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Journal Dark Lord Seth's Journal: Slashdot Fuckups 16

Journal by Dark Lord Seth

Ah yes, Slashdot. Been here for a year or two. Don't really keep track to be honest with you people, considering the exact date isn't really that important unless you're really anal about a time-of-joining based hierachy. In which case, UIDs would be a better indicator of 'status' to start with, but I digress. This is nothing about the Slashdot pecking order but more about the current state of Slashdot

You see, back in those days things were different, to say the least. Sure, people flamed the living hell out of eachother, MS bashing was as common as always and the majority of people here worshipped their own nice little pantheon of OSS gods and goddesses. Though I'm not quite sure on the goddesses part, mind you. Hell, I'm talking about a pre-GNAA time, back when trolling consisted largely of posting poorly drawn ASCII penises reading "CmdrTaco was here" or something along the lines of that. Sure, Slashdot has it's share of 'oopsies' but that was understandable. I mean, it had 1000+ replies on ANY topic back then. 2500+ wasn't too uncommon and the number of posts marked 4+ sometimes reached in the 250 area, pretty much what nowadays is the total amount of posts at -1+...

But things were pretty good back then. Busy as always, different trolls ( Love you people btw ), massive amounts of dupes by the editors and no subscriptions. People were happy; after all, it's a free service and none of us were paying anything for it. What can be expected of something free which isn't loaded with ads, hmm? Sure, the occasional oopsies kept things interesting between all the articles. We all laughed at Tacos typos and the obligatory funny CBN option in random clever polls. Back then it was decent for a free, uncommercial service.

Today however, I think we can be a tad bit more critical of things. Slashdot started a suibscription system, so the usual argument of "But it's free!" can no longer be applied to the quality of this site. Oh, you're still free to join up and reg but let's face it; the subscribers to Slashdot end up with the same shit the rest of us non-paying people have to deal with. Oh, they don't get ads, true, but neither do I, thanks to Mozilla. Oh sure, subscribers get a few worthless extras thrown in, but it's not hard to imagine anyone actually gives a flying fuck about silly little things like being able to have more then 200 friends or searching your own post history.

But that's not the main thing I'm going to bitch about right now, no. I don't pay, never will pay either, that's my solution to this issue. No, the problem is the ads lately. Have you seen them? There are a few nice ads here, here and here. Ahh, but they don't look like ads, nooo... They are supposed to look like articles! It's fascinating, both us non-subscribers and subscribers have to deal with them. You're reading an article and something just doesn't seem right. It's too aimed at geeks, too professionally written. It smells of a PR stunt, it smells of a person at marketing who found Slashdot. And then you realize it, you're just reading a dumb ad disguised as another poor article. It's like CNN accepting news stories about how great product X is, from the creator of product X. Granted, CNN is ran by professional editors who actually read their own shit.

But there's more: What the fuck is up with the "Related Links" bit? Do the Slashdot people raelly think we're going to storm some OSTG sellout online store en masse? Or is this just some stupid idea that some halfwit at OSTG HQ got wedged up their ass after reading Forbes? Also, why do Slashdot people want to affiliate themselves with OSTG, which hosts great sites like ITManagersJournal.com ( Same shit as Slashdot, just with random buzzwords and more ads ) and Sourceforge ( Develop cheaper, outsource with Sourceforge! )? Shame really. I'd continue bitching but I'm done for now. Just saw the movie "Troy" and I needed to bitch for a few minutes. Sorry about that... Has anyone actually managed to read this far without stabbing themselves in the eyes? Does anyone read this shit to start with?

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  • I post. I post a lot. It's nice to be able to see back 50 posts. But that wouldn't be necessary if I didn't have this stupid 50-posts-a-day limit....

    • But is it worth the money and the realization that you're propagating an otherwise doomed product? Even "Nearly free" is too expensive for a product when the quality is poor enough...

      • Actually, I'm not sure it's "otherwise doomed". For instance, I plan on forking off a copy of the code for my new political party webpage (or, actually, it's one of several competing equally free products that I'm looking at- but I like the user interface with some tweaks, better than some others). And, I confess I didn't pay for my subscription- it was a gift for Talk Like a Pirate Day.

