I think my user account dates back to late 1998, though I might have read the site for a while before finally registering. There never really was a Golden Age of Slashdot, when all the stories were relevant, the summaries were factual (and properly edited), and the submissions were timely. It's pretty much always been the same as today, though the summaries sometimes do seem a bit more trollish these days. Of course, that's probably the fault of the submitters.

If you go back and read the journal entries and comments from the early days, you'll see that people had much the same concerns back then that they have today: dupes, poor editing of the submissions, flamebait articles, inaccurate summaries, more dupes, and Jon Katz. It's difficult to state how much Jon Katz was hated and reviled. In fact, now that I have no one to focus my Two Minutes Hate on any more, I do feel a bit empty.

I really should have thought about that before I made my post, because you've definitely got a point. However, as disturbing as that scenario is, it hasn't been done explicitly for entertainment purposes. It also lacks the crass commercialization of a Hollywood movie, with the requisite viral marketing and merchandising tie-ins. Just think: little toy mushroom clouds for the kids! There's some real potential here for a producer with vision.

I don't know about you, but I'm kind of excited about the thought of a small third world nation having a nuclear bomb dropped on it, so that I can be entertained. I'm not heartless. The people would be evacuated first, of course. All of this would be captured by an award-winning director (I'm gunning for James Cameron), who would be free to add some drama and story to the action. If we find a poor enough nation, we should be able to pull this off for around a billion US dollars. Seeing as how Cameron has proved that he can pull in a billion dollars already, this should be doable.

I say, if we're going to be decadent, it's time to go all the way.

Yeah, maybe the true story here is that someone actually thought their local government wasn't a fascist dictatorship.

I agree. I think we need a mechanism for citizens to sue their representatives for treasonous legislation. The problem, of course, is that uncompromising ideologues will clog the court system with such protests. I'm sure there's a working solution, but it probably wouldn't be easy to implement. Anyways, it's probably idealistic and naive to expect that it would even accomplish anything, even if it did get implemented.

The part that confuses me is that I got modded up.

The disturbing thing is that someone out there agrees with me, but only when I phrase it in the most trollish and asshole-ish way possible. Whoever you are, I appreciate your moderation points, but you need to take a step back and think about whether you've made the right decisions in your life. You're modding up an overt troll made by a bipolar poster who's off his medication and thinks it's hilariously funny to flame people on Slashdot. If you're OK with this, then I'm OK with it, too. But you need to think long and hard about this.

Are you kidding? xkcd is total shit. Let me sum it up for you: whimsical stick figures white knighting on the internet!!!!! But with pop culture references!!!!! LOLOLOLOL. Penny Arcade is better, but the blogs are frequently better than the actual strips. PhD comics is alright, but it's not exactly what I'd call great.

Let me introduce you to a real webcomic: The Parking Lot is Full.

Honorable mention to Gone with the Blastwave, Sexy Losers, and Perry Bible Fellowship, even though PBF is a pretty much a ripoff of PLIF. Still, it ripped off the best, so it gets an honorable mention.

If you're into insipid, warmed-over Monty Python references and "internet culture", then SMBC is probably what you're looking for. It's alright. It's shitloads better than xkcd, at least. And there's no desperate, low self-esteem white-knighting, which is a huge bonus. There's also Bob the Angry Flower, if you crave nerd humor that's got more substance than someone making fucking graphs.

I could mention a few others, but I was never that big a fan of Ghastly's Ghastly Comic (maybe you need to be a weeaboo to really love tentacle rape jokes... and Sexy Losers did it all first). There's also Subnormality, if you don't mind preachy, TL;DR strips about the totally wacky and off-the-wall adventures of a sphinx that -- get this -- likes to EAT PEOPLE!!!! LOL. What craziness!

But, really, xkcd is total shit.

There's always some scandal that's got Slashdot frothing at the mouth. We do so love our Two Minutes Hate.

To be fair, I suppose any community of rabid fanboys has the potential to devolve into a cult-like atmosphere. God knows the Amiga was pretty close to that, for a while, and I loved the Amiga. Anyways, I've owned a Mac or two in the past, and I'm not morally opposed to owning another one; the community was a bit freaky, however.

