Slashdot

Kind of had it with Slashdot. They banned my entire IP range again and again for over a week now, because someone on my ISP keeps screwing around. Ban expires, I get a few hours of access and after that it's gone again. Repeatedly reported the ban on my IP and asked for a solution, but nothing.

So, fuck Slashdot.

Now, let's give this Kuroshin thing a try...

Temporary using my journal for this because the fools blocked my entire subnet after someone else from my ISP went wild. Yay.

Anyways, how would you feel to have a mediocre-looking goth girl ranting to you about death and Marilyn Manson? How would you like to PAY for it? How the hell can you get rid of bandwidth-drain caused by 30+ losers jacking of to a low-res overly bright pic of a chubby 30 year old goth-mom with flabby boobs? Would you like to tell these people that "free speech" does not equal "forcing your fat body on my monitor along with your flawed and irrelevant opinions about your life"*?

Help Nintendo sue them. Help them shut down the site or at least take a HUGE financial bite out of it. Some people don't like Viagra pill ads, some don't like ads about purple cars with tank tracks. I don't like ads about insecure goth moms posing en masse on some shitty website hoping that the attention of hundreds of lonely men ( who are all just there to see some T&A ) will make them feel better.

* .. You came here out of free will. If I put up ads all over the internet to try and force my opinion down your throath, feel free to yell at me and hit me with a stick for being a fuckwad. Until then, my point remains.

I can't even reply to my own damn journal anymore, but I can still post journal articles, ho hum. There's still plenty of ways to trolls slashdot even from a journal. Suppose someone could post some lovely little Scientologist bullshit on their journal, in which case Slashdot would be sued to hell and back again. Just an example of course, not going to do it myself. A bug? A design flaw? Who know; I'm sure as hell not going to report it, not after the lousy attitude they put up when I reported earlier bugs.

Ah yes, Slashdot. Been here for a year or two. Don't really keep track to be honest with you people, considering the exact date isn't really that important unless you're really anal about a time-of-joining based hierachy. In which case, UIDs would be a better indicator of 'status' to start with, but I digress. This is nothing about the Slashdot pecking order but more about the current state of Slashdot

You see, back in those days things were different, to say the least. Sure, people flamed the living hell out of eachother, MS bashing was as common as always and the majority of people here worshipped their own nice little pantheon of OSS gods and goddesses. Though I'm not quite sure on the goddesses part, mind you. Hell, I'm talking about a pre-GNAA time, back when trolling consisted largely of posting poorly drawn ASCII penises reading "CmdrTaco was here" or something along the lines of that. Sure, Slashdot has it's share of 'oopsies' but that was understandable. I mean, it had 1000+ replies on ANY topic back then. 2500+ wasn't too uncommon and the number of posts marked 4+ sometimes reached in the 250 area, pretty much what nowadays is the total amount of posts at -1+...

But things were pretty good back then. Busy as always, different trolls ( Love you people btw ), massive amounts of dupes by the editors and no subscriptions. People were happy; after all, it's a free service and none of us were paying anything for it. What can be expected of something free which isn't loaded with ads, hmm? Sure, the occasional oopsies kept things interesting between all the articles. We all laughed at Tacos typos and the obligatory funny CBN option in random clever polls. Back then it was decent for a free, uncommercial service.

Today however, I think we can be a tad bit more critical of things. Slashdot started a suibscription system, so the usual argument of "But it's free!" can no longer be applied to the quality of this site. Oh, you're still free to join up and reg but let's face it; the subscribers to Slashdot end up with the same shit the rest of us non-paying people have to deal with. Oh, they don't get ads, true, but neither do I, thanks to Mozilla. Oh sure, subscribers get a few worthless extras thrown in, but it's not hard to imagine anyone actually gives a flying fuck about silly little things like being able to have more then 200 friends or searching your own post history.

