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I read Slashdot for many years. Slashdot introduced me to the open source movement and shaped my conception of civil liberties greatly. I remember what the plac

by muraiki 13y ago

I read Slashdot for many years. Slashdot introduced me to the open source movement and shaped my conception of civil liberties greatly. I remember what the place was like on 9/11: when CNN's servers couldn't keep up, I kept going to Slashdot (and then IRC, something I didn't know much about). Slashdot was a great source of news about geek culture. I liked that it was that it was curated by editors, because as a teenager I had no idea where to find out about the sorts of things they talked about. However, what led me to leave Slashdot wasn't any sort of Eternal September like effect. Yes, there were many troll comments there, but there's also lots of options to adjust moderation types to suit one's particular interests. Rather, what I found was that the editors themselves seemed to stop caring. Article summaries would be blatantly incorrect or have distorting editorializing in them. If the whole point of the Slashdot style of reporting was to present a small number of quality stories each day, how could I trust the site when what the editors presented was inaccurate? When I came to HN I was surprised to discover that articles simply have a title and URL. Sometimes there's editorializing in the titles, but in general its pretty good. But I can understand what Malda is saying when he expresses his frustration in wading through the front pages of HN. I don't know if the solution is to implement topics of some sort or not, but the user volume on this site is picking up enough that I think some sort of organization beyond a single ranking algorithm is required. It might also lead some interesting stories that never make it onto the front page to reach an audience. This problem of course isn't unique to HN... whether its Slashdot or Twitter or Facebook, getting the signal to noise ratio to an appropriate level is a really hard problem. That being said, in my short time here I have learned a tremendous amount -- albeit much of which lies in my bookmarks!

