singleantler's Journal: State of discussions

I had mod points today thanks to the usual roulette and ended up using them up in the Google's Bigger Index thread.

Sadly, this is the first time I've used most of my mod points negatively - to mod down posts, rather than upping good posts. Well, I saw 'negatively,' what I was trying to do was improve the level of discussion a bit. There seem to be more and more duplicate posts at the moment (I know, I know, following the lead of duplicate stories.)

In the story it said Google had indexed six billion items, but their home page says they've indexed four billion-some web pages. There were lots of people pointing out that four billion is less than six billion, and then lots more pointing out the six billion includes images and PDFs, again and again.

I ended up thinking about when I first read Slashdot. It was over two years before I got an account, partly because I didn't read it very often, but mainly because I didn't feel I could contribute to the discussions. I couldn't contribute because they were all at such a high level. I couldn't think of anything that was as intelligent or useful as had all ready been said.

Now, I have to plough through two to three hundred posts, a lot of which seem pretty uniformed, to find a small number of useful posts.

No era is ever as perfect as nostalgia makes it seem. But Slashdot really is getting to the point where it won't be worth reading the posts any more and just using it as a list of news stories. And that's a great shame for such an old and successful site.