Of course, it would be remiss not to point out that Slashdot has also been accused [idge.net] of forms of censorship.
It is also worth noting that Digg has rapidly gained popularity to the point that Slashdot and Digg are now neck and neck [alexa.com] according to Alexa.
Digg is an interesting site that implements a number of things many long-time Slashdot users have wished Slashdot would do for quite some time. It would be a shame if they are failing to live up to their claim of non-hierarchial editorial control. If this is true, then they deserve to be outed.
I've still been off the mod list for the last 4 years now, but about two years ago I started being able to meta-mod again. I considered it a good step forward.
The whole thing pisses me off to no end because I basically got trolled into moderating up one of the "offensive" posts, and I feel like I was caught up in the general moderation bitch-slap that went around at that time. What's worse is I've never actually "trolled" on Slashdot. I've posted some stuff that I thought was funny, and some of those may have been "in opposition" to the prevailing attitudes about the topic (maybe pro-Microsoft or questioning the sanctity of Linux or whatever.) But I've certainly never done any frist ps0ts, obscene ASCII art, or any of the other griefer-type posts.
I like that Slashdot has a strong policy against censoring, and that they use the mod system to hide the griefers. I honestly don't know how they've avoided the casino spam, but whatever they're doing in that regard is also excellent and appreciated.
But I don't mind the occasional off topic discussion, and I don't have a problem replying to ACs. I also find some of the trolls hilarious, and I've even befriended one just because she's an excellent creative writer. So while I'm not a troll myself, I do enjoy the (very occasional) troll. I sometimes wonder if I'm too close to the border for them to restore my mod points.
So while I'm not a troll myself, I do enjoy the (very occasional) troll. I sometimes wonder if I'm too close to the border for them to restore my mod points.
I'm in the same boat. I noticed one day I couldn't mod anymore and wasn't sure why. I think it had to do with modding down somone during a heated BSD vs GNU debate, but this was when the meta-mod system was just came into place so most people were frantically using it to get more mod points.
I can still meta-mod just fine myself and don't really miss the
Most users get moderation ability pretty early on slashdot, but some never do, and others dont get it until a few hundred posts with a good karma rating. Slashdot has avoided problems by being conservative in their judgments. The biggest thing that people dislike about slashdot is the poor choices of posts. In the past it was the lack of a solid html code base, and slashdot did respond (very slowly). I think that the editors of slashdot realize they must pay attention to what people want, and they usual
Wow... Am I really that insignificant? I've criticized/. in my posts (most especially the moderation system) before, got modded as troll and modded back up, but I've never been banned and I still get mod points regularly. Although come to think of it though, there was a time when I didn't get mod points for a month. Damn. If I were a guy I'd be suffering from "small penis" syndrome right now (I think -- men are strange and mysterious creatures, so you tell me).
Same here. Despite having had excellent karma for well over 2 years, I never get to moderate since I got hit with the bitchslap for criticising Michela Sims.
It may have been just because of meta-moderation that lowered your moderation ability. When you Modded that post up Meta-Moderators figured didn't agree with the moderation and so your private moderation score dropped for a while. A similar thing happened a while back when I decided to get even with someone who responded to my post and really annoyed me. So I had Mod Points at the time so I went in and searched for that user and I modded everything he had that I could moderate as a Troll. Shortly after that I didn't have moderation rights for a few months. Most likely because Meta Moderators saw that completely untoll marked as troll and Meta-Moderated it correctly. The problem with systems like Digg and Slashdot it is easy to think you are purposely being censored but you may just be a victim of software algorithms, based on democratic results.
So, you abused the moderation system and then were denied access to it? I can see how people would think that's unfair.
To be honest, a lot of these "F'ing censoring bastards!" posts come from trolls who hate seeing a particularly good troll post get canned. If you're trying to game the system and get called on it, don't be surprised when you lose privleges. That's all I'm saying.
Um No I thought it was completely fair. I wasn't saying it wasn't I was just saying it is not direct censoring. I was a Vindictive ass [slashdot.org] at the time. But I don't beleave it was the slashdot editors who did it just the fact that I did unfair posting.
IIRC, the comments were in some random story about Oracle, so were all technically "offtopic" and therefore the mods were "abuse".
The issue is that this sort of thing has never been enforced at all here -- you can walk into an Oracle story and start a flamewar about Communism, Macs, SCO, or any other hot-button issue you can walk away with a Score 5 and nobody will care.
Interestingly, I have been banned from moderation for a long time. Apparently for just viewing certain posts or something. I don't remember the details.
Interesting because I have had this account for quite some time, and I (used to) Meta-Moderate on a daily basis. I also used my mod points to mod up, and not down. It was very rare indeed for me to mark someone as a troll or similar. Still, I followed a link to a supposed "forbidden" criticism of slashdot and such, and read all the posts therin, and I have not had moderation privilages since.
I have since stopped meta-moderating as much because, well, while I like slashdot, and it is my homepage on Firefox, I am somehow no longer appreciated or something, or maybe not trusted. I don't know.
Its funny really, when people like you and me are the ones for making slashdot what it is. Sure, there are posts about various stories, but what MAKES slashdot are the comments. For example, I have always found this thread: http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129489&c id=10801729 [slashdot.org] to be pure gold.
What digg aspires to be is a more "open" version of slashdot, whether it achives that or not we will see. Either way, the competition has been good, I suppose everyone has noticed the quick little changes in how slashdot works now? When this site has not changed much in the last five years?
No matter the outcome, the shakedown on this is bound to be good... It would be nice though, to have mention of the reason users like me are suddenly not allowed to moderate, as opposed to just having it vanish - apparently for "viewing" the wrong threads...
this [slashdot.org] is the thread in question. Though the moderation history has been purged, it was moderated 851 times. (Also check out this [slashdot.org] journal entry about it).
Seriously, stop and think it over for a moment. The comment has only 2 children with a score >= 1 - 1 that was posted 14 days later (with the moderation totals), and 1 that was posted a day later and is completely unrelated to the thread.
Do you believe that normal user-moderators went through and moderated down 266 replies? Not to mention the 426 down-mods of the original comment? Then everybody that up-modded it was then knocked around in m2?
Or do you suppose there is a "bitchslap.pl" script that will moderate a comment (and all replies) to a score of -1 offtopic.
The existance of the bitchslap.pl script is well known. This is an email from CmdrTaco referring to it. This was after a user lost mod privileges [idge.net] by down-modding signal 11.
