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"Please Die": Freedom From Speech
from the Hostile-Environments-Part-One dept.
"Please die," a Slashdot reader urged a few weeks ago after reading - and apparently disliking -- a column I'd written.
I didn't take it as a literal threat. Messages like that are uncommon via e-mail, but they aren't unheard of, either. I e-mailed back, curious as to why the guy expressed himself so aggressively, when he could simply have disagreed or, even more logically, just stopped reading. "You're not a Linux geek," he jeered. "It took you months just to install a Linux system."
This was all true, I wrote back, but hardly explained his blast. He blew me off, saying something lame about my not controlling what he said. In fairness, I doubt he knew why he'd responded that way. It was probably instinctive.
Electronic communities mirror the outside world. They face tensions, growing pains, political differences and the other usual evolutions.
E-communities are fluid. As they grow, they bring in newcomers who have different values, languages and customs, sometimes even different goals.
In all but the most restricted e-communities, hostility, anger and pressure are the by-products, a process as inevitable as it is unpleasant. It tends to create what are, to varying degrees, hostile environments, especially when it comes to public postings and discussions.
All over the Net, communities confront the same choice: freedom or civility. For anybody writing online, this is a familiar experience. Truly dangerous people aren't likely to post anonymous insults or send nasty e-mail. They have more effective weapons. Online flaming - not to be confused with disagreement - is almost by definition an act of social cowardice.
There are good arguments in support of flaming. Flamers can deflate the pompous, correct the inaccurate, educate the ignorant, level the communications playing field.
"Flaming is an equalizer," wrote an anonymous flamer on this site. "It puts me on a level with people like you, and keeps me there."
Flaming can even be an effective communications tool: "There's a style of argument I see practiced on the Net and almost nowhere else," wrote Ken, "a very precise, defensive style. I like it because it's based on scrupulously differentiating what you 'think' from what you 'know.' Flaming forces people to think about their opinions, he argued.
Ken has a point, but his is a benign interpretation of this new kind of social aggression and brutality. On this and other sites that encourage open discussion, online hostility is a significant problem, especially at a time when the need for open discussion about technology (Y2K comes to mind) becomes even more urgent.
The Net has been a hostile environment almost from the first; hostility is nearly a cherished tradition. The geek/nerd/programmer culture is probably statistically one of the least violent in the world, yet on the Net and the Web it's generated a consistently abusive atmosphere.
One of the most striking things about nasty e-mail and vicious public postings is that they're almost always rooted in surreal distance: the sender rarely thinks of his target as a human being. He's sending words to a remote computer system, unsure they'll even be read.
Once there's contact, the flamer is often amazed by a response. He almost always apologizes - 90 per cent of the time would be my guess, or replies in a more civil tone, or flees.
I get an average of 200 personal messages after a column appears here, sometimes more, sometimes less. About a fourth are written in disagreement, but usually only three or four are personal or hostile. There are typically even more public postings about my columns, and a dramatically larger proportion - between a quarter and half - are either sharply critical or pointedly hostile.
This bewildering dichotomy is expected by anybody who expresses an opinion regularly on a website. It was the same when I wrote for Hotwired and other websites. In fact, many of the e-mails I get constitute apologies for or laments about the sometimes vicious nature of public messaging online.
Not only does this odd reality, unique to electronic communication, create a hostile environment, it distorts reality since civil communications are rarely made public while attacks are often seen publicly. People reading columns, stories and commentary rush to defend the target or apologize for the assaults, rarely realizing that the attackers are a small minority though they appear to be dominant.
This misperception triggers a series of off-base notions about ideas, opinions and reactions that play off of one another, often inaccurately. Ideas that seem to be unpopular are sometimes popular; arguments that win widespread approval can seem widely condemned. There's no way for the reader to accurately or realistically gauge mood, temperament or perspective. Ideas aren't really tested in this way; they're aborted.
Worse, the ferocity of the environment discourages all but the most confident or determined posters. Flaming, like skateboarding, seems overwhelmingly an adolescent form of recreation. Whole segments of the human population - women, the elderly, those who speak foreign languages, newcomers, children - are excluded from the conversation or choose to avoid it.
Some are too vulnerable too join in; many are tough enough but they don't see much reason to bother.
