Slashdot Burying Stories About SlashdotMedia Owned SourceForge
danluu.com
danluu.com
I guess if you destroy the reputation of one of your businesses you might as well take care of the others at the same time!
Not everything ends the same way. Some things never really end.
I remember the first time when Slashdot was suggested to me by my professor teaching OS 304. (5 years ago)
But stay away from the comment section. It's horrible to navigate and lacks any interesting content at all. Seriously, don't even think about clicking into it.
I just want an on topic, light reading, tech news site. No machine learning, Markov chains, or "How we at company X solved Y" articles. Also not interested in "random gadget Y that has X more pixels than the last" articles. Know anything that fits the bill?
I feel like there's still some value in a curated aggregator like Slashdot. The list of topics will reflect the interests of the editors, which in turn will influence the kind of community which forms around it.
HN and some subreddits are "better" than /. at garnering useful discussion for popular subjects which reach the front page. However, I still subscribe to slashdot's rss feed, and sometimes I discover items I find to be of interest there which do not interest the HN community generally (or are outside of its scope).
Weird. I don't think I've found a reason to go there in the last 2 years and even before then it was a struggle to find something that wasn't already reported elsewhere days or weeks before.
It's kind of turned into my parent's facebook posts, echoing memes that have long come and gone but they think is new and original.
While many of the stories are the same at both sites, they're typically on Slashdot well before they're on SN. Many low-quality submissions get through on SN, as well, most of which would have no chance at Slashdot. Of these low-quality submissions at SN, many of them come from a small number of frequent contributors who are known to consistently send in biased and inflammatory submissions. While Slashdot's editors aren't known for doing a good job, we aren't seeing anything better out of SN's editors, and in fact I'd say they're doing a worse job based on some of the submissions I've seen there that have made it to the SN front page.
The SN community is also quite tiny. Most of the comments I've seen come from a relatively small number of people. Slashdot still offers a much larger community. This results in much better discussion at Slashdot, while much of the discussion at SN is inane, if not totally off topic.
Slashdot's moderation system isn't great, but I do find it generally does help me identify high quality comments, while also helping me to disregard low quality comments. That's not the case at SN. When I read the comments at SN, I always have to set it to show -1 comments. Very insightful and informative comments often end up at -1 on SN, while many of the highly-rated comments are absolutely worthless. The very small number of active users results in an even smaller number of users who are allowed to moderate, and this has resulted in the moderation system being used to push specific agendas or target certain other users, rather than giving a quasi-objective rating of a comment's value. The moderation system at Slashdot is generally helpful. The moderation system at SN is used as a weapon.
SN had a lot of potential. But now that the Slashdot beta site is gone, and likely won't be back, the biggest benefit of SN is gone. With its lack of quality submissions, with its small community, with its moderation problems, and with it's other less-serious flaws, SN provides no benefit over Slashdot. Slashdot offers better stories faster, its community offers wider and deeper points of view, its moderation system is much fairer and more balanced, and it's just a much better news source than SN is.
Pretty sure that was because it was a dupe and that the original had massive discussion here. One pattern I've noticed is that a story will often break on HN early, before it hits the main tech press. A day or two later, when more mainstream posts start appearing, we get a new wave of submissions about the story. Anyone who didn't see the original will wonder why those are getting buried. In the current system, there's no good answer to this—other than that a few indomitable users post links to the original discussion. We do have some ideas about how to fix it more systematically.
Also, moderation has become a lot more transparent over the last year or so (see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang) and I cannot think of a site offhand that does a better job of this.
Edit: My comments about moderation are related to the parent statement about how Hacker News often indicates why thread contents (such as the title) have changed.
Most of those bans I've seen have been enough to make me cock an eyebrow, as well.
When you get banned from a subreddit you are told, by the system, via private message. Reddit has user-level shadowbanning as well, but I've only ever seen it used when it was warranted, like doxxing -- here, some of the hellbanned comment histories mystify me. Reddit certainly has its own share of weirdness but in my opinion, /r/askscience (to use one example) has absolutely incredible moderation that makes HN pale in comparison.
Great examples are Gödels beliefs of ghosts and paranormal activity; some older Nobel laureates turned to 'weird' (for the lack of a better word) ideas at some point in time; etc. Not cited in the article, Gödel also believed to have found a logical proof of the existence of God: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3.....
People got upset that religions got included it. I can understand the disagreement, but I can't understand the need to censor the discussion. Whether you believe it or not, it shouldn't be a stretch to concede that religion is weird, in some sense. It's completely outside our usual phenomena, and it's an arbitrary explanation for several questions, or maybe it's a relief. But it's as strange as it is interesting that so many people hold those beliefs.
The original discussion:
More than once I've been in a comment thread where conversation dried up, and it is because the story got flagged to page 2 and beyond. I won't list topics but the usual suspects are fairly obvious.
(I'm not complaining, but it's intriguing to me that this comment shot from +3 to 0 between refreshes.)
Of course, I could be wrong - I used to think that Slashdot wouldn't ban negative pieces on Sourceforge either.
You even repeated and agreed with the sole point I'm making.
That was a unique case in my memory. "Often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of a thread" is pure fabrication. As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. It's literally the first thing PG emphasized to me when explaining how to moderate HN.
A recent example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711. That class of outrage thread is something we routinely penalize, but we penalized this one less because it was about Airbnb. There's no way it would have stayed on the front page for hours otherwise.
I think strictly speaking that may be true, however I suspect the reason that that is is because of the precautions already taken by the HN software and HN operators, e.g. by rankbanning. When users who have voiced anti-YC sentiments are already rankbanned, for example, you don't even need to intervene, because those comments will already have sunk to the bottom. So I think you can probably successfully refute my individual points but the larger spirit of my assertion remains.
Newer comments are given a boost in rankings so they have a chance to get upvoted. That comment might have been upvoted enough to stay on the top afterward (I am not affiliated with YC or HN).
cancer claim: Again, it sounds like a tautology, but you aren't considering statistics. Sure, if nothing else kills you, you die of exploding fingernails. But the intent of that expression is to say that cancer is the default, it's not a bullet you can dodge forever. I'm not sure I agree, because "old age" != "cancer", but that's what it means.
Or was your question purely rhetorical? I tried...