May 31, 2004

• A club you always wanted to be in. The old rules made the odds of being heard. Against you. Suddenly the doors are open. You want to impress the club. And yourself. Actually, mostly yourself. (damned you Heineken)
• I posted to slashdot for about a month, years ago, before deciding doing so was worthless. A few weeks later, I decided that reading slashdot was pretty worthless too. I suspect many /. users go through this, and that they rely on the constant influx of new people, not entirely aware of the worthlessness of their comments to keep things going at this point.
• Simple, I have my reading set so that all the offtopic, flamebait and trolls get modded +6. Thats mostly what I read the comments for anyway. Sometimes if i am really killing time I set it back down to -1, just to get a good feeling for it. And when I am really bored I just make insulting replies to people. Stops me from doing it in other places.
• Eh, only reason I post on /. is to make jokes. And it truly saddens me when those jokes get modded insightful...
• Slashdot's comment / moderation system has proved to be the best so far at handling such huge numbers of posts. K5's system has buckledc on itself, and large Fark threads are utterly monolithic and impenetrable. =Looking at my comment history, about half of my comments are noticed, and modded up / replied to. Which is a pretty good ratio. The thing is, the more posters there are, the more moderators there will be as well, and if you are posting as part of a subthread that people are reading, there will be mods reading it as well, so it's hard to be "burried" unless you're posting to an hours-old thread, in which case, well, them's the breaks I guess.
• I don't know, why don't you just post here and get 6+ comments? From people you know, some of whom really do know stuff.
• "[L]arge Fark threads are utterly monolithic and impenetrable", says Space Coyote. Add "and comments are arbitrarily deleted" to that. The Fark moderators delete comments they don't like, for whatever reason, and they disappear without trace. I stopped reading Fark because of that and the asinine comments (which perversely don't get deleted). I can't say I miss it, either. As for Slashdot, try AlterSlash, "the unofficial SlashDot digest".
• I agree with ThreeDayMonk.
• We should lock the doors and man the barricades before the great unwashed come flooding in here instead...
• Like Cpt. Psycho, I tried Slashdot years ago and decided that there was no way to make any sort of impression/ meaningful contribution. Same thing with Plastic. I must say that I don't like the moderated form, at all. Free-for-alls are best. Having recently managed to wrangle myself a MeFi password, I have found that the same applies there: it's just too big, the same as the fora above. I have never tried K5 or Fark or any of the others, but I don't think I would be surprised. Let's face it: MoFi is the dog's bollocks! Close the sign-up now.
• I have to say, I don't mind Slashdot. My comments are rarely unfairly moderated, and although I don't necessarily generate a lot of comments, the sorts of comments I tend to make rarely lead to extended discussion, whether on slashdot, mailing lists, or even here. The only thing that at all bothers me with Slashdot is the fact that running jokes permeate the +1 Funny moderations far more than anything actually funny. I am on the verge of browsing at -6 Funny, but I haven't quite reached that point. For Afterslash, I took a look at it, maybe when it came up on MeFi, and although most of the comments said it was a great interface and even much better looking than Slashdot, I just don't see it. A couple of interesting features, but nothing that calls out to me to use it instead.
• I used to love /. , finally got an account and started posting. I very quickly realized that (1)doing so didn't matter and (2) half the comments posted are bitchy or stupid. I still hit it once or twice a day, though just to see if there are any interesting links on the front page. But I haven't even glanced at the threads for months now.
• I post on /. fairly frequently but typically only on stories that have less than a hundred messages. I usually end up responding to people that respond to me or basically just having discussions with people. I have found that I can make a bigger impact if I post to stories that aren't on the front page like the ones at games.slashdot.org . If there are more than 20 or so messages in a thread I'll bump the score up on the story to 4 or 5. I typically skim the messages because I often find someone who knows more about the story will post about it or post a link to a more in depth story.
• I have been reading Slashdot for two years or so and I still don't get the moderation system. It also seems pretty cheesy, considering folks just make stupid jedi and matrix references to get modded up. Despite that, I still think it's a great source of information and I read it almost daily.
• The Matrix has you, de Carabas. /pointless inanity
• No. I've posted regulary to slashdot since about 2000 or 2001 and I don't think there's any problems with it at all. It used to be that I'd read every comment in a slashdot thread, nowadays I just read the moderated comments, there are too many. However, the moderated comments are almost always the ones that are worth reading. Is slashdot the moderation perfect? No. But it works damn well. All the complaints about opinionated moderation are mostly unfounded. There are occurences, but what is more likely is that if either idea has a degree of support it will be upmoded and you'll have two conflicting ideas to chose from. Slashdot still rocks the party.
• I can't believe I actually ended that post with that line.
• Slashdot is useful because sometimes you can gather useful information from it that would be unavaliable anywhere else, at least for the next six months. You also get a very skeptic view of anything discussed, which may not be beneficial immediatly, but is more scientifically useful than the relative one sided approach traditional media takes. I do believe Slashdot is too large to have any meaningful community, but maybe that's not why people post there. Maybe it's seen by people as a fast moving information contest.
• The other cool thing about slashdot is that often when I've made comments about Microsoft, I'll get a response from someone who actually works there. One time I made a 'Everyone hates MS in the same way everyone hates the Yankees, it's not because the people who play on the Yankees arew bad, it's just the way it is" and a guy from MS really appreciated it. I also got a direct response from someone who works with Bev Harris at blackboxvoting.org when the Diebold story was first being whispered about when I (I checked) was the first in the thread to outline printed receipts for voting machines. So to say that one can't make an impact isn't quite true. It's just that the nature of /.'s community eans that people don't really build up conceptions of a poster's personality they way they do on a place like this.
• The other cool thing about slashdot is that often when I've made comments about Microsoft, I'll get a response from someone who actually works there. One time I made a 'Everyone hates MS in the same way everyone hates the Yankees, it's not because the people who play on the Yankees arew bad, it's just the way it is" and a guy from MS really appreciated it. I also got a direct response from someone who works with Bev Harris at blackboxvoting.org when the Diebold story was first being whispered about when I (I checked) was the first in the thread to outline printed receipts for voting machines. So to say that one can't make an impact isn't quite true. It's just that the nature of /.'s community eans that people don't really build up conceptions of a poster's personality they way they do on a place like this.
• You can make twice the impact here.
• *rotten bananas @ Wolof*