Why does Slashdot...
 

suck so bad?

And why do I keep reading it?

What a fucking productivity waster. I think I wish it would just up-n-die.

Who else finds themselves refreshing that fucking page every 10 minutes?

I find is better now.
The Register

Re: Why does Slashdot...
 

Yo.

Although I've been known to sometimes just keep the headlines coming up in a gnews applet. Like anything else, the quality of the information is variable, and there are vast hordes of trolls of various stripes. Nonetheless, they are in general pretty true to their mission of "news for nerds, stuff that matters". I follow The Register too, but it's rather a different place.

Just noticed they now have a journal and "friends" system. Tony, is that you as /. user "undertoad", user 104182?

Ha! *my* /. number is 10193. :-)

Tony is "Tony Shepps".

UID 333.

He wins. :)

I s'pose. :-) Although that makes him =billg/2 :-)

Well, I had someone offer to blow me for my user number, so I must have something going on. When obviously there are 332 better choices for that sort of bribery.

I wonder if they were being serious :) I'd hope it was a female too. I can see one going for that. :)

Or you were refusal #333.


Uhh, you did refuse, right?

In person or e-mail or something?
He still has the number so unless he's a real bastard i guess he refused ;)

You can't change the user name so nobody will ever know.

Well, unless #333 starts spouting off ridiculous nonsense! Which if it were the real me, would never happen!

Actually I should think the number would be worth a lot more, so I'm holding out for better.

I've been reading mother fucking slashdot since mid '98, but I never registered until waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay later - 55,XXX was my first account. I dropped that account and got one in the 80,000's... but the one I post from most now (uh, bet you can't guess the username!) is in the 400,000's. If I had registered when I started reading, I'd probably have a pretty low UID. But, it occurs to me that it doesn't fucking matter because slashdot is going the way of the buffalo. Mark my words.

*sigh* Just like everything else that VA Linux (oops, sorry... VA Software) has done. :(

I agree with Tony: /. uid 333 should be worth more than *one* blowjob....even if it was a very, very good blowjob.

But that won't always be true. It will take very good market timing to know when to call the broker and say "*sell*!".

Slashdot is going the way of the buffalo because the intelligent posters are migrating toward other forums while the trolls and crapflooders overrun the stories. Add to that the fact that the journalistic integrity there is NIL (Chris DiBona is especially irritating, as well as CmdrTaco) and you have a losing combination. Not only can I *not* trust what I read there, but there's so little intelligent discussion that reading it is an insult to my intelligence (and yours, too). The intelligent posts hardly ever get modded up, many of the lame posts hardly ever get modded down. It sucks. That's why I hate the fact that I reload that page every 10 minutes - it is habit, and one that has formed over the past 3 years. I have visited that page 100 times daily for over 3 years now, and I am in such a habit of doing so that I cannot break out of it. Yet, there is never anything there for me. The karma cap, quite honestly, takes the fun out of posting. I wish "karma" didn't exist at all, because it's severely broken. At 50 points with 2 +5 mod's in the last few days (on a relatively new account, no less), I can post whatever I want and still have the +2 bonus. Many people take advantage of this. Then they get modded right back up on something else equally stupid. Slashdot used to be something special. But that quality that it once had is now rarely found. I don't know if they actually "sold out" and that caused it or what, but the fact of the matter is that Slashdot is no longer "News for Nerds". It is "Biased Articles Posted by 'Authors' That Have No Fact-Checking Ability Whatsoever". Some of it is just plain fucking bullshit - see JonKatz's article on the Afghani that emailed him.

Worst of all, Slashdot has tricked the world into thinking that it represents Linux. What a shame that is, because it's now a "community" of screaming children that drown out the intelligent conversation of respectable adults. I hate it, yet I am uncontrollably drawn to it. One day, I shall break this habit. One day...

I know the feeling. I've been trying to break free of the horrible yoke that is /.

I must admit to liking the interviews though, sometimes. It at least let me stumble across Wil Wheaton's Site.

[Edit: Interviews, not reviews! Doh!]

So I've been searching for something better. Between here and K5, I think I've found some new haunts. I'm a lurker though, as is evidenced by my /. User Page. :)

Now if I can just work up the power to remove it from my links list...

i'm so glad i never got into slashdot...

too bad the BBSes died!

I love Slashdot because I regularly get to talk to people who are just like me -- quite a rarity here around Arkansas. If I didn't have Slashdot, or some other site like Kuro5hin, well, i'd still be okay I guess. But, it's cool to talk to people with similar interests.

I don't talk to people. Once you hit the karma cap, one must post judiciously, rather than risk the loss of karma. :)

Though I am down at 47 now after my latest sputterings. Which weren't really sputterings so much as they were well planned & executed attacks. Heh.

You can stop stalking me on /. now. That'll help yer karma. And frankly mine too.

Haha. :)

What's yours at?

I've been at the cap for... oh I don't know, a year now? For a while I was in the zone and got a bunch of 5s in a row.

So you're still at the cap. So that's good.

I was in the zone for a couple of days back in the summer. I have since stopped posting intelligently. Anywhere. :)

Why not just post intelligently based on principle?

'Cause it gets fucking boring, and one can feel kinda burned by it too. I can't count the number of times I've taken my time, written a really intelligent and thoughtful post that just happens to disagree with popular opinion, posted it and gotten it modded down to 0 in the course of an hour. This happening every now and then isn't a big deal, but sometimes it can seriously be a real drag. Ask Tony. He posted something here about it a while ago.

