
Slashdot Burying Stories About SlashdotMedia Owned SourceForge - ingve
http://danluu.com/slashdot-sourceforge/
======
precision
The simple fact is that after 15 years of corporate mismanagement there isn't
anyone left there that cares anymore. It is really sad, when we started the
sites, all we ever wanted to do was help the OSS community. But those were the
days before a plethora of other alternatives existed.

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rossng
I think this might be Slashdot's Digg moment.

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!

~~~
thaumaturgy
Slashdot has already had plenty of Digg moments, and the current dismal amount
of user activity there is fine enough proof of that. There was Jon Katz, the
moderation wars, hot grits and all the other trolls, the non-stop complaining
about the story submission / selection process, the multiple redesigns
(including the big redesign that everyone hated, years ago), the sale to
Dice...

Not everything ends the same way. Some things never really end.

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moonbug
Does anybody care about Slashdot this decade?

~~~
mdeeks
Strangely, yes. I still read it daily believe it or not. It's like a lighter
version of hacker news or arstechnica. Ars and HN are usually too deep and
suck away my time and brain power (in a good way!). But sometimes I just want
to spend a couple minutes reading tech news without having to think too hard.
That's slashdot.

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.

~~~
moonbug
Stick "127.0.1.1 slashdot.org" in your /etc/hosts. I promise you'll have
forgotten about its very existence within a week.

~~~
mdeeks
My point is I don't want to forget. It still serves a purpose. I'd get over it
if it vanished but I'd rather it not. I'm sure there are other alternatives
out there though. Speaking of... any recommendations?

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?

~~~
papaf
Soylent News is OK and meant as a Slashdot replacement. Its suffering from a
lack of community though.

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unethical_ban
Soylent News was stood up more than a year ago after /. forced a new style on
people, and generally started going downhill. I read both now.

~~~
JimFJones
I don't consider SN to be a good alternative to Slashdot. It exhibits many of
the same problems as Slashdot, but they're usually worse at SN than at
Slashdot.

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.

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yuhong
I am thinking that Yahoo should probably acquire SourceForge.

~~~
sp332
To delete it?

~~~
yuhong
I would hope that it would at least be archived if Yahoo don't want to
continue to run it.

~~~
sp332
Nope.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities#Closure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities#Closure)
[http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo)

~~~
yuhong
To be honest, that was in 2009.

~~~
sp332
That second link has a lot of other projects, some more recent. "At the end of
2014, Yahoo! gave three months notice that it will kill Yahoo! Directory." I
haven't seen any evidence that Yahoo will act differently toward other
projects they "sunset" in the future.

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DigitalSea
If this were 2009, I might be shocked, but Slashdot has fallen so far from the
top that I don't even care anymore. Such a poorly mismanaged site. The
community used to be great in the early 2000's, but we all moved on.

------
blazespin
I'd love to see posts about how hacker news buries articles too. Some kind of
analysis would be great.

~~~
bad_user
You'd love to see that because you've witnessed such instances, or because you
like scandals?

~~~
blazespin
I frequently see extremely interesting posts vanish from the front page. Maybe
there should be a section on HN where we can review 'banned' posts.

~~~
lnanek2
You used to be able to set your preferences to see dead ones and browse
sections like new, but now they've unlinked them, so there is no way to check
any more. It's sad because the moderators around here tend to do a really
terrible job, butchering titles to be less informative and other harmful
actions, and this just makes them even less accountable.

~~~
jaredsohn
Used to? I can configure my account to see dead comments (and have), maybe
this is different for newer accounts (but I've never heard this)? Also, I can
see the new section when I browse incognito, so I'm not seeing what I think
you are describing.

Also, moderation has become a lot more transparent over the last year or so
(see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang](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.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
Nothing against HN, but you must not visit a lot of sites if you can't name
one site that moderates better than HN. Lest we forget, there are several
people who have been hellbanned for multiple years without any clue. They
waste a significant portion of their life talking to nobody because the person
who developed the site felt passive aggressive was better than just banning
someone outright and preventing them from rejoining. With incognito mode
checking if you're hellbanned is a five second operation, yet dang hasn't
replaced that aspect of HN despite its futility and childishness.

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.

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isopod
"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the
villain."

~~~
MichaelGG
Isn't that a useless tautology? Like "if nothing else kills you, you die of
cancer".

~~~
cactusface
hero/villain claim: So it's a tautology if you interpret it like this: You are
currently A. You will die. If you don't die as A, you will die as !A. But it's
not a tautology because there's an intermediate state between hero and villain
that is neither A nor !A.

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...