>"Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda" wrote:
>Pater, this guy was another victim of the too-powerful-bitchslap
>punishing comment posters for bad moderation. Give him back his
>defaultstatus.
>
>Jeff: we were using one script to solve 2 problems: Bots autoposting
>comments to Slashdot (moderating down all comments to -1 and
>setting defaultpoints to -1) and invalid moderation (karma -1 and
>remove all moderator points).
No, the infamous mod-ban bitch-slap of 2002 has been discussed by lots of people over the years. It was quite deliberate, and despite a long track record of interesting, insightful and funny posts most of us still don't have mod points back yet.
Perhaps it's time for me to ask for them to be restored again, kind of like asking the President for a pardon, or asking the Don for a favor on this, the day of his daughter's wedding.
Depends on which President you ask and when. Clinton was handing 'em out like candy in 2001.
On both/. and Digg, I find a huge level of arrogance coming from the editors, who, in many cases, aren't doing anything to "merit" arrogance, if you know what I mean. Both forums also suffer from a surfeit of immature, ignorant or downright stupid comments. I think both are great experiments in collaborative communication, but there is room (IMO) for much more radical ideas.
Digg tends to have more interesting "fluffy" or "neat" articles,/. has more substance, and/.'s forums, however low-tech and old-school they might be, have 10 times the good content than any Digg forum. The best feature/. ever added was the ability to be notified when someone replies to your post.
I think an interesting comparison would be to study the effects of/.'s rather limited moderation compared to those of Digg where you can mod comments up and down till you're blue in the face (and the comment has dozens of + or - points).
I find it rather odd that a score of +5 for a commment (given I have the karma bonus) means only 3 people out of hundreds of thousands of potential readers thought it worth modding up. What happens when 10 times as many people can mod and the mods can go 10 times as high or low? Will a better meritocracy of discussion emerge are will be just be giving the frost pisters and other morons more free reign to be infantile?
In the end, both sites are run by, and largely populated by, a bunch of know-it-all computer geeks, nerds, posers and wannabes, and this ultimately might be their biggest problem.
Now excuse me, I have some socket code to debug.:-)
Personally I find moderation points a bit of a hassle. Sure there is a measure of recognition in receiving some but when you try do do it seriously and force yourself to read at -1 and try to find the best posts within a thread, it does become rather hard work.
As for digg, I might be a bit hard but I see it as being a cynical attempt to create a for profit marketing forum which is just masquerading as another Slashdot. When everybody gets to moderate all the time, the paid professional moderators with numerous accounts will dominate.
It is interesting to pick up on the early indications of this with buttons for automatic story posting in cnet articles (cnet has to be with out doubt the very worst advertising as tech news sites on the web).
Add another Slashdot victom here. I used to get mod points weekly. After I complained about Michael (and got a post of mine instantly modded from +3 down to -1), I haven't seen them since.
Interestingly, as one who was not able to moderate for a couple years after moderating up some posts in one of those infamous threads, I've actually started getting mod points again. (They started again not long after michael left, which I suspect had something to do with it.) Are there others who are still blocked from moderating after that happened?
> After I complained about Michael (and got a post of mine instantly modded from +3 down > to -1), I haven't seen them since. You had to do more than just bitch about one of the/. admins dude. I'm a conservative leaning libertarian and post often in the 'daily hate bushitler' threads just to stir the pot a bit. I tend to refer to the admins as socialist kids who had their minds damaged by their higher education, and even less flattering terms. When I really get on a tear (meaning I speak too many un
I get modded straight into oblivion by the slashdot hivemind's defensive reflexes.
I love it when people assume that because everyone's doing it - it must be stupid. This is about as rational as saying "if everyone's doing it, it must be great!" Anti-conformity is essentially the same thing as conformity.
Maybe you're just being a troll and get modded accordingly?
"Yeah, you won't catch me tying my shoelaces like the zombie masses!!!"
"While I don't think editors should "bitchslap" threads, it's hard to ignore the fact that every single comment in that thread is in fact off-topic...."
Well, duh! All of those threads say 'off-topic' after they've been modded down!
At the time that thread was posted, there was no place to express these concerns. Taco has recently started attempting to have meta-slashdot stories, and there are always.sigs and journals. But, those didn't exist at the time of the $rbtl bitch-slap thread.
Besides - it was off topic to the story, but obviously it bore discussing since sooo many people modded it up. That's the point of a user-moderated comment system - the users get to decide what they want to discuss.
Hmm, I just took a look at that thread and all the posts I read looked like they deserved a -1. I feel like it was a waste of my time even reading them, but I did. If there were anything in there that didn't deserve a -1 I didn't see it.
Aye. My account was banned years ago from moderation for moderating up a post on slashdot critical of slashdot policies. The same happened to others.
I have been similarly blacklisted from mod points. That doesn't bother me as much as how sneaky the slashdot mafia are about it. If my account went around with a metric that showed I tend to get up and down modded I wouldn't mind. For example, it would be easy to record the average moderation and average deviation for each account from that value (a measure
Hahahahahaha. Maybe I'm missing something, but some of those guys built this place, right? Did you think that Slashdot was conceived by the internet via immaculate conception?
I'd love to see more open-ness and an open metric and stuff like that, but as long as there are people like you wandering the byways of cyberspace with this insane feeling of being entitled to every website you land on I'm not really that surprised that the creators retain (and delegate) more authority than would otherwise be optimal.
It's precisely this attitude of being entitled to stuff other people created that makes socialists so annoying.
Did you think that Slashdot was conceived by the internet via immaculate conception?
Slashdot is a business. They are paid by advertisers in exchange for my attention. When they lose my attention pulling their silly shit, I go elsewhere. I posted in hope that someone who runs the site would read it and benefit.
It's precisely this attitude of being entitled to stuff other people created that makes socialists so annoying.
What is worse is being a fatalistic slave to the status quo who is inexplicably
I posted in hope that someone who runs the site would read it and benefit.
Isn't that just a little sanctimonious? Believe it or not businesses do not exist to serve you. A privately held business is private property. The owners can do whatever they want with it. There's no obligation whatsoever for them to treat customers kindly, respond to concerns or any thing else to make the experience more enjoyable for you, me, or anyone else.
Of course if you run a business that way, you run the chance of not maki
I believe that the issue in both the/. and Digg cases is not the authority itself, but the fact that the authority is hidden. Doubly so on Digg, if the allegations are true, as they make much out of their policy of letting users decide how good a story is.
