Slashdot Turns 100,000 443
This entry represents the 100,000th story posted on Slashdot. Technically this is a bit late since we're missing the first few months of stories from the DB, but there are now 100k items in the story database and I thought that milestone was worthy of sharing with the universe.
We've come a long way in the last 12 years, and while the site isn't always exactly what I want it to be, I'm very proud of the work done by our thousands of submitters and by the editors our readers have "affectionately" referred to as "The Slashdot Janitors" for so many years.
Special grats to timothy who is just short of his 17,000th story and is far and away the most prolific person here. The hall of fame has a few other bits of trivia.
lowest account number? (Score:3, Interesting)
third post?!
I am curious to find which one of us reading this has the lowest account number? I had a really low one but lost that account..
Congratulations (Score:4, Interesting)
From a new user.
Here's to the next 100k.
If it was ever all laid out, this site would actually be a pretty interesting resource for future historians. Of course, that depends on future historians being able to read whatever formats the site is stored in.
Anybody remember the Domesday Book project in Britain from the 80's being digitised into a 'permanent' format, that was obsolete a decade later.?
Anyway, kudos.
CmdrTaco (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious about CmdrTaco saying the site isn't always what he wants it to be; care to elaborate?
I'm seriously not trying to start a flame war or anything like that; just curious as to how the site has differed from your vision for it.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno, there are old-timers here who have been around longer than I have, and I go through cycles of posting and not posting, but I think there's been a pretty marked change in both the kinds of users and the stories. I will probably get moderated to hell for saying this, but when I started lurking and then signed up for an account, slashdot at that time was more like some parts of reddit (to disclaim I post in both places, and I think the general quality of comments are better here, but there was a level of free-wheeling, shared culture that isn't quite as present here - it reminded me of the quirkiness of the jargon file). Back in those days everyone would catch and upvote semi-relevant Simpsons and Red Dwarf quotes for example (I got into RD via slashdot, if I remember correctly).
Perhaps the change in stories has been related; it's gotten a lot more general (it probably started before but I remember noticing the change as and after the politics section was added).
So yeah, the site's still around and there are still people posting and it's still relevant (more than I can say for digg), but the focus and community have changed a lot and for better or worse, as far as "net culture" is concerned, it seems like 4chan and the sites that interact with it's culture (reddit, unyclopedia) have more influence.
Don't get my wrong, I still love the slashie.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
...You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements...
Really? I think the comment system UI features that have been added over the past while are slick and efficient. The fewer times I am required to leave the current page for a small chunk of data to load, post or be rearranged, the better.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've said it before and I'll say it again - it would be great if there were questions/tests which could be somehow worked into Slashdot so that a rough idea of people's techinical skills/ability/knowledge could be gathered, and applied to rating. I'd like to prioritize comments from people who know what they're talking about.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oddly enough in my old slashdot account even though I never commented and rarely used them I was handed 5 moderation points pretty much every week.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:2, Interesting)
I disagree. Back in the day slashdot discussions used to be primarily about technology. Nowadays even in stories that are ostensibly about technology, all the discussions end up being about politics instead. For example someone posts a story about a cool new electric car, and half the comments are ignorant hicks repeating the same old ignorant bullshit about the inefficiency of burning coal. The same applies to pretty much every discussion. Just look at that list of top stories and you'll see that 9/10 of them are about politics or creationism (same thing really). A single top 10 story about technology (and a stupid one at that) on a site that is supposed to be "news for nerds" is pretty damned bad, if you ask me.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Age and quality. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you get them, just do what I do -- find a thread you don't have any interest in and moderate the first X posts as "under-rated". (X is the number of mod points you get, which is 15 for me.)
This gives you the benefit of nothaving to actually moderate plus you can't be meta-moderated.
I get points about once a week. YMMV. CYLDFD.
I'm really only posting here in case there's an acheivement... achievement... anchoviement.
Sorry, not enough sleep makes everything seem funny. At least I'm not rambling on pointlessly.
