GargamelSpaceman's Journal: News for nerds that's safe for work.

I've been on Slashdot forever. This account is old, and I had another account before. I changed the password to that account when I decided to be less of a troll and exercise a little more editorial control over what I say ( though I had excellent karma even with that other account. )

It's always been a great source of news for nerds, with news discovery crowdsourced, and techies have been a stimulating group to have conversations with over the years. Slashdot still is king of that, and the news for nerds is mainly why I still stop in now.

For most of the time I've used Slashdot, I browsed the site with lynx or some other such text browser for the blind. I'm not blind, but it looks superficially like I am coding if Lumberg comes up behind me to ask for the TPS reports. Also, web use is generally measured by the bite, rather than the site, and lynx text browsing has never gone above the radar.

But lately I work from home most of the time, and I think that's becoming common for real nowadays among techies, whereas once it was talked about more than it actually happened.

So I care less about what media I am viewing. ( using lynx I was rather biased toward text ) Also, if a NSFW image or offensive paragraph is on my screen, I don't have to explain it to Lumberg.

So lately, I've been browsing 4chan and youtube regularly. 4chan boards have some of the same crowdsourced discovery of news ( though it's less targeted toward techies depending on which board you are using ) And the stories have to be vetted more - obviously. But the crazies on there can be fun to argue with.

And youtube has improved its comment system to make conversations doable without too much hassle if not exactly supersmooth.

I've gone from being a slashdot / sciencedaily / google news / google groups (usenet news)/ the oil drum (now defunct) during the day and fark / dailyrotten ( now defunct ) at night kind of guy to a youtube / 4chan / slashdot / sciencedaily / fark kinda guy whatever time of day it is.

At work, though, when I go in, it is usually because I've got a reason to be busy, so I don't have slack days where boredom must be filled by posting shit. If I do run into a day like that, then I revert to my lynx habits.

I've always browsed slashdot with no filters. I think the moderation system was mainly to keep it safe for work. The conversation aspect of things suits me better on 4chan, though I like the crowd here better. Also I like posting things for posterity on youtube. I don't mind getting a reply to something I posted months ago. The replies are why to post, and have always been more important to me than moderation.

I guess the recent post I saw about only millenials liking Edward Snowden where there were older folks chiming in to defend their age bracket Eg: "I'm 65 and I like Ed" - GargamelSpaceman is 38 as of 2015 btw, so not a millenial, more of a Gen X. Also he can't spell millenial apparently, and talks about himself in the third person.. the comments on that recent post made me wonder if the age demographic of slashdot is getting older.

I saw many a post about: Stupid millenials this, and stupid millenials that. Once computers were for young people. I still think so, I mean 4chan's demographic is still young, but maybe that's because 4chan's demographic tends to be more unemployed..

My years of text browsing I've found has really been an information concentrating filter. I visit sites that seemed infomation dense and found them seeming information sparse when viewed with firefox.

And while it's possible to listen to youtube in the background while doing something else, it's not possible to pay close attention to anything being said. Also it's hard to search for keywords like you can in a text page, to go right to the thing you wanted to see.

And making videos is harder than typing, Youtube is at least a week behind the text web, and not as close to source ( except when the source was a video ). By the time someone makes a video the result has been through yet another layer of editing.

Slashdot, while probably older demographically, and mainly a text site, is still the freshest most comprehensive source for news for nerds of all types, and not a bad place to argue about stuff with at least some intelligent people.