There used to be a metric. Karma was expressed in points, any amount over 20 was pointless. But that lead to folks opening mutiple accounts just to moderate themselves up, and the reviled process known as "karma whoring".. Scan a thread of 0 and 1 rated posts, condense all the good points into your own without attribution, and post at +2.. Guaranteed few more karma.
That said, I had a few hundred karma. Each point representing one positive moderation. Another fellow, Signal 11, had three times mine.
Or maybe there are just more people modding now? When I first signed up for my account I got mod points all the time. I very rarely get them now. I've never really posted anything that I considered anti-slashdot, and I have no problems modding up posts I disagree with as long as I think it's something worth seeing - so I have no reason to believe it's anything other than just the workings of the algorithm.
I could whine and moan that the admins don't like me because I'm Mormon, or religious, or some of my politcal views - but that would just be random speculation.
In any case, I'm not really a fan of modding myself. If I care enough to mod, I'd rather post. When I have mod points I try to pick a topic I'm reasonably well-informed on but don't really care too much about and use them to be helpful. It really is more of a chore than anythign else, however, and I just do it to be doing my part. So if I don't get mod points as often, I'm not missing them.
This is my situation also; from about the time I hit "Excellent" karma until a while ago, I pretty much got mod points weekly, but then all of a sudden stopped getting them. I'm not sure if it's just a quirk of the algorithm, or whether I made some particularly unpopular moderation / metamoderation, or what. Or maybe it was because I let some points expire. I just treat mod points as a kind of weird force of nature, like the weather. Only less predictable and occasionally vindictive. (So, kind of like the we
I'm not really one of those "been-here-since-forever" slashdotters, but I've always gotten the impression that the gods on high here at slashdot consider this their domain. Which is fine with me. They built it, they figure out how to keep it running (esp financially) so kudos to them. And their system is relatively open - I especially like that no posts get deleted. I mean, yeah - there may be some weird mod stuff going on, but at least the posts are still there. But I think that attitude of "this is min
Yeah, you can add me to the list of folks that got "censored" on Slashdot. I totally lost moderator ability (despite my 40+ karma at the time), because I modded up a post that critized Slashdot's moderation system. I needed to create a new account to get it back. That said, Digg's moderation system is far worse. If you DARE to make a critical opinion about Apple, for example, the Apple fanboys there will moderate your comment down to -20 in less than an hour. After that happened to me a few times, I now unde
What Digg is accused of doing is deleting entire stories along with comments.
What everyone here is talking about is moderation (either how a comment was moderated, or whether they were allowed to moderate). Moderation (in either form) != censorship. Moderation is a tool to make the comments section tractable for casual readers - making the "good" comments readily available, and keeping trolls, flamebait, etc. off to the side. If you want to read all the trash, go ahead, set your threshold at -1. In other words, the comments are not censored, just assigned on score upon which individual users can filter them according to their needs.
Unless I'm very mistaken, I don't think there have been *any* cases on Slashdot of entire stories disappearing along with all their comments. That actually would be censorship of the ideas people expressed, and, as I read the article in question, appears to be the approach Digg takes to stories. To Kevin's credit, he indicates that the system is going to be changed to a more Slashdot-like approach soon. The stories will be "buried", but not deleted, much as modded down comments are here.
What Digg is accused of doing is deleting entire stories along with comments.
Who is to say the stories were not removed simply because they were lame and a lot of people flagged them as such? I've seen a story get deleted, but I had marked it as lame and so it wasn't really unexpected.
Mine too. I couldn't metamoderate for a while, and I've never been able to moderate since. The post I got banned for had over 700 moderations, and it looked like every account that moderated the post up got banned from moderating.
Here is the post [slashdot.org]. Here is a journal entry by sllort [slashdot.org] that does a much better job of describing what happened.
Aye. My account was banned years ago from moderation for moderating up a post on slashdot critical of slashdot policies. The same happened to others.
Yep, including me. I moderated the first Slashdot troll post investigation [slashdot.org] as Interesting because I genuinely found it interesting. (I link to it because I still find it interesting... just don't mod it up!) That was over four years ago. My moderation and meta-moderation abilities were taken away though I've always been I would consider a good Slashdotter. Emailed someone about it, probably CmdrTaco or Pater (maybe both, it's been so long), but no response. Strangely, meta-moderation ability was restored about a year later, but I've still never been able to moderate since then.
Not to say that this is a big deal... it's just Slashdot. But it seems a bit hypocritical to talk about Digg's actions as if they were unethical, when the same thing has happened, and is still happening, here.
Dude, you are a god amongst men. Your sig is probably the best thing that I have read in years. The number of miles that you will save my left hand in an average year is just flabbergasting.
Thanks! I don't remember where I read that, but once I discovered it, I was shocked that in several years of using Vim (as a power user!) I'd never heard of using Ctrl-C instead of ESC. Now that I'm used to it, I can't imagine ever having to reach all the way up to the ESC key again! I have no idea why this isn't extremely well known, since it's so useful.
I just unchecked that little box in my preferences that says "Willing To Moderate".
A good moderator is someone willing to read through all the 0 rated stuff to find the hidden gems that deserve moderation up, and frankly I'm not willing to waste time reading the drivel at that level, so rather than just spending points on already high rated stuff (I browse slashdot at +4) I just got out of the system altogether. I haven't missed it.
With respect, the contention here is that the Digg admins do this stuff in secret, whereas the Slashdot editors are completely honest about exerting editorial control over stories and sometimes, but rarely, comments.
Umm. You do realise there's a LOT of people on Slashdot that suddenly got their moderating priviligies (but not meta-moderation interestingly enough) removed and, as far as I know, no one has ever been told why?
I used to get mod points almost once a week, then I started exerting my Republican viewpoint on Slashdot and I havent seen mod points in over a year and a half.
Most likely you got hit by bad metamoderation, perhaps a few times in a row. I once used my mod points to moderate down a troll who was plagiarizing posts from different blogs... since metamoderators don't see context, I was metamoderated badly, and it was several months before I got mod points again.
Of course, you could make the argument that you shouldn't have been using the moderation system to push your own viewpoint. Although, of course, those with "popular" viewpoints can do it without any fear of retribution, which is a big part of the problem.
Pity the moderation system doesn't allow you to describe WHY you moderated something a certain way, other than via the canned options which are often not suitable.
The option I most often want is some sort of "-1 wrong" for an "interesting" post. As in, yes, it's interesting (and hence not overrated on that basis), but it's factually incorrect.
> I used to get mod points almost once a week, then I started exerting my Republican
> viewpoint on Slashdot and I havent seen mod points in over a year and a half.
