slrn and strn have both scoring and killfiles. This *is* a Linux crowd.:)
I think maybe I've been misunderstood... It seems like some folks think I'm suggesting everyone be able to score everybody else's stuff. That's not what I was proposing (and, considering how many times that's come up in this topic, I'm surprised no one has mentioned everything.slashdot.org, which seems to work just like that).
The more I think about this, the more strongly I don't like this idea of other people doing my filtering for me. Provide us with tools that we can apply to our own accounts, like the "Exclude this stuff, or these people" section in Preferences, and add a section where we can give people/topics higher priority, and forget about the moderation. Rating and filtering is something people should be doing by themselves, for themselves.
Small, naive children are *innocent*. When the government chips away at our freedoms and privacy, turning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into just so much wastepaper, that is anything but innocent. It's malevolence.
MST3K is vaguely like Red Dwarf. In MST3K, though, the main premise is that the people in the spaceship are forced to watch cheesy movies while {scientists monitor their minds/crazy lady chases them across the galaxy in a van-shaped vehicle/etc}. Every 30 minutes, the captives are allowed a break, and it's during these breaks that the skits, which are the "plotline" of the series, are played out.
The rest of the time, it's the robots and the one captive human making wisecracks at the movie. The entertainment value comes when you learn to catch BOTH what's happening in the cheesy movie, *and* the robots and Mike's comments. If you try to block out the wisecracks and just watch the movie, though, you're completely ruining the show for yourself.
Of course there would still be ad banners. They'd be on the *web* portion of/. The part where all the Slashboxes and other stuff would be.
Make the headlines another slashbox, perhaps...
Opera, Symantec, Intel, Novell, Microsoft... all of those have newsgroups. Almost all ISPs have their own newsgroups./. is just too big to remain a strictly web-based enterprise, and it seems like Rob is trying to reinvent the wheel. Scoring and filtering large amounts of mostly textual information is what NNTP (and trn/strn/slrn/Xemacs/xrn/etc) are designed to do best.
As for killing the popularity of the site, it seems to me that more people would be put off by the sheer volume of information presented on the home page than by a switch to NNTP.
I only log in every 2 to 4 days, for instance, and by the time I get around to any interesting article, there are usually hundreds of followups. Even Rob admits there are too many posts to follow most of the stuff here. I generally run with images off, as well. It's bad enough that I have to use Netscape to get here, and get around here; I certainly don't want the overhead of lots of little pictures bloating NS even faster than it usually bloats.
The Opera web site allows its readers to access an NNTP server, so I don't see why Rob couldn't do something similar. Or, if NNTP is absolutely out-of-the-picture for whatever reason, there's always something along the lines of Newsguy's web-based usenet interface (they call it EDRN).
I know there's probably some really obvious point I'm missing, but I don't understand why/. doesn't just switch to an NNTP interface. *Particularly* with 75,000 users, and with most articles getting 200+ comments within the first couple of days.
Using NNTP, people could use whatever newsreader suits them best, and do their own filtering and/or scoring the usual way.
There could be a slashdot.headlines group, for instance, where all articles are (cross-?)posted, with followups set to their relevant sub-topic groups: slashdot.debian, s.redhat, s.microsoft, s.tech, and so on. Moderate the s.headlines group to ensure that it contains *only* the headlines, and not followup discussions, and that's pretty much all that would be needed, it seems.
When journalists try history, they so often go for the fluff and the easy generalities, and miss much of the really interesting stuff altogether. Then they put their junk in print before people who may not be able to see it for what it is, who will then go away with a grossly distorted view.
But don't you see? That's exactly the _point_! That's the way things USED to be. Now, when a journalist publishes something that one of us disagrees with, we can publish our point-of-view immediately, often right there with the journalist's, for anyone to read.
The(tm) Bible(tm) is(tm) in(tm) real(tm) troub
on
Battle over earth.com
·
· Score: 1
. . . er, trouble(tm).
