Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: One of those weeks...
I make mistakes. I'm only human. But i really hate when the feedback mechanism breaks down. And it really is depressing getting 100 messages pop into your box telling you how much you suck for a mistake that was totally honest.
Usually i'm pretty good at letting the water roll off my back when people are mean in email. But the last few weeks has seen my inbox take a turn for the viscious. I'm used to hate mail. I'm used to name calling. But lately it just seems like it's getting worse. Or maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to it.
There are a handful of things that people just flat out don't understand about what we do... the main one is the difference between reading "The Bin" and "The Homepage". On a typical day I might read a few hundred story submissions. I might read another hundred pages that are potentially Slashdot material. And during a typical daddy pants shift, I might post a half a dozen.
This occurs day after day. I might delete a submission that 12 hours later is posted by another editor (maybe there is less to choose from at 11pm than there was at 11am... or maybe a better URL came along to a story that was rejected earlier).
So I kind of see the Slashdot Index differently than others. Some days, like when I'm wearing the pants I'm looking at every story very closely. I concern myself with timing, mix, spelling, quality. Other days the stories aren't mine. I see them differently: I see a story i left in the bin with a note saying "Maybe later?" or a story i rejected because it had a crappy URL. I see several stories I've never seen before. I enjoy those the most.
The problem is that over 8 years of submissions, my posts, and other people's posts start blurring together. I've posted over 10,000 stories. I've rejected hundreds of thousands of submissions. Sometimes I'm simply not going to remember a story from 3 days ago posted by someone else. It's not that I didn't read it- it's that I might have read it 30 times in different places.
There are technical solutions that go a long ways... we have a bunch of keyword searching things in the back end that alerts me if a story with similiar words came up in the last week. But that works spottily at best. The real fall back is the fact that most stories are posted 30 minutes early and screened before subscribers. And this works GREAT. Readers let me know about typos or URL problems in advance. Many articles get fixed, updated, and occasionally deleted during this window. Which unfortunately doesn't work if my SMTP server decides to make me wait 45 minutes for my mail. Stupid protocol. I posted a story for 15:14 GMT. At 15:36 I get a ping saying I have mail. I check the window and see dozens of emails telling me, in increasing hostility, about my error. Those emails were sent as early as 15:00. Bah.
We've discussed using IM and such for disseminating time critical information, but the real issue is GETTING the information. By using email, we raise the bar high enough that people don't arbitrarily spam it. If we put a text field right next to the index, we get so much junk it becomes a meaningless stream of worthless data. To much to keep track of. (Yes, we tried). Email works well for this purpose most of the time since it requires at least a tiny bit more effort than filling in a text field and clicking a button. I think it's a psychological thing- a web form is disposable.. and e-mail is more tangible.
And then the conspiracy theories: Submittor X is paying me to post his stories. Submittor Y is being rejected because I hate him. Advertiser Z gets all their stuff submitted because they are paying us Google is paying me to post their stuff. Yesterday a guy yelled at me for rejecting all his Google stories angry that I'm not posting enough about it.
The truth is less interesting- some guys know how to write good submissions so they get picked a lot. Some advertisers create original content that we find appealing. Since we reject 98% or more of all submissions, so the odds that YOUR submission just got rejected are pretty good. And Google is currently a very hot topic. Just like SCO was a few years ago, and KDE/GNOME was a few years before that. And when each of those stories were at their respective zenithseseses, I got hatemail for posting to much and not enough of those too. It's lose lose sometimes.
So anyway, i'm not in the happiest mood lately. The other reason is that yesterday my iMac shit itself. This particular computer is a normally just a dumb terminal containing little more than mail, web browser, and games, so normally this would be no big deal. Unfortunately i've been working for several weeks now to digitize my families home movies from the 80s, and edit them down as a christmas present for my parents.
The actual digitizing and editing has gone relatively smoothly. But this work in the last few weeks has created 80+ gigs of data that I obviously haven't backed up yet.
Now fortunately the hard drive is OK and it appears that only the operating system blew up. OS X won't let me reinstall tho, so I'm going to have to reformat. So now this machine is mounted as a firewire drive and i'm trying to copy everything over. The problem now is that it takes iDVD like 12 hours of master a DVD... and Christmas is this weekend... so I need to get all 3 DVDs finished, mastered, and copies burnt for relatives. I had plenty of time until my video editing machine needed to barf!
Anyway... it's been a long couple of weeks for me. I'm looking forward to a bit of a holiday break. Maybe it will bring a little more civility to my inbox.