Wait.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Age and quality. (Score:4, Interesting)
In the middle of a long dry spell myself
Re:Age and quality. (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I really don't think so, I often browse at 0 or -1 and even then the comments in general seem more intelligent. Sure there are a lot of offtopic trolls, but I still think that is far better than ontopic stupid people (though there are of course a far bit of them).
Sloppy editing, but indispensable. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, even with the sloppy editing, Slashdot is the best way of learning about computer and other technology events. It's indispensable in my life. Slashdot editors have been very good at choosing stories that are interesting to us.
The comments have often been valuable to me. For example, several years ago Slashdot ran a story I suggested about making international telephone calls. There were 880 comments. One of them mentioned BroadVoice [broadvoice.com], a company that provides unlimited calling to land lines in 57 countries (then 35 countries). Since we often call land line phones in other countries and talk for hours, that was a very valuable suggestion. (I'm only a customer. I have no other involvement with BroadVoice.)
It seems reasonable to mention also that editing is extremely mentally intensive. It is much more difficult than it appears to those with no editing experience.
We are lucky to have Slashdot. Where else could we go for these stories?
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're going to do that, you might as well just ignore the mod points..?
I've found that when I post less I tend to get more mod points. Even if I don't use them it still tops them up every few days.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
I credit the moderation system.
Of course, and as others have said, who choose to use and to read Slashdot in the first place. It is a very interesting community and I would believe, vastly more influential than what is suggested by the conventionally self-deprecating comments.
I love Slashdot so much that I often find myself worried about the possibility of organized attempts to manipulate the system. The next topic (the 100, 001st): Virtual Money For Real Lobbying, address this very issue, but about other discussion groups. I must say that I am reassured most of the time by the efficiency of the moderating system, with one recent exception: the issue of climate change, on which there have been 5 or 6 stories over the last few days. I admit the topic is controversial to begin with, but the comments I have seen modded down, with the intelligence and tone associated with the scientific minds whom we are used to read around here, and some comments I have seen modded up, left me with the impression of a massive attempt at manipulating the moderation system, only partially successful perhaps.
My immediate reaction was to reflect on what form of comment analysis, statistical or otherwise, would allow confirmation or infirmation of such coordinated attempts. Anyone has an idea on that?
Re:lowest account number? (Score:2, Interesting)
What about a lowish number AND a username with illegal characters?
w00t!
Still here after all these years (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't post nearly as much as I used to, and I don't get mod points as much as I used to either. But I'm always scanning the RSS feed and checking out stories, because I value the discussion here more than anywhere else. The quality of discourse here remains high, which is almost an anomaly in this age of Digg & Facebook, but it's that anomaly that keeps me coming back.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the ordering of comments. Sites where the most recent comments come first encourage repetition, circling around the same arguments and bad quality, whereas a thread you can follow allows picking up an existing conversation on top of arguments already made.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah; I've been getting 2 or even 3 15-point mod sessions per week for a while now. One thing it makes me think of is that I don't really understand all that much of how /.'s mod system really works. Is it actually documented somewhere that we can read? I haven't found anything that I'd call very informative about the mod system.
Part of the reason I'm interested is that some friends and other acquaintances have recently asked me about building some online news/blog sites for a couple of local organizations. Doing the basic programming seems rather straightforward, but I suspect that there are some subtleties for which it'd be best to learn from others. I'd want to include some sort of moderation system, so I'd like to read about some experiences with such things. Both successful and unsuccessful ideas would be useful. It'd probably be better than me making guesses about how to do it.
I did look into slashcode, but found that the documentation seems scarce, and apparently nobody is feeding and watering it any more. I also did a bit of googling, but didn't find much useful. Maybe I just didn't guess the right keywords ...
Anyway, if the /. editors have produced any sort of history of what they've tried, what worked, and what didn't, it could be interesting reading to some of us.
Ask Google (Score:4, Interesting)
things in "ask slashdot" that should instead get someone redirected to google
Not everybody is an expert at formulating search engine queries. In these Ask Slashdot articles, I take the question to be the following: "To answer this question, what words should I have typed into a search engine?" Even a "Let me Google that for you" response [lmgtfy.com] can be informative if it reveals keywords that the submitter couldn't think to use.