jjindev 13y ago
As I mentioned in the other Slashdot/HN thread, I too think it is all about the front page algorithm. The [thing] is though, I don't really doubt the structure. A lot of "new" and few "front page," filtered algorithmically, seems like it can scale. Of course, for that the algorithm must be good, and for that, maybe HN needs an algorithm contest. Should articles "pop" for both "velocity" (pace of up-votes, click-throughs, and comments) and "scoring" against a mission statement?
eli 13y ago
I agree with you about the decline of Slashdot. I'm sure moderating Slashdot frontpage is no small task, but it did start to seem pretty lazy. Stories with obvious typos in the title, stories that linked to terrible blogspam instead of the original source, etc. Contrast with Metafilter which has fairly aggressive top-down moderation and, IMHO, still has a pretty strong community. I'm not a heavy user but it looks from the outside pretty similar to how it looked years ago.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Yeah, if you're going to have editors, they have to, you know, edit. Otherwise all they're doing is slowing things down without adding any value. Slashdot lost me when it lost sight of this.
- codva 13y ago
  Charge 5 dollars one time for commenting privileges here and I bet the community would scale down in number and scale up in quality quite nicely.
  - eli 13y ago
    Maybe. I think there are more than a few people who would be ideologically opposed to paying a for-profit organization in exchange for being able to post on its forum. Maybe if it was a donation to EFF instead? Anyway, I think aggressive moderation is a big part of Metafilter's secret sauce.
    - moutarde 13y ago
      > Anyway, I think aggressive moderation is a big part of Metafilter's secret sauce. It's definitely part of the secret sauce, but I wouldn't call the moderation aggressive - it'd call it targeted to preserve culture. If MetaFilter has a first defence then it is the 5$ account wall, the second is the (almost legendary) snark, the third is the moderation. Moderation is almost always employed as a last resort, and it's rationale is normally documented. The "secret sauce" of MetaFilter is really the community and everything else works to preserve that. The moderators of MetaFilter are the last resort in that process, but their are neither "aggressive" nor numerous, they are just very well chosen - not by algorithms, but by other existing moderators who actually understand the organisation/community they work in.
leephillips 13y ago
In my opinion the two biggest problems with Slashdot now are (1)plagiarism: instead of writing a summary, the submitter copies and pastes a paragraph from the link, and it's presented as "<submitter> writes <text>", but <submitter> did not write it; and (2)credulous moderation: numerous comments consisting of obvious crap just made up by someone imitating expertise get bumped up to +5 insightful, so that moderation becomes useless as a reading filter.
joonix 13y ago
Your reference to Slashdot on 9/11 gave me a bout of nostalgia for all the time I spent on that site as a teenager, and led me to checkout archive.org's Slashdot capture from that date. For some reason it doesn't exist, the closest I can get is 9/14. "Net taps without warrants"[1] was on the front page (already). Very interesting to look back and see the commentary and the way this was received 12 years ago(!) in light of all the NSA/Snowden stuff that's been going on lately. Some highlights: "Do we really have any reason to believe that the government is trying to create a giant evil spy machine to watch their own people as opposed to the terrorists? I tend to be more or less trusting of the government, but that's just me." "This bill is quite limited in its scope, allowing only 48 hours to tap without approval and only for immediate threats to "National Security." Many civil liberties are restricted during threats to "National Security." Ever heard of martial law and curfews?" "Anything that is truely our rights in a constitutional sense will be protected by the supreme court. The congress will push, the courts will push back, and life wil lgo on as it has in the US. I get the feeling a significant cross section of slashdot just likes to run around hystericly like the sky is falling." "What's so hard about getting a warrant? [..] Or maybe you keep federal courthouses staffed with at least one judge with a security clearance 24x7, if its so important. " [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20010914224344/http://slashdot.org/yro/01/09/14/211241.shtml http://web.archive.org/web/20010914224344/http://slashdot.or...
- rgbrenner 13y ago
  slashdot doesn't delete old comments/articles. You can get to it directly on the site: http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/14/211241/net-taps-without-warrants http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/14/211241/net-taps-without-w...
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  Original 9/11 thread: http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towers-and-pentagon-attacked http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-tower... The subject of one of the very top comments reminds me of why I've never cared for the Slashdot community: "We had it coming..."
  - 13y ago
bluedino 13y ago
The commenting/upvoting system stink over at /. The Reddit/HN style is so much better. They should have switched a while ago. It makes the site still feel like 1997.
- qu4z-2 13y ago
  Personally, I prefer the slashdot system. Limited voting points makes you think more carefully about spending them, and being able to differentiate between +1 Insightful and +1 Funny is nice too. Also, moving popular posts to the top is great for readers, but voters will then tend to upvote the already popular comments.
  - jdp23 13y ago
    Agreed about the value of differentiating between different kinds of +/-1. Also Slashdot's meta-moderation is a significant advancement on its successors.
    - lmm 13y ago
      Disagree with the meta-moderation. It makes the site very echo-chambery, because people start modding up posts in line with the groupthink so that they will get meta-moderated positively.
  - OGC 13y ago
    Lack of a slashdot-like voting system is one of the reasons why, on reddit, subreddits become unreadable when they they hit a number of subscribers (e.g. 100k).

by muraiki 13y ago

jjindev 13y ago

As I mentioned in the other Slashdot/HN thread, I too think it is all about the front page algorithm. The [thing] is though, I don't really doubt the structure. A lot of "new" and few "front page," filtered algorithmically, seems like it can scale. Of course, for that the algorithm must be good, and for that, maybe HN needs an algorithm contest. Should articles "pop" for both "velocity" (pace of up-votes, click-throughs, and comments) and "scoring" against a mission statement?

eli 13y ago

I agree with you about the decline of Slashdot. I'm sure moderating Slashdot frontpage is no small task, but it did start to seem pretty lazy. Stories with obvious typos in the title, stories that linked to terrible blogspam instead of the original source, etc. Contrast with Metafilter which has fairly aggressive top-down moderation and, IMHO, still has a pretty strong community. I'm not a heavy user but it looks from the outside pretty similar to how it looked years ago.

