leviramsey's Journal: Further thoughts

Due to volume of comments (IINM, my most heavily commented JE yet... 'tis always amazing how popular meta-wankery can be from time to time), I suppose I'd address some of the issues brought up in a second JE...

"Emigrate" may have been a poor choice of word, or it's quite clear that clarity is a good thing . I'm not suggesting that we abandon Slashdot, or even the JE's. I think that SolemnDragon got the gist of what I was thinking about: a sort of complement to the JE's. Cross-posting wouldn't/shouldn't be "against the rules".

History. There is a history of sites that broke off from Slashdot and succeeded (at least for a significant period of time). Kuro5hin is, of course, the dominant example. HuSi, which basically was where a significant portion of the "Kool Kid5" of K5 went when things started going downhill is perhaps even more directly applicable to this idea.

On Scoop. Scoop has a counterpart to messaging called the Hotlist. As implemented at HuSi (which started life as little more than a testbed for Hulver's patches to Scoop), every story (including diaries) that you post is added to your hotlist. Every time a reply to one of your comments is posted, an entry is added to your hotlist. Additionally (and this was the extent of the K5 hotlist for non-subscribers), you can hotlist a story that's particularly interesting and thus be alerted when new comments are posted. K5 subscribers (and all HuSi users) also got the ability to hotlist users, so that whenever they posted, a hotlist entry would be displayed. UI conventions on Scoop sites are to place the hotlist on every page. I know of no limits on hotlist sizes, though I haven't really looked at Scoop's code in a loooong time.

A rough vision. This would not really be a competition to Slashdot. It wouldn't be stories that got rejected by Slashdot (not that there's anything wrong with that or such should be verboten). Would there be a general topic? Not really, though I suppose "the most intelligent user community on the web" might be apt (if possibly a bit conceited). K5's "Technology and Culture" may well be the best summation of what I'd like. We're all reasonably cultured and all reasonably knowledgeable on technology and such; we've got the expertise.

Political commentary: yeah

Game reviews: yeah

Music/Movie/TV/Book reviews: yeah

Interesting news: yeah

Interesting sites: yeah

Random shit from our daily lives: yeah

Humor: yeah

Fiction: why the hell not?

Community structure. I think HuSi has the right idea: if you want to join, fine. If you crap all over the lawn, we'll clean it up and ban you. Knock yourself out.

AC posting. One idea I've had brewing for a while is that AC posting should be preserved, but not immediately visible (as it is open to abuse). Logged-in users get the ability to promote/make visible AC posts. If one logged-in user promotes a post (and thereby essentially certifies, under risk of dire consequences that it's not crap), it's visible for all to see and treated just like any other post from a logged-in user. If three vote "It's crap", the post is no longer eligible for promotion.

Marotti.com. Yes, thoughts of Marotti.com have gone through my head. IMHO, Marotti "failed" because it didn't really differentiate itself from Slashdot (by which I mean the front page). As much as we bitch about the editors here, the story selection, the dupes, and so forth, the fact is that it's difficult to imagine a successful competitor to Slashdot in the "News for Nerds" market. Accordingly, Slashdot's FP should not be the model.

Sounds Good

[pherris]

I use to read your stuff on k5 all the time. Your comments were well written and worth reading. I think a site like you're talking about with a couple of decent editors and a large community could be really good. IMO /. of late is starting to look like f**kedcompany's forums (yuck). I like the thought of AC postings being invisible as the default. k5 have some good points like mostly nonanonymous modding and trusted users. I don't know if those worked but I liked them. Would you use something like k5's auto

Erm...

[KshGoddess]

As I said in my last post, maybe a slashcode-based thing with no ac, or anonymous within the group, but not every J. Random Troll on the internet. No need to thoroughly reinvent the wheel (although it might work better if you do...)

Invite-only, perhaps. Public modding sounds good; people start the day with x mod points for the day. Everyone gets them.

Maybe instead of news-related, it's more people-related; vote a journal (or 2) to the top of the stack (front page) [via a 'vote for journal' - 1x per person

Re:Erm...

[leviramsey]

If perl is the way to go, I think Scoop might be the better base, simply because it's built around the idea of voting stories up. That said, being more of a PHP person than a perl person, I've been seriously considering hacking together a sort-of port of Scoop to PHP.

Re:Erm...

[KshGoddess]

sounds like fun. ;)