Re:Groan (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah it would be cool to have some sort of linux kernel swear counts [vidarholen.net] but with /. stories, which matches some patterns like:
Come on /. devs, bring us a xmas gift ! ;)
Re:Age and quality. (Score:3, Interesting)
But that bribery exists on many times over. Bribing constituents have been happening for a long time. It's called farm subsidies, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, etcetera.
It has happened time and again that parties play to the fears of constituents being paid off that the other party will take away that money. Social Security and the elderly voting block is a great example of this.
And it's particularly relevant as this country heads into bankruptcy in the coming years, it will be Medicare and Social Security Spending that does us in, with interest payments on debt being in 3rd place.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:4, Interesting)
But that has changed. The user base of the Internet in general has grown, become more diverse, and become more main-stream. Sites like 4chan are a part of this broader audience. And while Slashdot has also felt some of this broader influence, it still remains pretty firmly removed from the mainstream.
My impression is that slashdot has kept most of its older users from the early days, while the younger people from the "mainstream" era of the web never found it interesting enough to spend a lot of time on it. They frequent 4chan, digg, youtube etc. and have thus mostly spared slashdot from the onslaught of that kind of posts, except for a few years back (must have been around 2002-2004) when "meme" type posts were big on slashdot...
Re:lowest account number? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Age and quality. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:lowest account number? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, that's pretty good. :)
Re:Age and quality. (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought all the vi users would have died of old age by now.
I personally like the politics section. It definitely fits into the 'stuff that matters' category. And I like the variety of opinions available. Where else on the internet can you find a group of educated nerds willing to DEBATE not argue (for the most part). Though they are misused sometimes people on
Idle on the other hand is like it was design to drag
Re:Age and quality. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've found that when I post less I tend to get more mod points.
Traffic loyalty scheme? If you haven't been posting much lately, maybe it's because you haven't been reading/visiting much either. Mod points (esp. when notified by the Slashdotter FF extension) perhaps serve to bring you back in.
- RG>
Re:Sloppy editing, but indispensable. (Score:4, Interesting)
The smart people need a site, and there's more smart people than ever... so there is a demand for something on the high edge. But there's absolutely no need for a 'halfway smart' site, like, say, Digg... at that point, the site joins millions of others in vying for the attention at the populated middle. I THINK there might be something like that happening with slashdot... at least I hope.
I think something similar happens with movies and tv.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, Slashdot still is only thought halfway to the end. The idea is a trust-relationship model trough action rating. Or in other words: People rate other people’s works, which given them a karma. which then is used to determine what a moderation of that person is worth.
But on Slashdot, instead it determines, who gets mod points. Which is a bit more binary, as there are no people with e.g. 10% moderation power, or anything in-between. You either have points or you don’t.
So it’s pretty close to the theoretical perfection.
The only thing it still has problems with, is that it has no concept of competency, and that meta-moderation is used. normally, one who moderates badly, would get thrown out pretty quickly, because he would lose his moderating power. But because /. does not know how competent you actually are, to moderate on a subject, that isn’t built-in.
I thought about this for a long time. But one thing remains open, even in a theoretically perfect system:
The ability to abuse the system, when you can’t uniquely identify people. (The sock-puppet dilemma.)
One could simply moderate one’s socks who then moderate oneself.
Also social aspects mean, that this can happen even without sock puppets. (Social engineering / politics.)
Unfortunately I haven’t found a solution to that problem yet.
Re:Age and quality. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, what are you waiting for then? You seem to know how to fix it, so why tease us?
I'm not GP, but I'll bite.
I'm not a web developer. I haven't ever dealt with AJAX (even though I know how it works, in theory), and I've no idea how to fix Slashdot. However, I visit other websites, and I've seen quite a few interactive sights which are both more convenient, and much, much faster. A good example of a site that uses Ajax rather heavily, but is nonetheless very well designed and convenient to use, is StackOverflow.