anyone can host.
Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.
I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running for most people it wasn't worth it.
Add on Tor/I2P and you now have all of the above 'off' of the main internet.
"We" can write an alternative. Make a new Usenet. Integrate IRC. Add voting somehow.
Usenet solved 30 years ago the exact problems a lot of people are having with Reddit/Voat/Slashdot. It's distributed, you can't 'take it down'. Make a new RFC and let people host their own 'sites'.
It just needs voting/some moderation on top of it. Make it a simple, straight forward interface. If I want to spin up a 'chat, discussion, et al' website on AWS.
I would peer a node on a discussion if someone wrote it.
I cannot imagine how watching someone type for hours is instructional, you could get well in to a book by that point.
I cannot imagine how just sitting reading a book is instructional. I would rather see someone do it. Look at the proliferation of youtube videos on how to do basic stuff like change your oil. Some people are visual learners. Those people used to go into trades where as book learners went to college.
A civil engineer could tell you all the theory behind pipe flow but I want a plumber plumbing my house. Someone that learned through hands on visual training.
Programming and coding is on its way to being a trade and it's sad seeing Slashdotters get on the case of people that are visual learners because they can't imagine why anyone would want to watch someone do something.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing with Reddit is there is just a +/- system. There is no taxonomy in why you moderate someone + or -.Everyone also gets an equal vote, which for some types of discussion, is best.
With Slashdot points are randomly distributed and you can't both moderate and comment, which is appropriate for other types of discussion.. In that way Slashdot got a lot of things right.
The problem neither site is a one size fits all solution for moderation. For actual tech discussion I want Slashdot's moderation. For pictures of Cats I want Reddit's.
Slashdot's moderation and "Anonymous Coward" account also prevented bandwagoning on the Brianna Wu Interview despite her trying to get her twitter followers to do exactly that. They didn't have the same power that they did on Reddit or Twitter so they really didn't affect the conversation.
Usenet just needed a good moderation system built on top of it.
Personally I wouldn't be opposed to 3 separate types of 'moderation' that can be enabled/disabled.
- No moderation. 4Chan, Usenet
- Everyone gets to moderation Reddit
- Not everyone gets to moderate. Slashdot. Mod points are handed out at random.
Each have their advantages or disadvantages. The "inline sharing" is something that should be done client side anyway. After using reddit for a few years and coming back to Slashdot I realize how much more I like markdown for just doing forum posts. Not that I have a problem with HTML but it takes a bit longer to type out the same content. Add a web front end and call it a day.
The best part is if you made it a RFC people could run their own usenet circles. I would love to get a slashdot replacement going outside of corporate control. If you host nodes in a few countries it would be hard to take down. (It's how Usenet was designed).
I'm ready to jump ship from Reddit and Slashdot to somewhere else and would prefer if that somewhere else was a protocol rather than a specific site.
It's kind of come to a head now that there is nothing really left for people to just discuss stuff. Slashdot sold out to Dice. Fark and Reddit sold out to SJWs and "mainstream". Voat is just reimplementing Reddit, but poorly (IMHO).
Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.
I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running & modify for most people it wasn't worth it (and we see how that turned out).
The nice thing about it being an RFC is that most of this stuff can be implemented client side. I can write my own app to discuss things. NNTP just needed distributed moderation like Slashdot.
The article had exactly the intended effect. She got to claim she was a victim on twitter. [Archive]
I read all 300 toxic questions for my @slashdot interview, here are the ones I can answer
1. Yes, I like peanut M&Ms
She got exactly what she was going for. She never intended to answer any questions. She's just run out of venues to call her out on her bullshit. She heard Slashdot used to do 'tech', probably knew someone at Dice and got it put in. I wonder what Slashdot's traffic looked like today when she actively tried to get her followers to brigade Slashdot
And it's pretty easy to tell who they are. They have no Karma, didn't even Create an account
Meanwhile some of us have been on Slashdot for 10+ years and have decent post histories to fall back on. She claims it was GamerGaters that did this but most of them are too young to have ever found Slashdot.
These people can't handle the truth/criticism.
Personally the Windows UI topped out around NT/2000. I've tried as hard as I could to make XP and Windows 7 look exactly like it. My task bar has 3 rows because that's how I work. It doesn't work for other people and I understand where Microsoft is going with the 'tabletification'. It's just a rehash of Microsoft Bob and Apple's At Ease. It's a computer interface for non computer people.
My wife loves her Windows 8 laptop. I try to use it and it's probably one of the most frustrating things I have ever used. Who decided you could only have a few apps up on a screen and they would try to take full control? How about the 'full screen' start menu.