So flamers discourage free speech, prey on the weak and dominate discussion. They have a "chilling effect" on the movement of opinions and ideas, a phrase more often associated with First Amendment law than the Net. Yet to silence or curb them is unacceptable, as it limits the inherently free nature - and information flow - of the best sites on the Web. There is no simple solution to this intensifying problem, or anything like a consensus.
To complicate the issue further, the great majority of visitors to most websites - certainly this one - are lurkers, information foragers who want news and information but are loathe to censor anyone, and are unwilling or unable to challenge the small cadre of flamers who've seized control of public discussions.
All of which presents a series of increasingly complex choices for people designing and running websites as well as for those working and posting on them. (Though truthfully, it's pretty hard to take seriously a message that says in its entirety, "You suck.")
Many public websites try to modify hostility by requiring posters to join and identify themselves. People who write anonymously are far more likely to post ugly sentiments than people who identify themselves and therefore assume at least theoretically responsibility for what they've said.
On this site, however, anonymity is seen as a cherished right - the only way for all posters, especially for those working for companies or government agencies, to weigh in without fear of reprisal.
Nameless posters - here called Anonymous Cowards - are considered sources as well as equalizers. Barrier-free sites have the freest information flow of any on the Web, and they're sometimes the most informative and newsworthy. The tradeoff is that they're also the most hostile.
On some sites, vicious posts get removed and vicious posters eventually ejected. Some provide hosts to steer conversations.
Slashdot's response has been to deploy one of the most elaborate self-policing systems on the Internet, with members of the site encouraged to join the process, act as moderators and and trigger software that automatically removes the most offensive posts from the screens of people who don't want to see them. A new system to discourage excessive hostility in public discussions has been in place for six months now. Posts never get deleted, but some are removed from mainstream view.
Although the moderation system gives users choices about just how much verbal aggression they want to encounter, it hasn't really curbed the site's overall hostility, just given users more ways to avoid it. Moderating systems ultimately can't hold people responsible for what they say, and don't take into account that the hostility isn't a side-show for many people, but the point.
This moderating is sometimes called "steering" or "over-steering," part of a broad movement on the Net that allows sites and individual users to limit their own horizons. Sometimes this is a response to the sheer volume of information, sometimes an effort to screen out unwanted points of view.
While flamers keep their right to assault, individuals - entirely voluntarily - create personal insulated zones where they can block anything unplelasant, challenging or disturbing.
The dangers are obvious. One of the Net's most significant contributions is to bring all sorts of people together. But the growing "freedom from speech" movement is spawning communities in which people will find only opinions they already agree with.
But more restrictive approaches pose an obvious tradeoff: less information, fewer public posts, no protective or leveling role for the posters.
As one who posts regularly and is on the receiving end of positive as well as snarky feedback, I'd go with preserving anonymity over advancing civility, if those were the only options.
Fortunately, there are more.
Tomorrow: Breeding Creative Jerks
The Flaming Anonymous Coward (Score:4)
And please don't moderate this down if you don't like it! Reply with a logical list of reasons you don't like it instead.
I can see what you're saying. (Score:4)
However, I don't think its a problem. In fact, its probably the only thing that keeps the online communities from spiraling down into pure demagoguery. People who are not willing to take the heat for their opinions probably don't have opinions worth hearing. I post often (especially on religious topics) and have taken my share of ad hominem attacks and flame. I have survived, and don't see why others cannot do the same. I think flame has made me a better poster.
Gark, you say! What about freedom of speech? What about it? This isn't prior restraint -- and the only legal right to free speech you have (at least in the US) is that congress may not pass laws prohibiting it. I am so sick of people who think that the first amendment (which they've never read) grants them some magical right to say any kind of idiocy that crosses their mind with impunity.
Also, I would hardly say that flame is something new, or unique to the net. Ever read the arguments of the sophists?
Learning to talk (Score:3)
Having a wonderful tool like the Internet opens the flood gates for communication for everyone, regardless of age, life experience, or education level. Ideas can be offered, traded and people have the oportunity to learn from one another.
Unfortunately the process makes it obvious to everyone we are a few common sequences of grunts away from sniffing each others butts for information.
We are not taught to communicate as children for the most part (children being better seen than heard), most of us feel alienated as adults, which is one of the resons we sought out people on to communicate with over the Internet in the first place.
We have a bunch of frustrated, alienated, people who are trying to express themselves in a "crowded room" senerio, where there are obviously a few cliques who run the place. So they start yelling and throwing temper-tantrums.