Yes conservative posts will usually get modded into oblivion, but that isn't the editors being bitchy, that is the users. Keep that karma up by posting ontopic posts that add to the conversation in the non political threads and you can absorb the hits when you speak out against the slashdot hivemind on the political threads.
As a libertarian, I haven't been able to moderate in two years. Someone told me that it's a factor of my posting/viewing ratio, so I created another account and didn't post on this one for three months. No effect. I'm thinking of an experiment with two accounts, one which only posts in political stories and one which only posts in technical stories, and see which one get's blackholed first.
I'm a libertarian and I get mod points about once a week. Not only that, I'm an anarchist, a conservative, and a fundamentalist, and I don't shy away from expressing those views when it's on topic. Somehow I haven't been hit by any such thing. I really do think it has a lot to do with the amount of reading you do... I first started getting mod points after I took week long vacations. But I think it's been tinkered with since then.
"So my idea was to start a news website where you would give complete control to the community... People like the fact that it's a democratic approach to news," Rose said. "There's no handful of editors in a smoke-filled back room deciding which stories are important; the masses are deciding." (http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/24/magazines/busines s2/diggdemocratizes/index.htm [cnn.com])
As much as I like Digg I've wondered if a democratic approach is truly possible without putting at risk their aim of being a tech re
newspapers have editors for a reason, websites have editors for a reason. Editors do a really important job in filtering out all the shit that we have to otherwise put up with which is pretty much as bad as spam.
The idea of digg is noble and great and in some respects it's definately a success, like the speed that it delivers news stories as they happen compared to slashdot. This makes a difference to me.
The most negative thing I have to say about digg are that the comments section is filled with a bunch of fucking assholes, I call them the digg mob. It's due in a great part to a fucking stupid comment moderation system that doesn't encourage people to think about why they are modding a person up or down because mod points run like honey. The result is the mobb effect, where someone says something contrary to popular opinion and gets buried under a massive amounts of undiggs. I'm at the point where I completely give up reading digg simply because people are such assholes in the comment section.
This story is fairly interesting to me because I recently started reading Digg and using RSS feeds, etc. though I've been a Slashdot mainstay for a long time. I find digg's practice of hiding the fact the editors filter the frontpage stories and ban site submitters at least a huge turn off if not all out scandalous.
They need to get their shit together or they will die. Slashdot's crowd keeps coming back because they're mostly no b.s. Trust > all.
Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
I am sure that your UNIX scripting comments were great. I am also sure that the only person that cared how highly moderated they were is EdwinBoyd. Consider your lesson the metaphysical equivalent of what would happen if you insulted the largest hairy troglodyte on the beach. The difference is that you don't end up with a massive sand-powered wedgie.
What if the editors bitchslap the wrong person? Of course, that could never happen...
Then a whole pile of comments that no one really cares about will become even more obscure. Oh no, the horror! Quite frankly, if it makes even *one* person think before hitting the submit button then the slim chance that I might get bitchslapped is worth the risk.
If you want something transparent try USENET. I still do, but only because I use a very capable news reader.
What the "whiners" really want is to be an editor. Everyone with a brain realizes that trolls are a problem, they just want to be the one with their finger on the bitchslap button. Fortunately, in this day and age of cheap bandwidth and free software you *can* be the editor of your own blog. Just don't be surprised if it isn't as popular as/.
Yes, you want to define the "good" reasons for bitchslapping, and you want/. to "improve" according to your tastes. That's what a/. "editor" does. It's not like the editors at/. earned their position with their grammatical skills./. is popular largely because Taco and crew have come up with a way where intelligent folks can have interesting conversations about nerdy topics. The rest of us schmoes simply play by the rules (or go elsewhere). Just don't be surprised if when you go elsewhere that the ed
As I have pointed out after previous mentions of Alexa, Digg has an obsession with Alexa stats that has lead many Digg users to install Alexa for the sake of adding to the view count for Digg.
How do these numbers relate to the question ? The original statement was that Digg users were "led to install Alexa for the sake of adding to the view count for Digg". I want to know what this accusation is based on.. and I didn't ask if the demographics of Netcraft and Alexa users are different (neither of both is statistically representative by the way).
Was there a campaign "Help Digg, Install Alexa toolbar" ? Where they not letting you create an account on digg.com if you haven't had Alexa toolbar install
It's just anecdotal. The odd comment calling for people to install Alexa. The relentless posting of Alexa graphs. The comments yearning for "a little more", and "not long now".
Digg has an obsession with Alexa stats that has lead many Digg users to install Alexa for the sake of adding to the view count for Digg.
That may be, but the site popularity is comparable in at least some
metrics. For example, a Digg link can generate more traffic
to target sites than even the notorious Slashdot Effect. For
example, the big Nmap 4.00
release [insecure.org] was covered by both Slashdot [slashdot.org]
and Digg [digg.com].
According to my referrer logs, Slashdot delivered a respectable 4,934
hits, while Digg brought more than twic
Maybe it is just more evidence for the sterotype that Sladhot readers don't RTFA.
It could also be the time differential. Which site posted the link first? (I couldn't see a timestamp on the Digg story, just a date.)
If there's an overlap of readership and the story was posted on one site a couple of hours before the other, it would certainly make a better explanation, no? (After all, if you clicked on the Digg link, then a couple of hours later it showed up on/., would you click again?)
Of course there could be other explanations for these results.
Well, the most common thing I hear from digg people who post here is "digg had this (N) days ago!". So maybe a lot of people read both and only clicked through when they saw it on digg first.
Another explanation, and one likely to get me flamed (or modded flame) is that the slashdot crowd is generally more technically competent (or maybe I should say "technically focused"; the digg crowd seems to have a broader base) and so accessed the nmap si
I quit taking Digg serious shortly after I thought I liked it, soley because of the obvious censoring they do, all in secret. Also because they edited my comments, changing the context, AND they were not against Digg or anyone else. Just simply Admin abuse.
I still find a story or two that is interesting, but mainly I just try to mod up the trash just to prove how fucked up and bias it is.
Digg is already old news, earning perhaps a footnote in Wikipedia someday.
I quit taking Digg seriously after I realized that Digg had brought new life to Slashdot, making the articles much more up-to-date, less dupes, and better comments.
That, and Digg's travesty of articles like "How to increase your adsense dollars" (aka "How to make your e-penis larger").
You are correct that it seems to have breathed new life into Slashdot. To me, Digg is like a Mall, where you don't know anyone and your actions have little consequence, good or bad.