All I want is a simple "Windows Classic" theme that makes Windows 10 look exactly like Windows 2000. That's it. Keep all the fancy kernel improvements and everything else, I just want to interact with the computer how I've found it best.
Some other great reading:
"We're a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids or morally quesitonable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of free speech on a site like this."
-/u/Hueypriest Comment
"We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States – because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it – but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse)."
-/u/yishan Gawker article + interview
There are two kinds of free speech. It's not the 1st amendment free speech, it's Voltaire's "I disagree with what you say but will defend you to the death to say it" freedom of expression.
No one is claiming that the government is stepping in to censor Reddit. What they are claiming is that Reddit attracted users on the basis of "Free Speech" anything goes. Moderators volunteer their time (Free as in beer) to moderate based on the premise that Reddit allowed Free Speech.
Comments, moderators, content is all built by the users. Users that were told "This is a free speech zone". The 1st amendment equivalent would be 'free speech zones' and then censoring what people said in them.
I disagree with FatPeopleHate, I loathed the subreddit. However I defend their right to exist. The freedom of expression exists in many other forms than just the US Government's interpretation of it.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, states that:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
England’s Bill of Rights 1689 legally established the constitutional right of 'freedom of speech in Parliament' which is still in effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Reddit claimed it was a place for freedom of expression and then backtracked on it. And with it users such as myself will find other places.
> If you're interested in a Reddit-like site that won't arbitrarily close your subreddit and shadowban you because they don't like what you're talking about, voat.co [voat.co] is shaping up pretty nicely.
But I'm not. What I'm looking for is a Reddit style site with Slashdot's moderation and accessibility through APIs and Usenet. I love Slashdot's moderation system and wouldn't want to discuss tech any other way. It also helps to slow down brigading since only a small number of users have mod points at any given time. Even then you got a choice between modding or commenting, not both. I'm wasting my points right now because I really want to post on this.
You also put a bit more effort into writing a post because everyone else put effort into "Should I spend one of my 5 points on this post". You also had throttling of how fast you could post. Posts were longer and more developed. I still go back and read comments I made from years ago because I put effort into writing them. (And it doesn't mean that you can't still have funny discourse).
Wu née M
It's 2015. I can copy and paste Emojis on facebook and Reddit and slashdot can't support character sets beyond American English? Come on.
It's hard to explain to kids these days what doxxing is and what it is not.
If I can take your /. or reddit username and go to http://facebook.com/%5Busernam... then it's not Doxxing. YOU are the idiot that used the exact same username for multiple sites. The most hilarious violators are the ones that post on the porn sites with the same name as Reddit, with their full location. It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to find the average Redditor from their posts and similar usernames.
Some will even post enough photos for you to reconstruct other username with google image search or tineye. This isn't super stalking sleuthing it's google 101.
Time to go find another tech news site.
I've floated this idea multiple places but I think that /.ers could actually pull it off. It's a bit scattered, and if anyone would like to discuss this further respond here. I really want /.ers opinion on this...
Can we go back to a Unix philosophy for online discussion?
Nothing was wrong with Usenet for discussion, it was distributed, scaled well, worked well on low CPU and low bandwidth machines. It just needed a better moderation system on top of it. Nothing was wrong with IRC for chat, it was distributed, scaled well, worked well on low CPU and low bandwidth machines.
They just needed moderation and better interfaces. IrcCloud is attempting to make IRC available for the 'mass public' on modern devices and HTML5. Why isn't the same approach being taken to Usenet?
While trying to chat with 5-10 people on Facebook my machine will grind to a halt. Even slower if I have it open in multiple tabs Meanwhile irssi runs perfectly fine on a RaspPi even with dozens of channels and hundreds of users.
Can a group sit down and make a RFC for moderation?. Include all the types of moderation so people can setup their own subreddit/newsgroups anyway they want. If people want a 'free for all' anyone gets to vote (Reddit), that's fine. But understand that with certain types of discussion it goes to shit. If people want a limited moderation (Slashdot), also allow that. Slashdot has some distinct advantages in that you can't really bandwagon like you can on Reddit because not everyone has mod points and not everyone has mod points at the same time. I've floated the idea of a "Coin" that could be used for moderation. "Slashdot2.0" hands out expiring moderation coins
Publish it as a spec and let other people figure out the implementation. You could have a completely integrated stack like Slashdot and Reddit but you could also distribute it. The discussion (usenet) is hosted on one server and the moderation is on another. I would even pay money to 'subscribe' to the moderation server that had all the slashdotters but not all of the redditors. I liked the taxonomy of "Funny" vs "Insightful". With the exact same news story you could have the exact same comments but displayed completely different for the audience.
