I really, really hope this is good news. I miss the actual "News for nerds" ethos that brought me here, and I've waded through a lot of sponsored "posts" and clickbait to sift out the kernels of actual news that remain.
New/. overlords? Get this site back to "News for nerds" and news that matters, and you'll keep me here.
I don't believe it. Is Slashdot going to stop those ridiculous paid links to forbes.com? What about the relentless left-wing social justice stories that blame nerds for everything wrong in the world? What about constant news-today-gone-tomorrow political stories that are general news, at best? I don't see any of those going away under any kind of new management. Irritating as fuck content has been around since the Jon Katz stories wouldn't stop appearing.
The deal closed less than 24 hours ago. We're going to look at all options in order to improve the experience. And, no, that doesn't mean we're going to roll out a crappy new interface without listening to user feedback. We want to make sure we get it right.
My own leading suggestion: no more AC posting, including from registered users. Let us all be known by our posting histories. Next, modding and posting in replies to the same article should be allowable, so long as it's not in the same thread.
An Edit button, usable until a post is replied to or modded, would also be nice.
In general, I agree with you because there is too much abuse of anonymity, but one of the features I want and would prefer to donate towards would be a maturity filter. If an account is too young, then I don't want to see it at all. My setting would probably be at least two or three months, but I'd like to see the statistics on the average lifespans of sock puppets.
The broader question of moderation is messy... What sort of project would I be willing to put money on? Tough question...
I'm not sure how far we want to go with refining the scale of karma, but the treasured interface doesn't have to change. Just make your karma rating a link, which leads to a breakdown of the overall rating.
Hmm... I'm going to have to look into this "breakdown of the overall rating" thing... Is it a new aspect of the user's account information? My fuzzy recollection is that my research into how karma worked was pretty much disappointed and disappointing.
Let me clarify that the way my suggested funding model would work, the powers-that-be-making-slashdot wouldn't do or change anything unless they already had a good estimate of how much it would cost and the funds had been offered by sufficient donors to make it work. No risk, since they would be holding the money anyway pending the donors' active encouragement about how to spend it.
However, this particular feature does offer a pretty good example of an ongoing-cost project of a feasible size. The extended karma would incur some extra server costs, but not too large. The way the feature should be implemented, if the extra server runs out of funding, then the feature would become disabled. Attempting to use the feature would instead trigger a pitch to help fund the server for the next year. There is also a special marketing pitch in this case. You could allow the pledge to enable a single or limited use of the feature, pending full enablement when the ongoing costs are funded.
Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
New /. overlords? Get this site back to "News for nerds" and news that matters, and you'll keep me here.
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Re: (Score:-1, Troll)
Welcome, Whipslash!
My own leading suggestion: no more AC posting, including from registered users. Let us all be known by our posting histories. Next, modding and posting in replies to the same article should be allowable, so long as it's not in the same thread.
An Edit button, usable until a post is replied to or modded, would also be nice.
Re: (Score:2)
In general, I agree with you because there is too much abuse of anonymity, but one of the features I want and would prefer to donate towards would be a maturity filter. If an account is too young, then I don't want to see it at all. My setting would probably be at least two or three months, but I'd like to see the statistics on the average lifespans of sock puppets.
The broader question of moderation is messy... What sort of project would I be willing to put money on? Tough question...
Theoretically? I think
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure how far we want to go with refining the scale of karma, but the treasured interface doesn't have to change. Just make your karma rating a link, which leads to a breakdown of the overall rating.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:2)
Hmm... I'm going to have to look into this "breakdown of the overall rating" thing... Is it a new aspect of the user's account information? My fuzzy recollection is that my research into how karma worked was pretty much disappointed and disappointing.
Let me clarify that the way my suggested funding model would work, the powers-that-be-making-slashdot wouldn't do or change anything unless they already had a good estimate of how much it would cost and the funds had been offered by sufficient donors to make it work. No risk, since they would be holding the money anyway pending the donors' active encouragement about how to spend it.
However, this particular feature does offer a pretty good example of an ongoing-cost project of a feasible size. The extended karma would incur some extra server costs, but not too large. The way the feature should be implemented, if the extra server runs out of funding, then the feature would become disabled. Attempting to use the feature would instead trigger a pitch to help fund the server for the next year. There is also a special marketing pitch in this case. You could allow the pledge to enable a single or limited use of the feature, pending full enablement when the ongoing costs are funded.