Slashdot is like a pub where everyone knows you, so you find more meaningful conversation. People actually give a damn about Slashdot, even when pointing out the flaws. Actually, if they didn't care, they wouldn't bother. Digg just isn't a "community" and never will be.
I've checked out Digg from time to time, and frankly the quality of the discussion is just not there. I admit I find pithy one-liners amusing, but most of the one-liners there aren't pithy, they're just dumb kneejerk comments. That's not to say we don't have (a lot of) that here, but I'm usually impressed by something that someone writes here on Slashdot at least once a week; chalk it up to the monkey-on-a-typewriter effect if you want, but I haven't seen anything over on Digg that seems to approach even the
The main problem with digg at the moment is the inmature style of writing most of it users has. A quickly written story about a great thing (tm) will get more diggs than the carefully written one that is posted 5 minutes later. This is a huge disadvantage for digg as I have to read the awfully written summaries to find the goodies.
The main problem with digg at the moment is the inmature style of writing most of it users has. A quickly written story about a great thing (tm) will get more diggs than the carefully written one that is posted 5 minutes later. This is a huge disadvantage for digg as I have to read the awfully written summaries to find the goodies.
This is as opposed to slashdot, I suppose, where the well-written story is rejected in favor of the factually incorrect one submitted twelve hours later.
You havent been to digg I hear. Where factually correct is a unheard of concept. And incorrect is the norm for most stories. On slashdot it's atleast rumours from respected sources, on digg it's rumours from blogs.
This is why I was/am a fan of Kuro5hin.org. User-submitted content, but it must (slowly) be voted out from an article queue where it has a chance to be "peer reviewed." It leads to some very well-written and interesting essays/stories/commentaries. But it's clearly not built to handle "breaking news" like Digg &/.
Personally, I don't see the point of censorship at all unless it's spam and other such content. E.g., on my blog I've had a variety of negative comments left by readers about me, the site, my
I haven't spent much time there, but the inanity, ignorance, immaturity and incivility of Digg posters reminds me of the time I quit Slashdot for a few years - before moderation it was fairly puerile.
With moderation, I find/. bearable, but it does suffer from that "attention curve" -- comments posted after attention has decayed from the story will probably never be moderated up. If you want moderation attention, you have to post very early.
Seriously, I don't read Digg for comments unless I'm bored, but I will get current and more news without all the dupes and old hat out of date news that we see on Slashdot every now and then.
But I like Slashdot because most of the times the comments are more interesting than the news articles.
They are two different beasts in that respect... Besides, you don't have to read the comments on Digg, nor you have to read the articles on slashdot;)
Oh come on, you're obviously a long-time Slashdot user. You should know that to get modded up, you need to reply to the first thread that has already been modded up (the "active" or "main" thread in any article's comments). I'm sure plenty of people (including myself) can admit posting in the first thread just to get some attention drawn to your post.
I don't think it much matters. I tried Digg for a week or so and found most of the stories to be incredibly worthless, the discussion to be drole and flooded with either idiots or trolls, and the user interface to be counter-intuitive at best. So at this point, these "accusations" are just confirmation to me that it's not for anyone wanting open and honest discussion.
It's funny you should mention this. As of today, my account is still banned from participating in moderation because I used mod points to mod up controversial comments during the great "mod" controversy of 2000. Or was it 2001? I haven't been able to mod since.
It is also worth noting that Digg has rapidly gained popularity to the point that Slashdot and Digg are now neck and neck [alexa.com] according to Alexa.
Oooh! This article might make digg crumble under the Slashdot effect.
But I can see that digg already has a story [digg.com] about Slashdot talking about digg censorship. So maybe Slashdot will crumble under the digg effect.
Either way, bandwidth is going to be a bummer this afternoon.
I only heard of Digg through posts on Slashdot, and when I first heard about it I was a regular visitor for a few weeks thereafter.
Then one day I realized that there was a large amount of garbage that was being DIGGed (dugg?), making the front page. Many times I've seen interesting headlines only to learn that the actual article doesn't contain much more information than what was in the headline. What really turned me off were the links to stories that could have been presented in a single page, but were
... that digg is the site which claims to be user-driven. Slashdot never has. Slashdot may do slimy moderating behind the scenes, but they don't claim to be pure as the driven snow. Digg does, and digg isn't, and digg got well and truly caught and called out on it, and retaliated, and the story goes on. Evil is one thing, but evil claiming to be good is another kettle of fish altogether.
This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
It is also worth noting that Digg has rapidly gained popularity to the point that Slashdot and Digg are now neck and neck [alexa.com] according to Alexa.
Digg is an interesting site that implements a number of things many long-time Slashdot users have wished Slashdot would do for quite some time. It would be a shame if they are failing to live up to their claim of non-hierarchial editorial control. If this is true, then they deserve to be outed.
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Informative)
The same happened to others.
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole thing pisses me off to no end because I basically got trolled into moderating up one of the "offensive" posts, and I feel like I was caught up in the general moderation bitch-slap that went around at that time. What's worse is I've never actually "trolled" on Slashdot. I've posted some stuff that I thought was funny, and some of those may have been "in opposition" to the prevailing attitudes about the topic (maybe pro-Microsoft or questioning the sanctity of Linux or whatever.) But I've certainly never done any frist ps0ts, obscene ASCII art, or any of the other griefer-type posts.
I like that Slashdot has a strong policy against censoring, and that they use the mod system to hide the griefers. I honestly don't know how they've avoided the casino spam, but whatever they're doing in that regard is also excellent and appreciated.
But I don't mind the occasional off topic discussion, and I don't have a problem replying to ACs. I also find some of the trolls hilarious, and I've even befriended one just because she's an excellent creative writer. So while I'm not a troll myself, I do enjoy the (very occasional) troll. I sometimes wonder if I'm too close to the border for them to restore my mod points.
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
I'm in the same boat. I noticed one day I couldn't mod anymore and wasn't sure why. I think it had to do with modding down somone during a heated BSD vs GNU debate, but this was when the meta-mod system was just came into place so most people were frantically using it to get more mod points.
I can still meta-mod just fine myself and don't really miss the
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow... Am I really that insignificant? I've criticized /. in my posts (most especially the moderation system) before, got modded as troll and modded back up, but I've never been banned and I still get mod points regularly. Although come to think of it though, there was a time when I didn't get mod points for a month. Damn. If I were a guy I'd be suffering from "small penis" syndrome right now (I think -- men are strange and mysterious creatures, so you tell me).
