Last Chance to See! The final opportunity to discuss this before the lights go out

The Original Accept No Substitutes!

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I'm hoping here to dispose of some misconceptions and answer a few questions I've seen asked and been asked. I will probably cause a whole new set of questions and a new set of misconceptions, here. Such is life. I should preface this by saying that I speak only for myself--others have different reasons and different desires, and they can speak with their own voice.

Why do you hate Slashdot?

I don't hate Slashdot. I've said it before, I love the community. If I thought this would destroy Slashdot, I wouldn't have started it.

Then why boycott Slashdot?

First, it's not a boycott. A boycott implies a continued non-use of services until a goal or demand is met. This is, as I called it, a "blackout" of a temporary (and short) duration.

I felt that the best way to demonstrate the importance of comment posters was to become part of the "other 97%".

82% read 10 or fewer pages a day. 15% read 30 or less. 3% read more than 30 a day.

That 97%, while providing page views and eyeballs, mostly do not contribute to the site. The other 3% are the ones that do "cost" more in DB and bandwidth resources, but they are also the ones that provide 99% of the content here. That content gets spidered by Google (that leads to search engine hits), builds a stolid community (that leads to press attention), and feeds the churning machine of story submitters and review writers building and bringing more comments and visitors daily.

But I (income) - C (costs) = P (profits)...

If you believe you can reduce a socio-economic dynamic such as Slashdot into a simple profit and loss statement, there are hundreds of surviving dotcoms who would pay big money to see that equation.

If it were that simple, Slashdot could remove comments altogether and be more profitable. The problem with that scenario is that Slashdot would fade away soon after.

How do you know that?

I don't. It's my contention that is the case. That's part of what I wish to show with the blackout.

So how will you know if you succeed? What is your standard of "I won!"?

That's a hard question. I will never know what the internals of Slashdot are doing or thinking. They could be printing out my amateurish screeds and using them as toilet paper.

If it is never said again that "half the visitors don't care" about comments, that would be a win. The fact that half of the visitors to Slashdot don't click-through to read comments is irrelevant--without those comments, Slashdot wouldn't have that other 50% visiting at all.

Mostly, I will see if the attitude I perceived in the past continues into the future. If so, I'll know that my small protest was lame and ineffectual. If it seems to have generated some positive attitude changes, I'll consider it a win.

I guess you think Malda hates comment posters?

No. Malda and the other "editors" read and reply to comments quite often, considering their busy schedules. They obviously care about them: do they fully appreciate their value, however? The impression I get is that the comment sections are a gift bestowed upon the laity from the High Priests of Slash. My contention is that the reverse is more true.

However, sometimes I wonder.

Frankly we doubt that 3% will really pay us at all. Notice the venom posted in this discussion: this comes largely from that very 3%. Its ironic that those who profess to hate us the most also load the most pages ;)

You hate Malda, huh?

No. I don't know him. The handful of emails I've traded with him over the years have been cordial.

I don't like their appropriation of the title of "editor" for themselves, I admit freely. That is why I usually scare-quote "editor" when speaking of the Slashdot team. If they are editors, I'm a duck.

So you want Malda to be filtered through a PR zombie?

No. I quite enjoy being talked to like a regular person and not a consumer. It is refreshing.

The flip side to that coin is, if you're going to be honest in your feelings, don't be surprised to find your feelings challenged. Copping a wounded attitude because everybody doesn't agree with you is kind of silly.

Do you just want free subscriptions to Slashdot?

No thanks, I have a subscription already.

Then are you looking for an apology?

The mental image I have of Malda doesn't allow for him to apologize. At least, not a real one--"I'm sorry you're such a dork. Get over yourself! There, I apologized!"

In addition, I'm not an apology-type guy. Some people may have been happy that Bill Clinton apologized for slavery, but I think it's stupid. Words are important, but apologies are words without meaning.

Really, this isn't about assigning blame--it's about fixing a problem. I believe that the Slashdot crew have a misplaced notion of the importance and true cost of comments. They don't hate or dislike them, they simply misunderstand their purpose.

