FortKnox's Journal: You PAY to be an EMPLOYEE!

Did you read Taco's latest JE? If you pay to be a subscriber, you get to see stories earlier, so you can warn them of typos and dupes. That's right folks, you pay them and they'll let you do part of their job.

I'm just waiting until Taco says, "I have a minor in sales".

Anywho, I'm hardly able to be on during the day. New assignment, new rigid internet policy. Sorry folks, but I'll have to catch up when I get home.

well

[sulli]

you don't have to if you don't want to.

The Biggest Benefit

[Flamesplash]

to me would be seeing sites before they get. /.d yay!

and as a previous comment said, you don't have to help out the /. crew if you don't want to.

Re:The Biggest Benefit

[Blackneto]

it would be cheaper to read the articles on Fark, Ars Technica or Extreme Tech a week earlier

This so sounded like..

[Xerithane]

an In Soviet Russia joke. I couldn't believe it wasn't, then read it, and it suddenly made sense.

I'm glad that Taco is actually a marketing guy though, it makes much more sense why slashcode sucked so bad when he wrote it.

So What?

[dthable]

After reading the Taco JE, it still doesn't solve anything. First, critical news items are posted to the main page ASAP. It won't matter if I pay to read the comments because the world gets to see them at the same time. Second, the reason I gathered for today's blunder was Taco had a meeting. (Join the club). So even if I did get VIP access to the story, no one at /. would have been around to see any messages I would send or even fix the problem.

I saw an intresting post in the dupes comments. Someone asked why not scan the story links and warn if story links are pointing to the same URL. It's a bit more complex than that, but I'm sure the clever /. coders could come up with a better form of story queue management. A way to see stories with similar keywords? How about a two step process where someone grooms the queue and then others post from the queue? That would force someone to look at things right away.

How's the new assignment? When I was a consultant, I always started to panic when I got a new assignment. You never know how things are going to go.

Re:So What?

[schlach]

Yeah, it's even better that you're (probably) not able to post your ideas to Taco's journal, since he restricted it to 'Friends' and 'Friends of Friends'. Taking a quick peek at his Friends list... hmm, just the other editors. Taking a quick look at their Friends lists reveals... the same people! If it weren't for krow, pudge, and wunderhorn1(?), there wouldn't be more than 15 people that could post to his journal... sigh.

One step forward, three steps back. I would suggest emailing him. He constantly complains about his email volume, but since that's the only way he wants to communicate, what are you gonna do?

Wish I cared as much as I did even a month ago... sigh.

Re:So What?

[dthable]

Ok...I'm not the only one then. I thought that I was going crazy because I coudln't post a message in Taco's journal. I remember reading some time ago that he was going to enable comments so we could give hime suggestions.

I really don't have a problem with the recent /. events, but suggesting that I pay for helping solve the problems is insane. If /. was terminated tomorrow, I don't know that the world would stop. We still have newsgroups and private blogs. Like FortKnox is saying, why should we accept the fact that we can pay to check the work of a bunch of editors? If that's the case, I want the power to change the stories and groom the queues myself.

Re:So What?

[Cy Guy]

I want the power to change the stories and groom the queues myself.

Well, then you might want to Check out PLASTIC [plastic.com] where anyone with 50 karma gets that "privilege" whether they are a paying customer (the website is free but there is a pay-only POP email service regular users are encouraged to sign up for) or not.

Although its sometimes hard to decide whether having the ability to comment, correct, and vote on the queue is all its cracked up to be, since when your suggestion is ignored, its kinda' frustrating. But you do get karma (there is no cap on PLASTIC) if you make a meaningful contribution to a submission (like adding a useful link, or coming up with a catchy headline) and it's used.

I would think that SlashDot will quickly find having a couple hundred/thousand eyebals contributing corrections to stories will lose its appeal rather quickly when the editors email gets SlashDotted every time there is an error or dupe. Or they will just ignore the suggestions which will really frustrate their paying employees who went to trouble of submitting the correction.

Better than getting rid of dupes for me tho, would be making all of the "First Post'ers" pay for the privilege.

It would be nice...

[krugdm]

...if they could just delete the dupe and code a way to "fold" whatever comments had been posted to the dupe into the original story.

Unfortunately, I don't know Perl, so "submit a patch" replies are lost on me.

"Learn Perl" replies, however, may be taken to heart.

I don't think that the big deal was to find dupes.

[bmetzler]

That was just a little side issue.

The big issue was a chance to see the stories and click the links before they are slashdotted.

Start seeing the glass half full people.

Thanks,
Brent