Understand, I'm not saying you're BSing us; I
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
I do and it doesn't strike me as logical that
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This should be fun (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest, a lot of these "F'ing censoring bastards!" posts come from trolls who hate seeing a particularly good troll post get canned. If you're trying to game the system and get called on it, don't be surprised when you lose privleges. That's all I'm saying.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2, Troll)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
The issue is that this sort of thing has never been enforced at all here -- you can walk into an Oracle story and start a flamewar about Communism, Macs, SCO, or any other hot-button issue you can walk away with a Score 5 and nobody will care.
Re:This should be fun (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting because I have had this account for quite some time, and I (used to) Meta-Moderate on a daily basis. I also used my mod points to mod up, and not down. It was very rare indeed for me to mark someone as a troll or similar. Still, I followed a link to a supposed "forbidden" criticism of slashdot and such, and read all the posts therin, and I have not had moderation privilages since.
I have since stopped meta-moderating as much because, well, while I like slashdot, and it is my homepage on Firefox, I am somehow no longer appreciated or something, or maybe not trusted. I don't know.
Its funny really, when people like you and me are the ones for making slashdot what it is. Sure, there are posts about various stories, but what MAKES slashdot are the comments. For example, I have always found this thread: http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129489&
What digg aspires to be is a more "open" version of slashdot, whether it achives that or not we will see. Either way, the competition has been good, I suppose everyone has noticed the quick little changes in how slashdot works now? When this site has not changed much in the last five years?
No matter the outcome, the shakedown on this is bound to be good... It would be nice though, to have mention of the reason users like me are suddenly not allowed to moderate, as opposed to just having it vanish - apparently for "viewing" the wrong threads...
Re:This should be fun (Score:4, Interesting)
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=377, Flamebait=4, Troll=27, Redundant=5, Insightful=98, Interesting=205, Informative=49, Funny=12, Overrated=11, Underrated=63, Total=851.
Seriously, stop and think it over for a moment. The comment has only 2 children with a score >= 1 - 1 that was posted 14 days later (with the moderation totals), and 1 that was posted a day later and is completely unrelated to the thread.Do you believe that normal user-moderators went through and moderated down 266 replies? Not to mention the 426 down-mods of the original comment? Then everybody that up-modded it was then knocked around in m2?
Or do you suppose there is a "bitchslap.pl" script that will moderate a comment (and all replies) to a score of -1 offtopic.
The existance of the bitchslap.pl script is well known. This is an email from CmdrTaco referring to it. This was after a user lost mod privileges [idge.net] by down-modding signal 11.
>"Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda" wrote:
>Pater, this guy was another victim of the too-powerful-bitchslap
>punishing comment posters for bad moderation. Give him back his
>defaultstatus.
>
>Jeff: we were using one script to solve 2 problems: Bots autoposting
>comments to Slashdot (moderating down all comments to -1 and
>setting defaultpoints to -1) and invalid moderation (karma -1 and
>remove all moderator points).
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Perhaps it's time for me to ask for them to be restored again, kind of like asking the President for a pardon, or asking the Don for a favor on this, the day of his daughter's wedding.
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Interesting)
On both
Digg tends to have more interesting "fluffy" or "neat" articles,
I think an interesting comparison would be to study the effects of
I find it rather odd that a score of +5 for a commment (given I have the karma bonus) means only 3 people out of hundreds of thousands of potential readers thought it worth modding up. What happens when 10 times as many people can mod and the mods can go 10 times as high or low? Will a better meritocracy of discussion emerge are will be just be giving the frost pisters and other morons more free reign to be infantile?
In the end, both sites are run by, and largely populated by, a bunch of know-it-all computer geeks, nerds, posers and wannabes, and this ultimately might be their biggest problem.
Now excuse me, I have some socket code to debug.
Re:This should be fun (Score:4, Interesting)
As for digg, I might be a bit hard but I see it as being a cynical attempt to create a for profit marketing forum which is just masquerading as another Slashdot. When everybody gets to moderate all the time, the paid professional moderators with numerous accounts will dominate.
It is interesting to pick up on the early indications of this with buttons for automatic story posting in cnet articles (cnet has to be with out doubt the very worst advertising as tech news sites on the web).
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Informative)
Add another Slashdot victom here. I used to get mod points weekly. After I complained about Michael (and got a post of mine instantly modded from +3 down to -1), I haven't seen them since.
Overall, I find it odd that CmdrTaco complains about Digg censorship, when Slashdot itself has its own glaring examples. For example, check out this thread where every single comment was modded down to -1 [slashdot.org]. Even worse, once when a thread was knocked down to -1, those who mod up anything, *anything* in that thread no longer get mod points. [kuro5hin.org]
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Yup. Haven't had mod points in years.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
> to -1), I haven't seen them since.
You had to do more than just bitch about one of the
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
I love it when people assume that because everyone's doing it - it must be stupid. This is about as rational as saying "if everyone's doing it, it must be great!" Anti-conformity is essentially the same thing as conformity.
Maybe you're just being a troll and get modded accordingly?
"Yeah, you won't catch me tying my shoelaces like the zombie masses!!!"
-stormin
Re:This should be fun (Score:4, Interesting)
While I don't think editors should "bitchslap" threads, it's hard to ignore the fact that every single comment in that thread is in fact off-topic ....
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Well, duh! All of those threads say 'off-topic' after they've been modded down!
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
At the time that thread was posted, there was no place to express these concerns. Taco has recently started attempting to have meta-slashdot stories, and there are always
Besides - it was off topic to the story, but obviously it bore discussing since sooo many people modded it up. That's the point of a user-moderated comment system - the users get to decide what they want to discuss.
~W
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Create acount moderation metrics (Score:2)
Aye. My account was banned years ago from moderation for moderating up a post on slashdot critical of slashdot policies. The same happened to others.
I have been similarly blacklisted from mod points. That doesn't bother me as much as how sneaky the slashdot mafia are about it. If my account went around with a metric that showed I tend to get up and down modded I wouldn't mind. For example, it would be easy to record the average moderation and average deviation for each account from that value (a measure
Re:Create acount moderation metrics (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd love to see more open-ness and an open metric and stuff like that, but as long as there are people like you wandering the byways of cyberspace with this insane feeling of being entitled to every website you land on I'm not really that surprised that the creators retain (and delegate) more authority than would otherwise be optimal.
It's precisely this attitude of being entitled to stuff other people created that makes socialists so annoying.