This way you could host it in any form you wanted. You could spin up an EC2 instance and host a .onion only chat/discussion/moderation server for people that need it in places where the government tries to limit it. But it'll also help to limit being DDOS'd like Voat's new servers are as well as all the *chan servers.
And for the love of god, make it support unicode.
Slashdot is dead. Reddit is dying. We've all seen that corporations running discussions always turn to shit. Surely there has to be someone on /. that can at least help me hash out this idea. Even if I have to implement it first in Python before someone that knows more than me can do it in C better and faster.
https://encyclopediadramatica....
Yes, it's a bit slanted, but that's the tone of Encyclopedia Dramatica posts. But it's about far slanted the otherway as Brianna's story is slanted towards her.
She's a self proclaimed victim http://selfproclaimedvictim.bl...
And then Dice will ignore them and shoehorn in what ever the most profitable agenda is at that time.
Right now they're banking on SJWs being profitable. It's a short term solution that is going to alienate a lot of people, especially when the SJW house of cards comes down
For those of you that want to know how Wu plays into this:
So...how did Brianna get involved anyway? All I remember is she just appeared one day making accusations and that whole house thing.
She involved herself. No one knew about her until she tweeted some ridiculous crap, got called out on her bullshit and instantly cried harassment.
And they made the announcement on a Friday afternoon as close to close of business as possible.
Rather than improving the site and taking on refugees from Reddit they decided to double down on terrible design and appeal to the worst of them.
It's like Italy deciding to turn away all the moderates and only deciding to accept
Meanwhile those of us that have been around Slashdot since 2000 have pretty much thrown our hands up.
I wish I had enough knowledge and freetime to rewrite INN with moderation. Usenet 2.0. It seems that the Eternal September has hit the web.
Fark has become Reddit lite. They went full SJW, removed boobies from the front page, redesigned it, etc.
With all of the coders on here you'd think someone would figure out a way to update INN to include moderation of some sort. Put a nice web front end on it and make it all open over API/RFC and let other people make your clients.
Not everyone is cut out for making effective Power Point presentations but we got rid of standalone presentation makers years ago. It's what my dad used to do. Now everyone puts together their own presentations (For better or worse). Coding is going to end up being the same may.
You'll have mid level managers that can do it effectively to convey their idea. There will be mid level managers that put together terrible pieces of code.
My manager learned VBA and uses it for everything. It's gotten to the point where his year end reviews, budget, etc are all one massively interconnected set of spread sheets. But it means he works 1/10th as hard as his counterparts who still do it the old way 'by hand'
Why does everything have to be on a single site? The whole point of the internet was to not put all the eggs in one basket so what did people do? Put all their eggs into one basket.
Why /r/tdi instead of Tdiclub.com? Why /r/coontown instead of Stormfront? (Plus I can keep myself from accidentally ending up there).
Reddit has a great grasp on the breadth of knowledge but not on the depth. Sometimes a forum dedicated to something with separate subjects broken down into separate subjects.
Usenet just needed a good moderation system built on top of it.
Personally I wouldn't be opposed to 3 separate types of 'moderation' that can be enabled/disabled.
- No moderation. 4Chan, Usenet
- Everyone gets to moderation Reddit
- Not everyone gets to moderate. Slashdot. Mod points are handed out at random.
Each have their advantages or disadvantages. The "inline sharing" is something that should be done client side anyway. After using reddit for a few years and coming back to Slashdot I realize how much more I like markdown for just doing forum posts. Not that I have a problem with HTML but it takes a bit longer to type out the same content. Add a web front end and call it a day.
The best part is if you made it a RFC people could run their own usenet circles. I would love to get a slashdot replacement going outside of corporate control. If you host nodes in a few countries it would be hard to take down. (It's how Usenet was designed).
I'm ready to jump ship from Reddit and Slashdot to somewhere else and would prefer if that somewhere else was a protocol rather than a specific site.
I'm trying to keep Slashdot alive here with a light story and a chance for some good old geek nostalgia/venting.
Me too. >serious<Wanna make a new site?>/serious<
Just like College Humor before them.
It's already half implemented in BitCoin, just have Karma"Coin" and make it a distributed system.
And that's why I like not putting all of my discussion eggs in one basket.
I personally don't care if someone is a racist or a fatty when they talk about their opinions on technology. I'm sure I've picked up a great number of things over the years from people I may not have agreed with on other subjects. I'll just copy and paste my old post on what slashdot needed to do
Dice you've successfully figured out how to run one of the most best 'news' and opensource websites and run them into the ground for profit. /. and Fark were the only 2 places that could handle 9/11 traffic. I rode out that entire day on both sites when CNN was crumbling.