        • Well, still... The constant 503's, the broken moderating system, the "Nothing to see here, move along" syndrome new articles are suffering... Like I said before, even free can be too expensive if the quality of the product is low enough. Then again, PHPNuke and other CMSs are downright atrocious regarding security and all that. Having a poorly designed but reasonably secure solution might be preferable to a decently designed but insecure solution, especially if you're going to try something like politics w

          • I agree- after today especially....503 errors are getting to me today. It's the user friendliness I'm after- I LIKE Slashcode's user interface. Beyond that, I'd be adding my own security (or lack thereof) to anything I try anyway- but a large part of that user interface is the moderation system and the flame control system, both of which need tweaking but ARE working adequately for a political system.
  • Troy? Never heard of it.

    Yeah, I read yr journal. And I read this here "slashdot." I karma whored. I even got a print out of my page saying "Karma:50" so when I slid down to -1 I could say "I used to be the top of the heap!"- 6/24/02 is the date on the print out, BTW.

    And you know what? This is nothing new. They have been trying to squeeze all the fun out of /. over the years. After a while, they were bound to do a good job of it.
    The final cut? my/amigos is cut at 5 postings, instead of 10.

    This plac

    • Indeed.

      Making something like this anew shouldn't be that hard, initially. But most people around here know about the terrible unusability of modern web-based CMSs. PHPNuke for example, is about as secure as WinXP Pro with no service packs or updates on an AOL connection. Then again, most CMSs overdo it and try not only to manage content, but also to make it, bend it, brighten it and make a cup of coffee in the process as well...

      Troy is some silly Brad Pitt movie. Basically, it's Greek history mixed w

  • I didn't poke myself in the eye, but I did poke myself in the gums. Gotta do something while I get the dinner unstuck from the damn braces.
  • I don't pay to remove the ads or any of those other features, although, they are nice. I pay because I want to support a website that I enjoy reading.

    • So then I can assume you are not bothered with the cheap sellout articles? The horrible editing done by the current editors? The atrocious levels of bias?

      I mean, if you like it, more power to you, but... Slashdot can hardly be considered a quality product. The sole redeeming factor for me is the fact that it is free.

  • I would have replied to your entry on moderation but I hadn't seen you before that. Anyway, since I have no other place to put this, I'll put it here.

    M1 has some serious fundamental flaws. First of all, editors have unrestricted moderation power. They have unlimited moderator points. Secondly, someone that is your foe may not actually change his relation with you. This means that you don't know who this foe is. The result is a moderator who makes use of the overrated modifier. Your posts get modded down
    • The situation is even worse. Editors have power to change your account at will.
      Right now I have 3 accounts "broken by editors".

      1) No Mod points. For some 2 years. Following guidelines thoroughly.
      2) AC posts banned for "too many troll posts". Or more like uncomfortable political comments.
      3) Karma: Terrible, starting post level -1. When I last counted the karma from posts, the account was somewhere around Karma: +10.

      • Methinks you have been bitchslapped [sourceforge.net].

        Notice how they simply use raw SQL queries to bypass modding and everything alike, just to fuck you over and make it so no one is likely to read whatever you said. Bastards.

        • I can't blame them for screwing up the 3rd account. That one was intended to be a very evil troll... The intention was to get it to Excellent karma with not a single post deserving positive moderation - all posts would be either misinforming, clueless (the least harmful - my fantasies COULD be right) or in a tricky way wrong, but looking viable. I got about 3 or 4 +5's on complete bullshit before someone noticed a journal entry where I admitted the intent and the account got nuked. A Liar Karma Whore...

          Som

  • Leave it up to Slashdot to prove themselves even more incapable then thought possible:

    Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, anonymous comment posting has temporarily been disabled. You can still login to post. However, if bad posting continues from your IP or Subnet that privilege could be revoked as well. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner or login and improve your posting . If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfa

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