I had a similar experience on E2--I did a writeup for a node that I happened across. I did not go through the "Writing a perfect node" procedure--I saw a hole and filled it. For my efforts, one of the E2 "editors" lambasted me for not jumping through their hoops. I responded that to jump on the heads of casual noders is probably not a good plan. They (casual noders) are not the bulk of the E2 community, but they are an important part of the "ecosystem" there. He responded with a "love it or leave it" statement.

There is a choice to be made--is the core community important or not? If not, then spare us the trolls, flooders and PWPs and dump the comments. If so, then walk and talk like you know it.

Boy, your ego is sensitive.

Perhaps. We can talk about my ego some other time, though. That is (at best) a side issue.

If you don't like it, why don't you just leave? Or start your own community?

The same reason I don't leave the US to start another country if I don't like what's going on here--it's easier to try to change the system than to start anew (most of the time).

And who's to say that another community won't gain my audience, rather than Slashdot? Perhaps, if Slashdot continues on its path and doesn't improve relations to its community, I will go. And perhaps others will as well. Not in a bunch, mind you, but in dribs and drabs, until only the trolls and crapflooders are left. As more people feel marginalized, they will contribute less and less, feeling that since "half the visitors don't care", they may as well not give their opinions or ideas a voice.

At that point, Slash will have excellent triggers for detecting crapflooders and bots, scripts and lamers; and somebody will take that and use it to build a more stable (and more attuned) community.

I'd rather that not happen, myself.

So you maintain that comments and comment posters have value? Why don't you go sell it, then?

Corn has great value. But not to another corn farmer. The comments are a product of the value-producing community. I suppose you could equate the community with the land, and comments as the crop. It's a bit of a weak analogy, but let's run with it.

The land is filled with potential value--but in and of itself, it is worth little. The comment community, which makes up the heart of Slashdot, isn't worth much if they aren't producing. What they produce, you can't shop around to other web sites--they have their own land and corn stalks already, thank you.

(I thought about extending the analogy to the community equating to corn farmers, but then I figured somebody would say, "But corn farmers wear overalls and drive tractors! Your analogy stinks!", or something equally pointless. So I'll just leave my pointless analogy where it stands.)

I still don't get it. Why are you doing this, and what do you want?

I've done my best to explain. Read what I've written again and then once more. If you still don't get my position, just ignore me. If you do get it and disagree, don't participate. If you get it and agree, remember to stop posting on Apr. 21-27th. Don't post comments, don't submit stories; just visit the front page for the links. Become as the other 97-percentile.

And, if you send me $1000 via PayPal today, I'll send you a real prayer cloth that I used to ritually clean the sacred scrotum. Put your hands on the screen, and let me heal you! Hallelujah!

I still think you're an idiot.

Enjoy yourself.

Oh, and fuck you, you prick.

Knock yourself out.

vi or emacs?

Emacs, you peasant.

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Last Chance to See! The final opportunity to discuss this before the lights go out

The Original Accept No Substitutes!

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Last Chance to See! The final opportunity to discuss this before the lights go out

Questions? There are answers here!

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Saved for posterity, from a discussion about the new subscription system:

... while I don't mean to dismiss the value of comment posters, the percentage of readers that read comments is small. Yes comments draw readers, and keep them coming back. But half of readers don't care! An accepted story submission provides a benefit to hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers. A Score:3 comment is read by 1/50th of that. So if we decide that an accepted story submission is worth 1000 page views, you would need to post perhaps 50 Score:3 comments to affect the same number of people :)

A statistic in the hand of the ignorant is more dangerous than a gun in the hand of a child. Malda's dismissal of the importance of comments reflects on the inability of Slashdot's "editors" to understand the way communities work.

For the record, my feelings on the Slashdot Subscription Embroglio rests firmly in the uninterested. I have almost zero opinion on the final outcome of subscriptions. I love Slashdot, and will probably subscribe at some point to support the site, but the details are dull (to me).