But that's not the main thing I'm going to bitch about right now, no. I don't pay, never will pay either, that's my solution to this issue. No, the problem is the ads lately. Have you seen them? There are a few nice ads here, here and here. Ahh, but they don't look like ads, nooo... They are supposed to look like articles! It's fascinating, both us non-subscribers and subscribers have to deal with them. You're reading an article and something just doesn't seem right. It's too aimed at geeks, too professionally written. It smells of a PR stunt, it smells of a person at marketing who found Slashdot. And then you realize it, you're just reading a dumb ad disguised as another poor article. It's like CNN accepting news stories about how great product X is, from the creator of product X. Granted, CNN is ran by professional editors who actually read their own shit.

But there's more: What the fuck is up with the "Related Links" bit? Do the Slashdot people raelly think we're going to storm some OSTG sellout online store en masse? Or is this just some stupid idea that some halfwit at OSTG HQ got wedged up their ass after reading Forbes? Also, why do Slashdot people want to affiliate themselves with OSTG, which hosts great sites like ITManagersJournal.com ( Same shit as Slashdot, just with random buzzwords and more ads ) and Sourceforge ( Develop cheaper, outsource with Sourceforge! )? Shame really. I'd continue bitching but I'm done for now. Just saw the movie "Troy" and I needed to bitch for a few minutes. Sorry about that... Has anyone actually managed to read this far without stabbing themselves in the eyes? Does anyone read this shit to start with?

Seriously, my patience has a limit and after this article, Slashdot just crossed that limit. I dont want to deal with Hemos' sad sense of humour. Coupled with the fact that the site still fails to render properly on mozilla from time to time, still has a broken and blatantly abused moderating system along with retarded and incompetent admins, I wish to know if there are any sites like Slashdot just without the retarded admins.

Thank you in advance,

- Seth

Okay, so the last few years "blogging", apart from having an atrocious name, has become a fad. Fair enough, because in essence it's a good thing, allowing people to post stories on the internet and have others comment on it, without the retarded Slashdot admins or the GNAA trolls. Over time, some wonderful journals came online, with examples such as the MSDN journals and Groklaw. These sites function as portals for people to communicate, exchange ideas about certain subjects and to gather information from people who know what they are talking about.

Unforunately, journals are not limited to that.

The last few years also witnessed a massive rise in "personal" journals. Some of these are fairly tolerable and more or less make a fair bit of sense, communication wise. For example, a random 20 year old exchange student keeping track of stuff using a journal for friends at home. For things like that, personal journals work nicely enough and serve a purpose. It sure as hell beats phoning all your friends and telling them all the same story about your latest stunt as a foreigner. But sadly, most journals are horrid. Poorly written and of little interest of anyone except those who already know the exact details, these journals litter the internet, crosslinking and polluting search engines. It's bad enough to realize I share this planet with a random 18 year old ugly girl who doesn't understand basic concepts like "punctuation", "paragraphs" and "capitalization". It's even worse when her bullshit gets crosslinked by other people, crosslinked again, and again... And thus screwing up several popular search algorithms.

The end result? Rendering Google and other search sites useless regarding some items you want to look for. At least 30% of most of my search results these days consists of blogs where someone, womewhere is venting his or her opinion. I don't want opinions, I want facts about stuff I look for. I can form my own opinion, thank you. I'd provide you people with a good example, but the person who that journal belongs to is kind of touchy and takes everything as a personal assault against herself, lately. Figures. Anyways, bitching about it will not get anyone anywhere, so here are some possible solutions for this... problem.

• Removal of popular public journal sites from main search features. ( LiveJournal, Blogger, etc )
• Adding specific journal search features to popular search engine. ( To counter the above )
• Adding a specific Slashdot section regarding journals and "blogs". ( Easy to disable/ignore. )

These would solve allot of problems... The search results would not be contaminated anymore, people like me would not have to deal with uninportant information anymore, the bloggers can still look and search for eachother's stories and I can finally ignore craps about blogs on slashdot. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Here's to hoping Google and the like will implement something like this... And that the Slashdot admins would make a seperate section. However, I highly doubt the latter one, regarding the incompetence of the Slashdot admins.

I know, ironic I post this in a Slashdot journal. At least it's not personal crap, it's actually an issue that lives among people on the internet. Then again, I'm high on irony lately...