Slashdot is a broken system. It doesn't respect its users, so I can't respect it. Like I said before, I welcome the day when it disappears. It was ruined a long time ago.

You folks collect karma?
 

I've never posted to Slashdot as anything but an Anonymous Coward, and doubt I ever will. If somebody wants to read what I have to say, it's there, and all they have to do is look for it. If somebody wants to ignore everything below 'n', that's their prerogative.

When I used to read talk.bizarre regularly on USENET, I had a massive scorefile that gave new posts 1, familiar (and talented) faces more than 1, responses an automatic -6 penalty and whacked everything negative or at 0 unless I specifically went looking for it. Slashdot is similar, except that you're not the one who sets the scores, which makes reading-by-karma a bit pointless.

Mother fucking Karma cap sucks.

I posted a comment for fellow lazy asses like myself that hate copying & pasting URL's because someone was too lazy to make a link. I didn't do it in a karma-whoring mode or anything - just made the link, and made it obvious from the subject so that people could click 2 links instead of having to select it with their mouse, copy it (if in Windows or MacOS), and then paste it in their URL bar, which is tedious under Mozilla/Linux because you have to hit Ctrl-L, then delete what's in the URL bar, then move the mouse up there and paste it. Well, it gets modded up like 7 times - all the while, I'm sitting at the fucking karma cap. But it gets modded down 5 times - once as "Redundant" and 4 times as "Overrated" - which it definitely was. So when it's all said and done, my karma is 49, which is just an ANNOYING number to be at. Sure, I could go moderate myself up (I'm almost always moderating), but that kinda defeats the purpose. I think you should only lose karma on a post if the overall moderation of the post is negative - ideally, that's how it would work, but because of timing and the karma cap, it can work the other way. Fucking lame. I hate Slashdot.

I hate kuro5hin too. It's become this place for pseudo-intellectuals to read their own posts and masturbate while fantasizing about their greatness. It drives me nuts. The Cellar is the only discussion board I can even stand to read anymore. Am I becoming more irritable, or is the internet becoming more irritating?

Well, i'm glad you post here.. it's pretty fun arguing with you. :] It wouldn't be the same without ya. But ya know.. every time I see your name completely filling the 'Last Post' row on the main page, I think back to this thread (third post down), wherein you stated that you didn't have the time to post all day. How exactly did we let you get away with such a claim?? <g>

The mad posting started shortly thereafter...like maybe around mid-November. All of a sudden, dham went Cellar-happy. He's been here about 6 months now, but he's probably made 400 posts or so in the past month.

And people think *I* post a lot...I've been here almost a year though. ;)

Yeah. I got into my groove, wherein I can still accomplish a ton of work while posting on the Cellar. Though admittedly, some days people just don't give me as much shit to respond to. That's when I find out about the Butte Pirates. After work though, I hardly spend any time Cellar-ing. Got too much to do outside of work. Like cleaning up so I can move into a second bedroom. Wahoo!

And yeah, the flurry of posts started kinda late. I probably have made upwards of 400 in the last month - I'm definitely averaging about 20/day or so. The weekends make up for it though - I'm pretty much absent. I read, but I hardly ever post. Hehe.

Anyway. It's Jenni's birthday, so I shouldn't be on the computer all day. Gonna go hang out with her.

If 333 is worth at least one blow job, what would 972 get me? At least a third of a blow job?

I've got the same addiction to Slashdot. I just can't remove it from my bookmarks page, and my mouse finds it every time I'm wandering through the links. At least I can tolerate the front page in "light mode" while I scan for news.

euroderf's is pretty cool - 47. Though he doesn't post here. Heh. Anyway. 972, eh? When did you register? I'm trying to figure out where my UID would be if I registered when I started reading, which was in August of 1998.

You'd be pretty far up there. I'm 46,000 something and I registered in early '99 if memory serves. I can't remember though, I was in college, so lots of things are blurry, like my breakfast. :)

Remember though - Slashdot got big in late August/September/October of '98 and continued into '99. The actual date I started reading was August 6, 1998. The Linux explosion happened shortly thereafter, and that's when everyone started joining. I think it's pretty hard to gauge what my UID would likely have been without first finding someone that registered in early August of that year. :)

Tony - when did you join Slashdot?

I have no concept of that whole time frame! All I know is that it was no longer called "Chips and Bits" or whatever it was originally called. I started before they even HAD numbers, I think, and just got lucky that I was refreshing it when number-fication came around.

Man. You're getting close to 1,000 now. Word.

Chips n' Dips, it was.

I remember when it actually used to be a cool little discussion forum. I remember when everyone used to actually like Jon Katz - partially 'cause he was a celebrity that had stumbled upon this small place on the web. I dunno. I miss that, but it still was never as cool as the Cellar is, and it'll never be there again anyway...

aaarrrrrrgggghhhhhhh
I offically give up on slashdot, after reading the comment for nearly an hour (kinda bored) i nearly ripped my eyes out, there are so many MORONS who have bene MODDED UP!
BY OTHER MORONS
*cries* oh for the days of a a half-decent slashdot..... THe register just doens't have the same feel, although i like the smartarses that write it, they're almost equally cynical about everyone.

Good man. Good good man. :)