-stormin
Re:Create acount moderation metrics (Score:2)
[flamebait]It's precisely this attitude of being entitled to stuff other people created that makes socialists so annoying.[/flamebait]
Fatalistic slave (Score:2)
Did you think that Slashdot was conceived by the internet via immaculate conception?
Slashdot is a business. They are paid by advertisers in exchange for my attention. When they lose my attention pulling their silly shit, I go elsewhere. I posted in hope that someone who runs the site would read it and benefit.
It's precisely this attitude of being entitled to stuff other people created that makes socialists so annoying.
What is worse is being a fatalistic slave to the status quo who is inexplicably
Re:Fatalistic slave (Score:2)
Isn't that just a little sanctimonious? Believe it or not businesses do not exist to serve you. A privately held business is private property. The owners can do whatever they want with it. There's no obligation whatsoever for them to treat customers kindly, respond to concerns or any thing else to make the experience more enjoyable for you, me, or anyone else.
Of course if you run a business that way, you run the chance of not maki
Re:Create acount moderation metrics (Score:2)
Re:Create acount moderation metrics (Score:2)
But that lead to folks opening mutiple accounts just to moderate themselves up, and the reviled process known as "karma whoring".. Scan a thread of 0 and 1 rated posts, condense all the good points into your own without attribution, and post at +2.. Guaranteed few more karma.
That said, I had a few hundred karma. Each point representing one positive moderation. Another fellow, Signal 11, had three times mine.
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
I could whine and moan that the admins don't like me because I'm Mormon, or religious, or some of my politcal views - but that would just be random speculation.
In any case, I'm not really a fan of modding myself. If I care enough to mod, I'd rather post. When I have mod points I try to pick a topic I'm reasonably well-informed on but don't really care too much about and use them to be helpful. It really is more of a chore than anythign else, however, and I just do it to be doing my part. So if I don't get mod points as often, I'm not missing them.
-stormin
Moderation, it's like the weather. (Score:2)
I just treat mod points as a kind of weird force of nature, like the weather. Only less predictable and occasionally vindictive. (So, kind of like the we
Re:Moderation, it's like the weather. (Score:2)
But I think that attitude of "this is min
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
That said, Digg's moderation system is far worse. If you DARE to make a critical opinion about Apple, for example, the Apple fanboys there will moderate your comment down to -20 in less than an hour. After that happened to me a few times, I now unde
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Maybe I'm missing a story somewhere, but where did Taco complain about this? I would think that he could care less.
Re:This should be fun (Score:4, Interesting)
What Digg is accused of doing is deleting entire stories along with comments.
What everyone here is talking about is moderation (either how a comment was moderated, or whether they were allowed to moderate). Moderation (in either form) != censorship. Moderation is a tool to make the comments section tractable for casual readers - making the "good" comments readily available, and keeping trolls, flamebait, etc. off to the side. If you want to read all the trash, go ahead, set your threshold at -1. In other words, the comments are not censored, just assigned on score upon which individual users can filter them according to their needs.
Unless I'm very mistaken, I don't think there have been *any* cases on Slashdot of entire stories disappearing along with all their comments. That actually would be censorship of the ideas people expressed, and, as I read the article in question, appears to be the approach Digg takes to stories. To Kevin's credit, he indicates that the system is going to be changed to a more Slashdot-like approach soon. The stories will be "buried", but not deleted, much as modded down comments are here.
Could be real though (Score:2)
Who is to say the stories were not removed simply because they were lame and a lot of people flagged them as such? I've seen a story get deleted, but I had marked it as lame and so it wasn't really unexpected.
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Interesting)
I suggest you check what else you've been up to and think about that.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2, Interesting)
Here is the post [slashdot.org]. Here is a journal entry by sllort [slashdot.org] that does a much better job of describing what happened.
Re:This should be fun (Score:4, Interesting)
The same happened to others.
Yep, including me. I moderated the first Slashdot troll post investigation [slashdot.org] as Interesting because I genuinely found it interesting. (I link to it because I still find it interesting... just don't mod it up!) That was over four years ago. My moderation and meta-moderation abilities were taken away though I've always been I would consider a good Slashdotter. Emailed someone about it, probably CmdrTaco or Pater (maybe both, it's been so long), but no response. Strangely, meta-moderation ability was restored about a year later, but I've still never been able to moderate since then.
Not to say that this is a big deal... it's just Slashdot. But it seems a bit hypocritical to talk about Digg's actions as if they were unethical, when the same thing has happened, and is still happening, here.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Insightful)
A good moderator is someone willing to read through all the 0 rated stuff to find the hidden gems that deserve moderation up, and frankly I'm not willing to waste time reading the drivel at that level, so rather than just spending points on already high rated stuff (I browse slashdot at +4) I just got out of the system altogether. I haven't missed it.
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, I'm one of them.
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, you could make the argument that you shouldn't have been using the moderation system to push your own viewpoint. Although, of course, those with "popular" viewpoints can do it without any fear of retribution, which is a big part of the problem.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
The option I most often want is some sort of "-1 wrong" for an "interesting" post. As in, yes, it's interesting (and hence not overrated on that basis), but it's factually incorrect.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
> I used to get mod points almost once a week, then I started exerting my Republican > viewpoint on Slashdot and I havent seen mod points in over a year and a half.
Yes conservative posts will usually get modded into oblivion, but that isn't the editors being bitchy, that is the users. Keep that karma up by posting ontopic posts that add to the conversation in the non political threads and you can absorb the hits when you speak out against the slashdot hivemind on the political threads.
Go look
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
I'm a libertarian and I get mod points about once a week. Not only that, I'm an anarchist, a conservative, and a fundamentalist, and I don't shy away from expressing those views when it's on topic. Somehow I haven't been hit by any such thing. I really do think it has a lot to do with the amount of reading you do ... I first started getting mod points after I took week long vacations. But I think it's been tinkered with since then.
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2, Interesting)
As much as I like Digg I've wondered if a democratic approach is truly possible without putting at risk their aim of being a tech re
Re:This should be fun (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea of digg is noble and great and in some respects it's definately a success, like the speed that it delivers news stories as they happen compared to slashdot. This makes a difference to me.
The most negative thing I have to say about digg are that the comments section is filled with a bunch of fucking assholes, I call them the digg mob. It's due in a great part to a fucking stupid comment moderation system that doesn't encourage people to think about why they are modding a person up or down because mod points run like honey. The result is the mobb effect, where someone says something contrary to popular opinion and gets buried under a massive amounts of undiggs. I'm at the point where I completely give up reading digg simply because people are such assholes in the comment section.
