Comment Slashdot Valedictory (Score -1, Offtopic) 208
I have been posting on /. for a couple of months now. I had read Slashdot for several years, and had always been repulsed by the level of ignorance and mob culture that reigned here.
So I decided to get a user account and test my theory that only posts that would be favoured by the masses would get moderated up, and that posts that closely corresponded to the communist zealoutry of "free" software were certain to be favourably received.
The results showed that this was indeed the case. Pandering to the "utopian" ideal of open source with its socialist political undertones guaranteed my success. Provided these posts appear sufficiently close to the beginning of the message board they would be seen and moderated up by individuals (or were they behaving as individuals; that is a pertinent question) who sought to promote their narrow minded bigotry, to spread their seed of poison against the stability of society and the natural human processes of capitalism.
If I wished to have a +5 Informative/Interesting/Insightful (for these tags in themselves are arbitrary markers; do Slashdot readers even understand what is truly meant by "Insightful"? I very much doubt it.) then I was certain to achieve it merely by waiting patiently reloading the /. homepage for the next article to appear.
I saw the moderation points come in, and my Karma climb up from Neutral to Positive to Good to Excellent. The accuracy with which I could predict the moderations and replies astounded me; it frightened me. Is this representative of all society? Is there really no such thing as individual thought? Are we all just a member of some mob or another?
You can see from my history that what I say about being moderated up is true, although the earliest examples were best and can no longer be seen. I didn't try as hard to mould my comments perfectly into the Slashdot mindset after my initial successes, knowing how easily my prey fed were caught even in those mouse traps with rotten cheese.
I urge you to reconsider your opinions on free and open source software. I do not say that they are wrong, or that they have no place. Open source software may have a place, but anticapitalism does not. Without capitalism we won't have jobs to pay for food, accomodation, our families and recreation. Those who benefit most from the furious communism of the GPL are the large players like IBM and Novell. It doesn't benefit the small, innovative firm struggling for a foothold. The BSD license, MIT license, and to an extent less restrictive variants of the LGPL like the Mozilla Public License or wxWindows (now wxWidgets) license are beneficial to the developer community, firms large and small, and end users alike. It is closer to the academic/commercial partnership that has worked in the past for scientific and other industries.
I also urge you to be objective, to think about your viewpoints, and those of others whose views you embrace. Perhaps I will return to Slashdot one day when an "Insightful" moderation really means Insightful, and is not merely a doubleplusgoodduckquack to use Orwell's terminology.
Thank you for your time.
mcx101
So I decided to get a user account and test my theory that only posts that would be favoured by the masses would get moderated up, and that posts that closely corresponded to the communist zealoutry of "free" software were certain to be favourably received.
The results showed that this was indeed the case. Pandering to the "utopian" ideal of open source with its socialist political undertones guaranteed my success. Provided these posts appear sufficiently close to the beginning of the message board they would be seen and moderated up by individuals (or were they behaving as individuals; that is a pertinent question) who sought to promote their narrow minded bigotry, to spread their seed of poison against the stability of society and the natural human processes of capitalism.
If I wished to have a +5 Informative/Interesting/Insightful (for these tags in themselves are arbitrary markers; do Slashdot readers even understand what is truly meant by "Insightful"? I very much doubt it.) then I was certain to achieve it merely by waiting patiently reloading the
I saw the moderation points come in, and my Karma climb up from Neutral to Positive to Good to Excellent. The accuracy with which I could predict the moderations and replies astounded me; it frightened me. Is this representative of all society? Is there really no such thing as individual thought? Are we all just a member of some mob or another?
You can see from my history that what I say about being moderated up is true, although the earliest examples were best and can no longer be seen. I didn't try as hard to mould my comments perfectly into the Slashdot mindset after my initial successes, knowing how easily my prey fed were caught even in those mouse traps with rotten cheese.
I urge you to reconsider your opinions on free and open source software. I do not say that they are wrong, or that they have no place. Open source software may have a place, but anticapitalism does not. Without capitalism we won't have jobs to pay for food, accomodation, our families and recreation. Those who benefit most from the furious communism of the GPL are the large players like IBM and Novell. It doesn't benefit the small, innovative firm struggling for a foothold. The BSD license, MIT license, and to an extent less restrictive variants of the LGPL like the Mozilla Public License or wxWindows (now wxWidgets) license are beneficial to the developer community, firms large and small, and end users alike. It is closer to the academic/commercial partnership that has worked in the past for scientific and other industries.
I also urge you to be objective, to think about your viewpoints, and those of others whose views you embrace. Perhaps I will return to Slashdot one day when an "Insightful" moderation really means Insightful, and is not merely a doubleplusgoodduckquack to use Orwell's terminology.
Thank you for your time.
mcx101