smacktoward 13y ago
Yeah, if you're going to have editors, they have to, you know, edit. Otherwise all they're doing is slowing things down without adding any value. Slashdot lost me when it lost sight of this.
codva 13y ago
Charge 5 dollars one time for commenting privileges here and I bet the community would scale down in number and scale up in quality quite nicely.
- eli 13y ago
  Maybe. I think there are more than a few people who would be ideologically opposed to paying a for-profit organization in exchange for being able to post on its forum. Maybe if it was a donation to EFF instead? Anyway, I think aggressive moderation is a big part of Metafilter's secret sauce.
  - moutarde 13y ago
    > Anyway, I think aggressive moderation is a big part of Metafilter's secret sauce. It's definitely part of the secret sauce, but I wouldn't call the moderation aggressive - it'd call it targeted to preserve culture. If MetaFilter has a first defence then it is the 5$ account wall, the second is the (almost legendary) snark, the third is the moderation. Moderation is almost always employed as a last resort, and it's rationale is normally documented. The "secret sauce" of MetaFilter is really the community and everything else works to preserve that. The moderators of MetaFilter are the last resort in that process, but their are neither "aggressive" nor numerous, they are just very well chosen - not by algorithms, but by other existing moderators who actually understand the organisation/community they work in.

leephillips 13y ago

In my opinion the two biggest problems with Slashdot now are (1)plagiarism: instead of writing a summary, the submitter copies and pastes a paragraph from the link, and it's presented as "<submitter> writes <text>", but <submitter> did not write it; and (2)credulous moderation: numerous comments consisting of obvious crap just made up by someone imitating expertise get bumped up to +5 insightful, so that moderation becomes useless as a reading filter.

joonix 13y ago

Your reference to Slashdot on 9/11 gave me a bout of nostalgia for all the time I spent on that site as a teenager, and led me to checkout archive.org's Slashdot capture from that date. For some reason it doesn't exist, the closest I can get is 9/14. "Net taps without warrants"[1] was on the front page (already). Very interesting to look back and see the commentary and the way this was received 12 years ago(!) in light of all the NSA/Snowden stuff that's been going on lately. Some highlights: "Do we really have any reason to believe that the government is trying to create a giant evil spy machine to watch their own people as opposed to the terrorists? I tend to be more or less trusting of the government, but that's just me." "This bill is quite limited in its scope, allowing only 48 hours to tap without approval and only for immediate threats to "National Security." Many civil liberties are restricted during threats to "National Security." Ever heard of martial law and curfews?" "Anything that is truely our rights in a constitutional sense will be protected by the supreme court. The congress will push, the courts will push back, and life wil lgo on as it has in the US. I get the feeling a significant cross section of slashdot just likes to run around hystericly like the sky is falling." "What's so hard about getting a warrant? [..] Or maybe you keep federal courthouses staffed with at least one judge with a security clearance 24x7, if its so important. " [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20010914224344/http://slashdot.org/yro/01/09/14/211241.shtml http://web.archive.org/web/20010914224344/http://slashdot.or...

rgbrenner 13y ago
slashdot doesn't delete old comments/articles. You can get to it directly on the site: http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/14/211241/net-taps-without-warrants http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/14/211241/net-taps-without-w...
nsxwolf 13y ago
Original 9/11 thread: http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towers-and-pentagon-attacked http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-tower... The subject of one of the very top comments reminds me of why I've never cared for the Slashdot community: "We had it coming..."
- 13y ago

bluedino 13y ago

The commenting/upvoting system stink over at /. The Reddit/HN style is so much better. They should have switched a while ago. It makes the site still feel like 1997.

qu4z-2 13y ago
Personally, I prefer the slashdot system. Limited voting points makes you think more carefully about spending them, and being able to differentiate between +1 Insightful and +1 Funny is nice too. Also, moving popular posts to the top is great for readers, but voters will then tend to upvote the already popular comments.
- jdp23 13y ago
  Agreed about the value of differentiating between different kinds of +/-1. Also Slashdot's meta-moderation is a significant advancement on its successors.
  - lmm 13y ago
    Disagree with the meta-moderation. It makes the site very echo-chambery, because people start modding up posts in line with the groupthink so that they will get meta-moderated positively.
- OGC 13y ago
  Lack of a slashdot-like voting system is one of the reasons why, on reddit, subreddits become unreadable when they they hit a number of subscribers (e.g. 100k).