Well that is one possibility. I used to flame people because it made me feel macho.
-Little Sister
I fail to understand.... (Score:5)
I mean, you can turn Katz off completely if you wish, it's in the Preferences. You don't even have to know he exists!
But no, it seems that some folks on here would rather get rid of Katz completely, and deny him any right to post on Slashdot. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but I never get angry over it.
Perhaps some people are imbibing too much caffeine?
Flaming (Score:5)
This statement caught me off-guard, because I've never actually seen a Jan Katz post. I've seen stories submitted by him, but I've never seen any other sort of commentary. I suspect that this is the true source of most of the flames that he gets. He doesn't appear as a member of this community. He appears as someone submitting stories from on-high, thinking himself too good to come join the common fray. (I'm not saying that is true. That is just the appearance.) I suspect that he'd get a lot less flack from people here if he were to do that.
Jon, why not post here, is response to people's comments? Better yet, read other stories on
Personally, I've found that it is possible, with practice, to avoid most flamewars. (Through painful experience, believe me.) It is mostly a matter of learning not to respond to trolls, learning how to use diplomacy in posting, and mostly, learning not to take it all too seriously.
And one thing always to remember: you will never "prove yourself right" to the point where everyone agrees. Don't bother trying. Once you've stated your case appropriately, it is counterproductive to say any more.
Just remembering that will avoid a lot of flaming.
I also think it interesting that this story is posted here as it seems to me that
Dual-purpose moderation (Score:5)
Sometimes this is a response to the sheer volume of information, sometimes an effort to screen out unwanted points of view.
Jon, please remember that moderation serves two purposes: screening out junk and raising the profile of good posts. I've read a lot of really thoughtful posts that I would have missed were it not for up-moderation. Sometimes, someone makes a good point deeper within a thread than I would have dug on my own. Other times, when comments overflow my thresholds, I can at least get some idea of the discussion from the highly-rated posts.
No AC here. (Score:4)
Now, why am I being so hard on Katz? There is one big reason: I don't want /. to slide further down the same path as Usenet. Slashdot is not and never was a free-for-all forum. It is editing in two ways: by Rob & Co. chosing what and what not to post, and by those arbitrarily chosen for moderatorial duties. Without effective editorial control, any forum rapidly sinks to the level of lowest common denominator. In some ways, slashdot has gone as far as is possible to counteract this tendency, with moderation and meta-moderation supplmenting the editorial team; only to throw these advantages away by promoting a vapid windbag as part of the team, effectively both writer and editor -- for who believes Katz's slashdot posts are subject to the same controls as ordinary contributions?
It used to be different. Slashdot was made up mainly of submitted stories: that is, slashdot readers were also slashdot columnists: a "story by RobLimo" or or CmdrTaco or whoever was normally a posting of something a /. reader had sent in, with the powers that were at slashdot functioning as editors of a kind. Now, it's different. Now, ironically, it is "old media" with a vengeance. Know-it-all journalists decide what slashdot will cover: setting the agenda, then graciously allowing the unwashed masses to comment on their wisdom -- though, never, you'll note, getting seriously involved in the discussion.
Why hate Katz? (Score:5)
One would assume that if reading a Jon Katz article results in such venom, that the article itself has caused the flamer a good deal of personal pain. This is a situation I don't understand, as personally, I have never been insulted by a message or article that was not directed at me. I have seen uninformed, off-topic posts, but none of these feel like a personal attack against me.
But to some it does. So much so, it causes them to lash out in anger. No hostages taken, no feelings spared, it is the singular goal to return this pain and anguish to the one who caused it. Does this feel good? Frankly, I've participated in a flame war or two, and it just makes me feel empty. There is no reward, there is no catharsis, only futility.
I wonder why one would subject himself to such torment, especially in an environment where I can go to my preferences page, press a button, and never see another Jon Katz article again. Ever. Personally, I like Jon's writing, because I can see the value in stating the obvious when necessary, and more often than not, he puts words to thoughts I have had myself, that am grasping to understand. But I digress. Why would anyone choose to be tormented by Jon Katz? I can only think of two possibilities:
- The thrill of combat. It is clear that many people attack merely for the joy of battle. If you can craft your words into a weapon, and use them to strike out across the ether, it indicates your prowess with the langauge, your tool of battle. ``Look at how clever and cruel I am!''