Says Rob Malda, "... while I don't mean to dismiss the value of comment posters, the percentage of readers that read comments is small. Yes comments draw readers, and keep them coming back. But half of readers don't care!" In that case, Slashdot would be much better served by dumping the flaky and irritating overhead of a DB server and filling the pipe with a longer "Favorites" list--which, essentially, is what Slashdot is once you strip away the comments and comment posters. This is where a meaningless SQL query puts dangerous statistics in the hand of the ignorant. If Malda thinks that he can divine real knowledge from a SELECT query, he is sadly mistaken. While I do not doubt the validity of the numbers, I seriously doubt the validity of his extrapolation of the data. The ebb and flow of a community cannot be read from the tea leaves of an Apache log file.

This easy dismissal of the value of the only providers of interesting and insightful content on Slashdot is offensive. Thus, I propose a small revolt. The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout.

T(H)GSB will be during the week of April 21 through April 27. Easy to remember, the full moon in April falls on the 27th. During that time, I will not be posting, nor will I click through to read the comments from the home page. I will become as Malda's idea of the typical Slashdot reader. I will provide no new content (neither comments, nor story submissions--although I'm not much of a story submitter).

During that week, I'd like to see if Malda sees Slashdot become a better place, or if it becomes the Hallowed Shrine of Troll. I'd like for the logs to be revisited and new queries run. And, I'd like for the "editors" to really see what the true value of Slashdot is--not the sum of click-throughs and page-views, but the sharing of knowledge and dissemination of information; the passing of experience from the more to the less.

This is where the (Hopefully) comes in. This is only meaningful if enough free content-providers (i.e., comment posters) agree to go along and participate. If there is only me and a handful of others who cease normal activities during that week, it will be pretty meaningless. Barely a dent will be made, and Malda and the other "editors" will never realize the incredible value they receive from comment posters.

To spread the word, I'm changing my sig to link to this journal entry. If you would like to help, you can link to this journal from your own sig, or you can simply resolve to enter into a voluntary one-week blackout. Pass the word. This will only work if a goodly number of comment posters participate.

To summarize, if you wish to participate, during the week of April 21 through April 27

• Do not click through from the home page to the comment page
• Do not post any comments to stories
• Do not submit new stories

A useful HTML link to this journal entry (69 characters, should fit in most sigs). You'll probably have to unfungle it after the lameness filter gets through with it:

<a href="http://slashdot.org/~rho/journal/5872">T(H)GSB</a> Apr 21-27

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Last Chance to See! The final opportunity to discuss this before the lights go out

Questions? There are answers here!

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I can't abide thick headed people.

I can understand being unwilling to admit that you're wrong, especially when I'm so unfriendly, but at some point you have to back up and admit that you're starting to sound a bit stupid.

That might be an interesting experiment: fight two different battles, one rudely, one friendly. See if you really can catch more flies with honey.

Apparently, I have a burr in my saddle.

I have no explaination. I've just been really intolerant of insipid stupidity lately, and Slashdot seems to be breeding the lame and the retarded.

Do they even teach in the schools anymore, or is it nothing more than grown-up daycare?

I'll just go right ahead and piss directly in the eye of my fellow nerds.

You're wrong, and you're too stubborn to admit it.

We are living in a different time now. That old, creaky 386 has been replaced with a whizzy new Pentium IV. The $1,200 I paid for 32MB of RAM (and was happy to do it at that time) is now the minimum allowable in a Casio watch. That pokey old 20MB drive has been replaced with 60 gig speed demons.

We are no longer slaves to hardware limitations!

But we are still held in bondage to our old ideas of how a computer should work, based on our old assumptions of how fragile and limited they are. We toil under the delusion that we are some kind of vaulted priesthood; an Order of Nerds from whom all blessings should flow. We have the same secret handshakes of the Masons and a Bill Gates (or Richard Stallman, if you prefer) Secret Decoder Ring. We look down on our fellow humans as lesser beings because they have not attained the priestly learning that we have.

And it's killing that which we love so much.

Thank goodness for boobies and blood! Without those two, the pervasive Internet would probably never exist. If people couldn't get nudie pictures and news, Playboy and Peter Jennings from the Internet, they'd probably chuck the computer out the window like a failed hobby.