I'm glad I had Slashdot over Reddit when I was an angsty tenager. I took pride in trying to get +5 comments and put effort into doing so. Honestly slashdot made me a better writer. Reddit is nice for short terse communication but sometimes I want to "talk with adults".
Slashdot didn't need much. Unicode support. Newer HTML5 support. CSS3. Make a decent mobile app, move away from HTML for Markdown. Moderation made sense and was much better than a simple +- system. Voting was randomly enabled and you couldn't both vote and comment on the same article. -2 to 5 also limited band wagoning. It's easier to recover from a bunch of early 'down votes'. Instead you drove everyone away to other sites (which still don't quite scratch the /. itch). You shoe horn in what ever fucking agenda is "big in IT". Looking back at all the news I got from /. I can't ever remember thinking "I wonder if a woman did this" or "Too bad a woman didn't do this" because I didn't care. It was about the tech and news for nerds.
On 'Gamergate', 'sexual equality', 'gender issues', we don't care "Trans-gendered" is a big thing in the news these days (and especially around tech) but a long, long time ago I remember a Mac developer made the transition. (This was in the late '90s.) I read her bio. Shrugged my shoulders went "Neat" and moved on. Why? Because she made some awesome Mac games. Most other person I know in IT or engineering think the same way. None of us care what you do with your body or who you take to the bedroom. I do care if you can cut it and get your work done or contribute to society.
On the other side of that is Randi Harper (FreeBSD Girl) [twitter.com] who actually write decent code. I've dug through some of her BSD commits, major props to her for doing that. But it can all be done without photoshopping traffic tickets to make it look like you got swatted, begging for money to move on twitter [youcaring.com], (When you already earn $3k/month from Patreon [patreon.com]), grandstanding on Twitter for no reason and bandwagoning users against anyone that disagrees isn't the way to do it.
You had the same opportunity to fix Sourceforge all of its' convoluted download mirrors (just use a proper CDN), update to Git, and everything else that Sourceforge isn't and GitHub is. Instead you rested on your laurels and are now trying to use this as one last cash grab before the Titanic goes down.
I don't know where I was going with this either. Just thought someone up top should know why your traffic is tanking and a lot of us are pissed off at you for what you've done.
I still won't forget the time you broke the capslock filter [slashdot.org], I remember BitTorrent being announced and people thinking it was useless, the iPod's lack of wifi and space compared to a Nomad, et al.
Thanks for the fish?
It's happened before, it'll happen again.
The people that have historically been on reddit were a 'techy' or 'nerdy' minority. They were who Slashdotters were 20 years ago. They want to attract bored housewives and people not currently on reddit and they'll never do it with fat people hate or other people having full control of subreddits or big things like Secret Santa, so they got rid of everyone that disagrees. Victoria actually made celebrities do their own AMA. Now they can just have the PR firm phone it in.
If anyone is upset at the changes then you they weren't the target demographic of Reddit 2.0. The type of people that originally came to Reddit a decade ago will find elsewhere. Reddit will continue to exist as a place for bored housewives to continue talking becoming a facebook of sorts. Right now all of those people are shoehorned into a terrible ayout of Facebook (Notice how facebook just added threaded discussion?). They're going to attract the people that want a "better" place to discuss things than Facebook but not actually have any real discussion. Why do you think CoonTown and SRS still exist? Loud vocal minority idiots are very profitable (Patreon).
Write something in a low level, portable language. Someone on slashdot should know how to roll up Usenet, IRC, voting & a web front end into a single set of packages that anyone can host.
Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.
I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running for most people it wasn't worth it.
Add on Tor/I2P and you now have all of the above 'off' of the main internet.
"We" can write an alternative. Make a new Usenet. Integrate IRC. Add voting somehow.
Usenet solved 30 years ago the exact problems a lot of people are having with Reddit/Voat/Slashdot. It's distributed, you can't 'take it down'. Make a new RFC and let people host their own 'sites'.
It just needs voting/some moderation on top of it. Make it a simple, straight forward interface. If I want to spin up a 'chat, discussion, et al' website on AWS.
I would peer a node on a discussion if someone wrote it.
I want to know why LOTO protocol wasn't followed.
I cannot imagine how watching someone type for hours is instructional, you could get well in to a book by that point.
I cannot imagine how just sitting reading a book is instructional. I would rather see someone do it. Look at the proliferation of youtube videos on how to do basic stuff like change your oil. Some people are visual learners. Those people used to go into trades where as book learners went to college.
A civil engineer could tell you all the theory behind pipe flow but I want a plumber plumbing my house. Someone that learned through hands on visual training.
Programming and coding is on its way to being a trade and it's sad seeing Slashdotters get on the case of people that are visual learners because they can't imagine why anyone would want to watch someone do something.