- A sense of belonging. Let's face it. Hating Jon Katz does not make you stand out in a crowd. If you don't feel like part of the slashdot ``in crowd,'' because you don't like Linux or the GPL or something, it can be difficult. Especially if slashdot is your only connection to intellectual peers, to be separated by ideological differences is painful. I suspect that half or more of the anti-Katz camp really has no problem with Jon Katz at all! But by joining in the ``Please die'' bandwagon, they join a community whose only admission fee is a nastygram. Not bad, if you have a need to belong.
Now much of this might be bogus, and I will probably be flamed, too. I look forward to it, because constructive flames will help me continue to form my opinion on the matter, help me see parts of the argument I have ignored. I look forward to it, because destructive flames will make me laugh. Certainly it will not prevent me from posting again, as it will not prevent Mr. Katz.Jon, write on!
Some thoughts (Score:4)
I -would- disagree with the idea that flaming is ever necessary or useful. Yes, it makes the other person stop and think. Unfortunately, it often makes the other person stop, think and take whatever useful contribution they could have made elsewhere.
IMHO, constructive critisism, suggestions, patience, tolerence and a good user-controlled filtering system are more effective and more valuable than any flame will ever be.
I've said some shitty stuff on the Internet, that I've come to regret. Did I regret it because I was flamed? No! That provoked an infinitely nastier response from me, and the whole thing would go in a vicious cycle, sometimes for weeks. No. I've regretted my behaviour, when I remembered that the person on the other side of the screen was a human being, like me, with feelings. Feelings I was busy trampling over, for no better reason than I was being an idiot.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that I'm "all better" and some kind of saint. I'm not. On the other hand, I've a decent karma (in the 400's), through writing how I feel, rather than directing any venom at people.
THAT is the key, I think. We all get angry, or upset, over all sorts of things. If you aim it at people, though, how different are you from the gunmen at Columbine? Sure, no-one gets killed, but they -CAN- and -DO- get emotionally hurt. Yes, even those too thick-skinned to admit it! You're shooting with words, sure, but the words inflict emotional injuries, every bit as real as a bullet will inflict a real one.
To make matters worse, what do you achieve by shooting the messenger? It doesn't change the message. It doesn't even change what you're upset about. All you have is the same mess you started off with, and one less person to solve it. Oh Whoopee! It must make people proud, to make things harder on themselves, like that! A Real Tough Guy. A Real He-Man, to not admit that the problem is never the person, to hide their head in the sand. And, yes, if you think I'm being a bit sarcastic, you're 100% right. It's what flamers need to hear and understand. I know, from bitter experience.
Katz not responding (Score:3)
Well, on the subject of authors responding to comments on their own work:
There is a certain school of writing that considers discussing or defending one's own work in public to be crass. I write both fiction and technical material, and in the past I wrote role-playing games. (If Katz thinks this flaming is bad, he should see some RPG fans dissecting one's work! :)
Among these people, the rule in these situations is: read the comments, consider them, and use them to improve your own work. Never defend your work, because you'll eventually wind up at either: "You misread what I wrote," or "I disagree."
If they didn't understand you, you need to investigate your published writing and find your error. The point of writing is not to write so you can be understood; it is to write so you cannot be misunderstood. If they disagree, you can either choose rational discussion, or consider their arguments privately. Either way, flames don't enter into it.
Obviously, you can take this too far. Salman Rushdie needed to speak out when the Iranian theocracy declared a fatwah on him; but nobody has put a price on Katz's head, either.
The Net makes it easy to update documents. It might be that the old-school "publish it and let it stand on its own" standard is obsolete, and that living, constantly-updating articles will soon be considered the norm. This attitude will not die before then.
I'm not saying that Katz is of this school, but it's certainly possible. I know more than one professional writer who believes this. After attempting to publicly defend my own work, I believe it also.
Fortunately, unlike a paper mag, Slashdot has options to let you never see posts by a columnist. If he annoys you that much, set your preferences to hide him.