The computer, its acceptance and its power, is lessened because of this complexity. There are untapped sources of new ideas out there, but the twin handicaps of difficulty and dickheads prevent these new sources of knowledge from ever being tapped: difficulty in using the computer, and dickheads who refuse to admit there's a problem.

"But," I hear you cry, "a computer is a complex machine! It must require a certain level of knowledge to operate!" I'm not so sure that's the case. Surely the ability to read is a prerequisite! Well, since I've seen pre-literate kids play with a computer, I'm not conviced that's neccessary. The ability to see? Well, there are quite a few blind computer users.

The difference here is that the machine is molded to serve the user in both of those cases. For the general public, however, the machine is immutable, and the users must mold to suit it. This is the fundamental brokenness of the computer. The old belief that the computer is limited and the user must conform to its rules is still in effect.

Until we face this problem and accept that it is in our hands to fix it, the computer will forever be an Infernal Machine rather than a human advancement.

Ye gods and little fishes, how much longer do we have to wait for the Web to return to the way God and Tim Berners-Lee intended it? When TBL created the Web, it was a way for people to collaborate on documents while separated through space and time:

Abby and Bill work on similar projects. Abby is in Portugal and Bill is in Mexico. They can collaborate on a document during their respective work hours, and it's fairly seamless.

What we have, though, is a bastard child of hypertext newspapers and sanitized prole-feed. A document is created by a single individual and served to thousands. To edit the document, the creator must either type in control codes (<I>), or use a swell "HTMLeditor"like FrontPage.

I've tried Amaya, and I like the concept -- an HTMLis a legal, editable document, you just need the access control to change it. Neater would be the ability to add your own notes to a document (like Post-Its) with the ability to hide/show/share them.

Icing would be the ability to allow a TEXTAREA to have basic HTML editing features. This ought to be a feature added to Mozilla right now.

Browse around to any "news" site -- I include the wanna-bes in with the "real" sites -- and you'll see a particularly atrocious addition to the Web experience, inflicted upon us by the lame and clueless: the "Print This Article" link, whose sole purpose is to format the page in the style we would prefer to see in the first place.

It must be an American affectation to be so resolutely obtuse: take what we want and like, intentionally munge it up into some steaming turd, then offer the option to convert it to the way we preferred in the first place, and then call it a "feature". This abortion of an idea is usually corralled with a few other future glue sticks, the "Email this article to a friend" and "Respond in our '$COMMENT_SECTION_NAME_FROM_MARKETING'". While these two have some arguable merit, the "Print This Article" is pure bozoness.

Oh, I understand the reasoning well enough: divide an article into sections and make them separate pages so they can fling more banner ads at our eyeballs. The reasoning -- while it sounds good to crack-addled bean counters -- ends up running about in a tight circle, like a wino in an Italian alley. "Banner ads don't work, people ignore them, so let's architect our site to feed MORE ADS to our users, so the ads can be worth LESS THAN BEFORE, so we can re-architect in 6-8 months to have banner ads display BETWEEN EVERY OTHER WORD..." and so forth, ad infiniteum.

If marketing majors actually cared about their jobs (instead of falling into the major when they flunked out of business school, after blowing off a final with a Dionysian Orgy of Excess at the frathouse the night before), they'd operate a web site on the principle that the ads can be sold on stories, but should never be visible until a story has been selected to view. At that point you know at least something about your viewer (they're interested in "X", since the article is about "X in our schools"), and a decent sized article has at least three good places to sell an ad -- the beginning, middle and end.

The dolts that come to a site's home page are the unwashed vermin: they could be Warren Buffet, but are more likely to be Wilber Beauchamp, lube monkey from West Undershirt, Idaho and secret teen porn afficianado. The best you can sell them are Visa cards from unheard of banks in suspicious countries. But that untapped genius who clicks through to an in-depth article on sewer drains? If you can't sell a ballcock to this guy, you should probably go back to Ball Peen State (Home of the 'Fighting Cantalopes') and ask for your money back.