Just for grins, I checked, and every one of the following words is a domain:
Slashdot Mirror
slrn and strn have both scoring and killfiles. This *is* a Linux crowd. :)
I think maybe I've been misunderstood... It seems like some folks think I'm suggesting everyone be able to score everybody else's stuff. That's not what I was proposing (and, considering how many times that's come up in this topic, I'm surprised no one has mentioned everything.slashdot.org, which seems to work just like that).
The more I think about this, the more strongly I don't like this idea of other people doing my filtering for me. Provide us with tools that we can apply to our own accounts, like the "Exclude this stuff, or these people" section in Preferences, and add a section where we can give people/topics higher priority, and forget about the moderation. Rating and filtering is something people should be doing by themselves, for themselves.
Small, naive children are *innocent*. When the government chips away at our freedoms and privacy, turning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into just so much wastepaper, that is anything but innocent. It's malevolence.
MST3K is vaguely like Red Dwarf. In MST3K, though, the main premise is that the people in the spaceship are forced to watch cheesy movies while {scientists monitor their minds/crazy lady chases them across the galaxy in a van-shaped vehicle/etc}. Every 30 minutes, the captives are allowed a break, and it's during these breaks that the skits, which are the "plotline" of the series, are played out.
The rest of the time, it's the robots and the one captive human making wisecracks at the movie. The entertainment value comes when you learn to catch BOTH what's happening in the cheesy movie, *and* the robots and Mike's comments. If you try to block out the wisecracks and just watch the movie, though, you're completely ruining the show for yourself.
Of course there would still be ad banners. They'd be on the *web* portion of /. The part where all the Slashboxes and other stuff would be.
/. is just too big to remain a strictly web-based enterprise, and it seems like Rob is trying to reinvent the wheel. Scoring and filtering large amounts of mostly textual information is what NNTP (and trn/strn/slrn/Xemacs/xrn/etc) are designed to do best.
Make the headlines another slashbox, perhaps...
Opera, Symantec, Intel, Novell, Microsoft... all of those have newsgroups. Almost all ISPs have their own newsgroups.
As for killing the popularity of the site, it seems to me that more people would be put off by the sheer volume of information presented on the home page than by a switch to NNTP.
I only log in every 2 to 4 days, for instance, and by the time I get around to any interesting article, there are usually hundreds of followups. Even Rob admits there are too many posts to follow most of the stuff here. I generally run with images off, as well. It's bad enough that I have to use Netscape to get here, and get around here; I certainly don't want the overhead of lots of little pictures bloating NS even faster than it usually bloats.
The Opera web site allows its readers to access an NNTP server, so I don't see why Rob couldn't do something similar. Or, if NNTP is absolutely out-of-the-picture for whatever reason, there's always something along the lines of Newsguy's web-based usenet interface (they call it EDRN).
I know there's probably some really obvious point I'm missing, but I don't understand why /. doesn't just switch to an NNTP interface. *Particularly* with 75,000 users, and with most articles getting 200+ comments within the first couple of days.
Using NNTP, people could use whatever newsreader suits them best, and do their own filtering and/or scoring the usual way.
There could be a slashdot.headlines group, for instance, where all articles are (cross-?)posted, with followups set to their relevant sub-topic groups: slashdot.debian, s.redhat, s.microsoft, s.tech, and so on. Moderate the s.headlines group to ensure that it contains *only* the headlines, and not followup discussions, and that's pretty much all that would be needed, it seems.
When journalists try history, they so often go for the fluff and the easy generalities, and miss much of the really
interesting stuff altogether. Then they put their junk in print before people who may not be able to see it for what it is,
who will then go away with a grossly distorted view.
But don't you see? That's exactly the _point_! That's the way things USED to be. Now, when a journalist publishes something that one of us disagrees with, we can publish our point-of-view immediately, often right there with the journalist's, for anyone to read.
. . . er, trouble(tm).
Just for grins, I checked, and every one of the following words is a domain:
in.com
the.com
beginning.com
god.com
created.com
the.com
heaven.com
and.com
the.com
earth.com.
and.com
the.com
earth.com
was.com
without.com
form.com
and.com
void.com . . .