Re:Why hate Katz? (Rev. Neh's theory) (Score:4)
I come to Slashdot almost every day. I started coming here when I became overwhelmingly frustrated by seeing conventional media outlets pander to the masses. I would read a newspaper and see a statement by a politician or marketing exec, then do the math and find that he was talking out of his ass; on Slashdot, this behavior is immediately corrected by hundreds of posts explaining in excruciating detail why such and such is blatantly incorrect. I like to read posts by people who know what they are talking about; I have a couple of dozen user pages bookmarked just so I can see what they think on exciting issues. Since I happen to know things about some issues, and have imho well defined, rational arguments to support most of my political and social philosophies, I therefore enjoy posting when I see the opportunity; I can identify with what Jon must feel, because I have had some searing AC replies which have hurt me deeply while at the same time enjoying a greater number of buoying emails. From the relatively few negative emails I have received, and the emotional trauma associated with those particulars, I can tell you that if I received the hundreds of negative replies that Katz has received, I would have moved on long ago. For this he has my utmost respect.
Jon Katz' hellmouth series was initially a major point of interest to me; I had seen both sides of the high school popularity wars and was profoundly moved by some of the insights revealed there. He immediately jumped out at me as a "deep thinker", someone whose ideas were good and therefore someone whose opinion mattered. I cared what he said. After the first hellmouth, I waited impatiently for more wisdom, because I crave insight. I wanted to read the words of someone I respected, expand them and argue against them to achieve a higher level of comprehension. Unfortunately, such gems were rare. Not non-existent, but sporadic and inadequate.
In the months since his first posts, I have become abjectly bored with his work. I have not seen anything which really made me think, nothing which makes me run to the library and delve into the wisdom of the ages, the way posts by amphigory [slashdot.org] or kintanon [slashdot.org] or fable2112 [slashdot.org] or countless others routinely do. I have to say that Katz has neither challenged my beliefs nor caused me to think in anything other than a cursory manner in at lest several months- and if this is true for other Slashdot users, who possibly come here for the same reasons as me, then that could explain a lot of the hostility. When a smart person is expecting stimulating conversation, and receives nothing but shallow blather, hostility is a natural result.
I think that a lot of the hostility currently reserved for Katz would be reduced if he were really as profound of a thinker as he presumes himself to be. If he were Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell or Ayn Rand, people would respond differently--because regardless of whether or they agreed with what he was saying, the content which would come with the posting would provide fertile grounds for argument. As it is, people read a 3000 word essay and come away with only one thought: "What did I waste my time with that for? I could have received equally eloquent commentary from the editorial staff of the small town newspaper." The lack of intellectual substance leads to ad hominem attacks against the author due to sheer exasperation.
I think Katz could be better. I know he has written good stuff; I think he just needs to take a little bit more time preparing his work, making it truly profound instead of the mass of tepidity it is today. If he does this, then I think his problems will solve themselves. That is, if Slashdot would just do away with AC posting...
I guess another solution would be for someone better to start posting to Slashdot; that way we could get our intellectual fixes somewhere else and Katz could be our Spice Girls, good for a few minutes of entertainment but nothing requiring deep reflection. (You listening, David Brin [kithrup.com]? I doubt it; after the way Slashdot treated you the last time [slashdot.org] you posted something I wouldn't listen to us either... Neal [lycos.com]?
Rev. Nehemiah
All complaint, only one solution? (Score:4)
I did not find Katz' article to be shameless self-promotion. Quite the contrary, I was reading an article about the hostile nature of the Net, a nature proven to any reasonable POV by this thread alone. After all, you've not asked that Katz improve. You've pointed out that he doesn't seem to join the forums on Slashdot (A point neither of us can confirm beyond doubt, as Katz could be posting anonymously in some threads. I don't read all of the stories on /., and I doubt you do either. For this argument, however, I'll concede that if Katz does post, he doesn't do it under his own name). But even though you "invited" him to enter into these discussions, it's clear from your tone that doing so will gain him nothing. It's not what Katz is saying that you don't like; you don't like him, and you want him to go away. That's hostile, period. And it's common on the Internet to have hostility in discussion threads.
That's the point I got from Katz article. I saw the comments he made regarding those who post negatively. I took those to be anecdotal evidence for his point, and personal experiences as such evidence is considered to be an excellent way to make such points. You'd learn that in any public speaking or argumentation class.
why nerds are hostile online (Score:4)
No matter if you're beaten up by bullies in high school, if you're left out of any sports you care to practice, if you can't get a date to the prom: in the world of computers you're the master. Recently not only you're the master but you get reconginition and lots of people coming to you for help. You may even get a well paying job years before all those bullies even think about earning their own money, and that feels good. Until very recently, the expertise and command of technical things that was required to access the net was a limiting factor and put geeks in contact with other geeks in a worldwide fashion. It gave us a head start in building the communities, filosophy and rules by which the internet functions.
