Irony and my thoughts on Slashdot

Journal stepson's Journal: Irony and my thoughts on Slashdot 2

Journal by stepson on Friday January 11, 2002 @01:11PM

If you're a regular slashdot reader, you probably fall into a few catagories. You probably like Linux, and possibly use it. Or you at least like the idea of a free operating system. Maybe you're a fan of Open Source Software, and the freedoms it brings. You probably aren't a fan of Big Business and Proprietary Software. Maybe you aren't aware of the
Dangers. But I digress. Today I'd like to talk about hypocracy in the slashdot community.

Lets talk about Skylarov, DeCSS, and the DMCA. No one likes access controls, everyone wants to view their DVDs in their free OS, and people don't want corporations making decisions for them. The slashdot editors have been vocal about this as well, I count over 100 stories on /. alone about DeCSS, and probably just as many if not more on the DMCA. I'd say this counts as considerable support for the "little guy" who breaks the encryption schemes, and against those who try to enforce it.

Now, who here doesn't love getting that ever elusive "First Post" on a slashdot story. C'mon, we all know the joy in getting that #1 comment, or more recently, the top comment when you sort by "Newest First". And who hasn't gotten a chuckle from our friends, the Slashdot Trolls, or crap flooders and the like? Its all in good fun, right? Well, with the recent programming additions to Slash, the programmers and Slashdot editors, are trying to take away our basic right to post Goaty, and generally, Troll in general.

Well, whatever right? Its their site, we're just the users, so who cares how they run it right? Well, think about it for a minute. Don't you find it just a little ironic, that while they'll support people circumventing legal acccess control methods (argue the ethicality of it all you'd like, its still 'legal'), they add their very own to Slashdot? Right now, click on a story on Slashdot, hit reply, type in something witty like "CmdrTaco blows goats!" or "First Post!" and hit Submit.

Woah! Whats this? "Slow Down Cowboy!" Isn't this basically a form of access control? Doesn't this limit some of what you can do here on Slashdot? Ok, so first posts are kind of lame, and worthless, but if thats what you want to do, who are we to try and stop you? Maybe you like crap-flooding. Maybe you just get a kick out of the *BSD is Dying posts. Who cares! My point is, the slashdot editors put the same kind of access controls on you that the movie industry tries to put on DVDs.

Don't they realize we'll just get around it? I still see "first posts" and goatse.cx links all the time. Sure they're harder. Sure its not as easy to crap-flood as it once was. But damnit, if you tell us we can't do something, you can be damn sure we're going to try and get around it. We'll wait the 2 minutes after hitting reply. We'll redirect goatse.cx through yahoo. We'll find a new ISP company after you've banned the IPs from the last 3. Go ahead guys, whip out your Perl books and try to keep us from doing what we love, and we'll come up with even more ways around it.

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