MaxGrant's Journal: Outta Here

I'm through here. What finally made me stop and say "Enough!" was neither the trolls nor the Jon Katz. It was posting a quick five-word reply to a comment and being told to SLOW DOWN COWBOY because apparently typing fast leads to excessive trolling. I mean, I can type 95 words a minute. I am not waiting sixty seconds to post a one-liner just because someone mistakenly believes it will prevent trolling. Not only that, but it was a cached page and my reply was gone when I tried to return to it. It was at that point I said, Fuck that.

I have lost patience with being nannied by a software program attempting to control people's behavior. It's a technological solution to a human problem. Sure there are assholes on /.. Sure they post stupid shit. But as I've seen amply demonstrated the lameness filter, while readily blocking my attempts to use an ellipsis (a valid punctuation mark), will on more than a few occasions let an ascii rendering of a gaping asshole right on past. Displaying the destination of links in comments has been hacked. And the trolls just troll on despite all that. I don't know what it accomplishes except getting me really irate, and the signal-to-noise ratio continues to modulate for the worse here.

I'm not vain enough to think anyone will care. I'm not posting this in a comment or in my sig or anywhere, but just as an FYI if someone comes looking for me. You no longer need to tolerate it either. There are plenty of weblogs out there and the user community of Slashdot that made it so interesting three years ago has clearly moved on to other places anyway. Captain Burrito will continue to mangle perl scripts in a futile effort to fight trolls and crapflooders, and drive away well-behaved and polite users in droves. Whatever. My karma peaked at 50 anyway, and for some reason that was the only thing left after all the really interesting arguments petered out, and now that that goal has been reached I'm retiring. I'm not opening a new account, I'm not screwing around anonymously. I've not opened this site for over a week, and I just had some free time to write my farewell to this anonymous community. And my last word posted to slashdot will be . . . whatever