Then the possibility of getting online with just a few clicks allowed anyone, no matter how stupid (from the point of view of teenage geeks), to "intrude" in our own world. Now not only we are excluded from most social events in real life, the same people want to take over our own private world!
Of course when geeks grow older, and I'm a 34 yo geek, we learn to deal with those issues and end up adjusting; we learn to use whatever capabilities we have in a useful way and we simply outgrow the need to be accepted in some circles - we learn that we usually are well accepted in the circles that really matter.
But can you blame a teen geek, who is probably feeling left out, who gets humiliated every other day, from defending violently his/her perceived territory from people who are trying to turn it into just another instance of the real world?
I think it's very understandable why teen (and immature) geeks behave like this, but it's also sad. It means geeks are using their superior knowledge to beat those weaker than him/her, just like bullies use their superior physical strength to beat those weaker then them.
On the Internet, the geeks are the bullies! My advice to geeks: be honest and think about this or you'll turn into what you despise. My advice to everyone else: think about this next time you abuse a geek. It's just human nature, after all.
Online Expression is Difficult (Score:3)
One point I haven't seen made yet is that email, newsgroups, and other on-line venues are a very different sort of communication compared to face to face verbal communication on the one hand and reviewed, edited written publications on the other hand. Online writing is conversational in tone and content, without the nuanced cues and feedback found in direct human interactions, and without the editorial filtering. This removes a whole lot of restraints and conventions that help keep us civil.
The other factor is that its harder to type than it is to talk. (doh) I'm a very fast typist, but its still hard for my fingers to keep up with my thoughts. So I find myself using overly emphatic or exaggerated prose and grammar to try and get my points across. The net effect is that written conversations tend to suffer from over saturated emotional content -- flamage.
The barrenness of online speech and the difficulty of transcribing conversational speach to written word make flaming an easy way out. It takes time and effort to master the skills and self-discipline needed to communicate effectively in this media. Unfortunately this means that in open forums such as this, we have to endure boorish flamers. And the regrettable fact that discussions happen in an extremely short time frame makes it harder to take the time to hone your words or to reflect on them before posting.
In my product support work I did not have the option of ignoring the flamers. But engaging the flamers with civil, on-topic, constructive, and informative replies I typically caught them off-guard -- often leading to public apologies and retractions. In cases where the flaming persisted, or was beyond my tolerance threshold, replying directly to the flamer was often more effective than public retorts. So my advice would be:
The group flamers are the worst (Score:3)
The real difficulty I've noticed is when you have two or three people flaming as a group with the clear intention of making a board unusable. I had a situation on one board recently where four or five people came on and began announcing the formation of their own group, which had nothing at all to do with the board topic, and then had post after post of their group's planned activities, a little stage internecine feud, etc. The damage was much worse than just a single angry person.
A board like Slashdot is so popular that they can afford to keep the Anonymous Coward option, but for smaller boards blocking some people and requiring non-anonymous membership are the only way to prevent such nonsense.
Katz is "poor content"?! (Score:5)
That's not really a reason. This is just a cleverly disguised "Katz sucks."
Katz's critics seem to feel mysteriously exempt from explaining why he sucks, implying that it should be obvious to anyone else as cool as they are. What little substance they offer is highly subjective: "he rambles," "his topics aren't news for nerds," "he's not part of the community." Notice that Katz critics love to talk about the Slashdot Community as if it were clearly defined -- which is isn't.
Truth be told, Slashdot is a cornucopia of "content [that] reflect[s] poorly on the community." AC's posting inane crap. Luminaries posting inane crap [slashdot.org]. Slashdot staff post bullshit rumors and then end up immediately retracting them. Coverage of Microsoft and Java will typically be smug and negative. Coverage of the Amiga, Linux and Perl will be fawning and uncritical.
All of this would thoroughly discredit a standard news site, but Slashdot has a different model. Rob and Jeff merely regulate the amount of content -- the "community" (posters, moderators) act as the filter. In a way, if the Slashdot staff is guilty on anything, it's not doing too little filtering, it's doing too much. (Of course, maybe Slashdot is supposed to be a site where only the best nuggets of information are posted -- in that case, it's failing miserably.)