pilbender's Journal: Addicted

I'm addicted to Slashdot. I go through these periods of having to visit several times a day just to make sure I haven't missed anything. I'm in one of those periods now. I've been sucking on the firehose lately too.

Then I go through other periods where I don't visit for months. I don't understand why I go through these violent swings of interest and disinterest.

I've been tweaking my friends and foe list now for a while and I think I finally have things set so I can enjoy reading discussions. I don't really see people I don't want to see here anymore. Once I configured the filtering like this, this place is pretty nice to visit and the comments are pleasant. It's taken months to get to this point.

I'm thinking about paring down my friends list so I stop getting the chronic posters. You know, the ones you see post on every story, every time with nothing to say but group think or some dumb wise crack. I haven't done it yet to anyone because once in a while my "friends" say something interesting even if they're noisy. That's how they made my "friends" list.

I have my friends modded +6, friends of friends +3 (so I see them if they have good karma), foes of friends -3, and foes -6. Then I set my threshold to 4. That seems to work well for me but Slashdot doesn't do a good job of arranging comments for higher thresholds. A lot of people seem to understand this so they quote what they are reponding to. This helps a lot but Slashdot needs to fix this formatting issue. Formatting nested only seems to work for threshold -1.

I'm too lazy to Foe anyone

[smittyoneeach]

...and I set my threshold to -1, browsing /. in all its ragged glory.
I like to check it for a mental breather.

Re:

[pilbender]

I would only browse -1 for a long time too but I was finding I couldn't keep up with information that was important to me. I was missing comments from people I wanted to read because I didn't have time to sift through hundreds of junk posts. I know I miss some good things the way I do it, but it makes reading comments go so much faster.

If I didn't have to write code for a living I would browse Internet articles for 4 hours a day and code the rest of the time for fun. Of course then I would be independent

Re:

[WillAffleckUW]

I only give friends +1. And have only one foe.

No, Pudge, you don't rate Foe. I save that for Jon Katz.

Re:

[pilbender]

Hilarious!

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

I set my threshold to -1, browsing /. in all its ragged glory.

Ditto. Sometimes the ACs win the thread.

Re:

[pilbender]

It's interesting that so many people don't set their thresholds up. I'm starting to feel guilty now. Maybe, I'll try to read a smaller number of articles and reset my threshold back down so I can properly drink the raw sewage.

I will say this, it can be difficult to follow a thread on anything but -1 because the formatting is so poor. I often find myself resetting my threshold temporarily because of this.

Maxed out my relationship list!

[pilbender]

Well... I didn't know it until now but there's a limit of 200 relationships, friend or foe. Now I'm going to have to be a little more selective. I may have to eliminate some to add others.

I was thinking of going a different route too. That is, I was thinking about using another account and only using foes and then setting my threshold down again. By setting my threshold up, I'm not getting any benefit of adding people to my foe list, unless they get modded up (which is rare). Then the foe list makes s