Doom has a certain stigma attached to it, especially when depressed, alienated teens obsessively play it...

If you talk to a real-life sociopath, you'll actually hear this from them, sometimes.

In a normal personal, the psychological gymnastics necessary to rationalize your behavior in this way would be truly amazing. In sociopaths, it seems to come naturally.

Same here. Wikipedia calls that a gadfly, which I think fits better than "troll". In my mind, there's a difference what the GNAA does (as amusing as they are, they have no higher purpose, and they exist merely to annoy others) and that of good faith devil's advocate. Still, trolling for a higher social cause is still trolling, so I usually just skip the rationalizations and fancy words. A troll's a troll.

Perhaps 15 year old trolls eventually turn into 40 year old gadflies... and then 60 year old cranky old men.

It depends. If you're a persuasive writer, you can probably get modded up by saying anything. I've done quite a few experiments, to see how my comments would get modded. In most cases, I found that repeating the Slashdot groupthink will get you modded up, regardless of content. Simply being disagreeable tends to get you modded down quickly. Using reverse psychology works so well, that it's almost like cheating. All you need to do is preface your comment with, "I know I'll get modded down for this, but..." Some freethinking rebel will take the challenge and prove that he's open-minded by modding you up. It almost never fails. It's gotten to the point where I roll my eyes whenever I see that phrase in a post, because I know it's going to shoot up to (score: 5, interesting) in minutes.

It's true, you can get modded up, if you take the time to support your beliefs and assertions, but it's also true that simply repeating Slashdot groupthink will get you modded up even more easily and rapidly. Often, the most trite comments possible ("Fuck the RIAA!") get the most attention, while thoughtful and insightful posts often languish in obscurity, because they took too long to write, they were posted anonymously, and/or they forgot to use reverse psychology.

In the end, it's not really all that important, because karma is meaningless and few people on the internet (or real life, for that matter, I suppose) are even interested in thoughtful debate; they'd rather angrily repeat slogans and prepared "factoids" at each other in endless arguments. Once you realize that, it's difficult to resist becoming a troll and adding to the noise, though one could charitably call it "playing devil's advocate". Shades of gray, really.

I've noticed this, too. As soon as you take what might be considered a controversial stance on some issue, you get hounded by people calling you a shill, because they can't conceive of how anyone could disagree with them without having been paid. I think this happens most often in highly insular communities with a strong degree of conformism (ie, groupthink). Unsurprisingly, Slashdot is quite prone to angry (and sometimes paranoid) howls of, "Shill! Shill!" I hate when conversations get derailed like that. For one thing, it's a logical fallacy. For another, it's an incredibly lazy way to silence dissent.

I originally scoffed at the idea of armies of shills invading Slashdot. I think one or two of my older posts were like that, after I noticed a marked increase in accusations of shilling. Eventually, I had to admit that there were some controversial posters (InterestingFella, DCTech, or whatever he calls himself now) that even I suspected of being shills. I've since softened my stance to that of skepticism, rather than outright rejection. I still think it's unlikely that shills are hiding under every rock, waiting to spout their paid-for opinions in every story posted to Slashdot. I think most of the people that get accused of being a shill are merely enthusiastic fanboys, who don't even need to be paid! When you've got legions of zombie-like fanboys, why do you need shills? If they seem to all be reading from scripts, I'm still not convinced that they're shills. Apple fanboys, in particular, are known for repetitious use of Apple's marketing. It's like they have their brains scooped out and replaced by a marketing script that they read from. It's like a cult.

What about Hulu, Crackle, Vevo, etc? Aren't those exactly what you're asking for?

I think you're pulling numbers out of your ass.

That's possible, but I doubt it. Just talk to a few random people, and you'll find that you share absolutely nothing in common in them. They don't give a shit about your concerns, and you probably don't give a shit about their concerns. My sister is one of those anti-vaccine, pro-organic people. She loves Apple and all of her iProducts. If you listen to her, all of the world's problems revolve around Monsanto, vaccines, and Windows PCs. She doesn't give a shit about patent trolls, DRM, Sony rootkits, or open source. Do you really think my sister is going to give a shit about your beef with the MPAA or RIAA?