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Insightful)
This story is fairly interesting to me because I recently started reading Digg and using RSS feeds, etc. though I've been a Slashdot mainstay for a long time. I find digg's practice of hiding the fact the editors filter the frontpage stories and ban site submitters at least a huge turn off if not all out scandalous.
They need to get their shit together or they will die. Slashdot's crowd keeps coming back because they're mostly no b.s. Trust > all.
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people need to be bitchslapped. Personally, I think that the tiny bit of editorial control that /. editors exert is a plus, not a minus.
Fiends help friends? (Score:2)
Unusual.
All replying in the first 45 mins. of the original post.
Is that just a weird coincidence or did /. take a leaf out of the Digg book? :)
Re:Fiends help friends? (Score:2)
If there's some sort of conspiracy, I am not involved. I'd *like* to be involved though :).
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Insulting an editor magically converts my year old comments on UNIX Scripting from Insightful to Troll?
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
How does that old saying go? Oh yeah:
I am sure that your UNIX scripting comments were great. I am also sure that the only person that cared how highly moderated they were is EdwinBoyd. Consider your lesson the metaphysical equivalent of what would happen if you insulted the largest hairy troglodyte on the beach. The difference is that you don't end up with a massive sand-powered wedgie.
Re:So what happens then (Score:2)
Then a whole pile of comments that no one really cares about will become even more obscure. Oh no, the horror! Quite frankly, if it makes even *one* person think before hitting the submit button then the slim chance that I might get bitchslapped is worth the risk.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
If you want something transparent try USENET. I still do, but only because I use a very capable news reader.
What the "whiners" really want is to be an editor. Everyone with a brain realizes that trolls are a problem, they just want to be the one with their finger on the bitchslap button. Fortunately, in this day and age of cheap bandwidth and free software you *can* be the editor of your own blog. Just don't be surprised if it isn't as popular as /.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Yes, you want to define the "good" reasons for bitchslapping, and you want /. to "improve" according to your tastes. That's what a /. "editor" does. It's not like the editors at /. earned their position with their grammatical skills. /. is popular largely because Taco and crew have come up with a way where intelligent folks can have interesting conversations about nerdy topics. The rest of us schmoes simply play by the rules (or go elsewhere). Just don't be surprised if when you go elsewhere that the ed
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Any facts to back up this bold statement ?
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Informative)
Digg.com [netcraft.com]: Rank 1150.
slashdot.org [netcraft.com]: Rank 62.
Alexia confirms it... (Score:2)
That's not what I asked about (Score:2)
The original statement was that Digg users were "led to install Alexa for the sake of adding to the view count for Digg". I want to know what this accusation is based on
Was there a campaign "Help Digg, Install Alexa toolbar" ?
Where they not letting you create an account on digg.com if you haven't had Alexa toolbar install
Re:That's not what I asked about (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Informative)
Google is #1
Yahoo is #2
MySpace is #83
And you are an anonymous idiot
Traffic Comparable in Some Respects (Score:3, Interesting)
That may be, but the site popularity is comparable in at least some metrics. For example, a Digg link can generate more traffic to target sites than even the notorious Slashdot Effect. For example, the big Nmap 4.00 release [insecure.org] was covered by both Slashdot [slashdot.org] and Digg [digg.com]. According to my referrer logs, Slashdot delivered a respectable 4,934 hits, while Digg brought more than twic
Re:Traffic Comparable in Some Respects (Score:2)
It could also be the time differential. Which site posted the link first? (I couldn't see a timestamp on the Digg story, just a date.)
If there's an overlap of readership and the story was posted on one site a couple of hours before the other, it would certainly make a better explanation, no? (After all, if you clicked on the Digg link, then a couple of hours later it showed up on
Considering that I
Re:Traffic Comparable in Some Respects (Score:2)
Well, the most common thing I hear from digg people who post here is "digg had this (N) days ago!". So maybe a lot of people read both and only clicked through when they saw it on digg first.
Another explanation, and one likely to get me flamed (or modded flame) is that the slashdot crowd is generally more technically competent (or maybe I should say "technically focused"; the digg crowd seems to have a broader base) and so accessed the nmap si
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
I still find a story or two that is interesting, but mainly I just try to mod up the trash just to prove how fucked up and bias it is.
Digg is already old news, earning perhaps a footnote in Wikipedia someday.
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Insightful)
That, and Digg's travesty of articles like "How to increase your adsense dollars" (aka "How to make your e-penis larger").
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is like a pub where everyone knows you, so you find more meaningful conversation. People actually give a damn about Slashdot, even when pointing out the flaws. Actually, if they didn't care, they wouldn't bother. Digg just isn't a "community" and never will be.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Oh yeah? Step outside and say that!
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
That's not to say we don't have (a lot of) that here, but I'm usually impressed by something that someone writes here on Slashdot at least once a week; chalk it up to the monkey-on-a-typewriter effect if you want, but I haven't seen anything over on Digg that seems to approach even the
Re:This should be fun (Score:5, Interesting)
And I'm not even a native english-speaker.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
This is as opposed to slashdot, I suppose, where the well-written story is rejected in favor of the factually incorrect one submitted twelve hours later.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I don't see the point of censorship at all unless it's spam and other such content. E.g., on my blog I've had a variety of negative comments left by readers about me, the site, my
Digg reminds me of pre-moderation Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
With moderation, I find /. bearable, but it does suffer from that "attention curve" -- comments posted after attention has decayed from the story will probably never be moderated up. If you want moderation attention, you have to post very early.
Re:Digg for up to day news, /. for comments (Score:2)
But I like Slashdot because most of the times the comments are more interesting than the news articles.
They are two different beasts in that respect... Besides, you don't have to read the comments on Digg, nor you have to read the articles on slashdot
Re:Digg reminds me of pre-moderation Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Just to be safe.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Oooh! This article might make digg crumble under the Slashdot effect.
But I can see that digg already has a story [digg.com] about Slashdot talking about digg censorship. So maybe Slashdot will crumble under the digg effect.
Either way, bandwidth is going to be a bummer this afternoon.
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Then one day I realized that there was a large amount of garbage that was being DIGGed (dugg?), making the front page. Many times I've seen interesting headlines only to learn that the actual article doesn't contain much more information than what was in the headline. What really turned me off were the links to stories that could have been presented in a single page, but were
Also don't forget ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)
Re:This should be fun (Score:2)