SoylentNews Might Shut Down On June 30th (soylentnews.org) 149
ElizabethGreene writes: NCommander announced today that SoylentNews, a fork of Slashdot created in the early 2010s, will be shutting down on June 30th of this year.
Goodbye old friend.
UPDATE (5/27/2023): After the announcement, the appearance of some volunteers gave hope that the site possibly might not have to shut down.
Here's an excerpt from NCommander's original lengthy post, which covered the technical reasons, challenges faced, and the ultimate decision to shut down the operations of SoylentNews: This is the post I never thought I would have to make. I am also writing this post on behalf of SoylentNews PBC, the legal owner of SoylentNews, and not as a member of the staff or the community.
SoylentNews is going to shut down operations on June 30th.
This wasn't an easy decision to come to, and it's ultimately the culmination of a lot of factors, some which were in my control, and some that weren't. A large part boils down to critical maintenance to the site not properly being performed for a very long time. To pay back the mountain of technical debt we've built up, it would require relaunching the site from scratch. I'll discuss this more in depth below, but I can't personally justify the time any more, especially due to the negative impact that SN is having on my personal life. Before we shut down, at least for the foreseeable future, I'm going to outline the situation as I see it, my own personal responsibility, and what happens next. [...]
Goodbye old friend.
UPDATE (5/27/2023): After the announcement, the appearance of some volunteers gave hope that the site possibly might not have to shut down.
Here's an excerpt from NCommander's original lengthy post, which covered the technical reasons, challenges faced, and the ultimate decision to shut down the operations of SoylentNews: This is the post I never thought I would have to make. I am also writing this post on behalf of SoylentNews PBC, the legal owner of SoylentNews, and not as a member of the staff or the community.
SoylentNews is going to shut down operations on June 30th.
This wasn't an easy decision to come to, and it's ultimately the culmination of a lot of factors, some which were in my control, and some that weren't. A large part boils down to critical maintenance to the site not properly being performed for a very long time. To pay back the mountain of technical debt we've built up, it would require relaunching the site from scratch. I'll discuss this more in depth below, but I can't personally justify the time any more, especially due to the negative impact that SN is having on my personal life. Before we shut down, at least for the foreseeable future, I'm going to outline the situation as I see it, my own personal responsibility, and what happens next. [...]
Who? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, let's be honest, I can understand why.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't remember slashdot beta. It was a complete site overhaul to be more mobile friendly but everybody hated the change. From that SoylentNews and Pipedot rose as competitors and looked remarkably just "old" slashdot. The admins scrapped the beta site and here we are. I occasionally posted to Soylent but they simply don't have the user base.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
they simply don't have the user base.
Slashdot too is the ghost of its former self. Remember the Slashdot effect? Lively stories with hundreds of comments?
Slashdot is precious because it's one of the last remnant of the internet of the 90s and early 2000s, which wasn't rotten to the core by advertisement and used to massively put the entire Earth's population under surveillance. It's naive and innocent social media without the hatefulness of big data. SoylentNew too was precious for the same reason, and I'm sad to see it go. But I keep wondering how Slashdot itself keeps going. It's nothing like it used to be.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Informative)
I keep wondering how Slashdot itself keeps going. It's nothing like it used to be.
It gets only absolutely critical maintenance, its active user base is a minuscule percentage of what it used to be, it still somehow inexplicably sells ads, and frankly it's pretty simple. Some features have been hacked out of it, possibly because they were problematic to maintain, like tags. You're only allowed 200 relationships (and management of them is terrible, sigh... but making it better would no doubt involve more queries.) If it has any meaningful caching at all, by modern standards this site hardly does anything. It's convenient that this is how we like it. I am still using classic, and still loving it. It must be nice to know that your user base only wants one feature, and will keep coming back even if they don't get it.
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It must be nice to know that your user base only wants one feature, and will keep coming back even if they don't get it.
Wait, are we talking about unicode or editing?
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Wait, are we talking about unicode or editing?
Unicode. Only a small segment of users want editing, the rest of us use classic and know how to use preview, and if our comment is wrong it's our own fault and we take responsibility for it. There's too much content in a Slashdot discussion to have to start reading edit histories to make sense of a thread. And without edit history, it becomes a pure misfeature as it can be used for gaslighting.
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A 2-minute edit was the feature most often discussed. Yes, we have preview, but we still screw up :D
It's just not a big deal anymore. Somehow we started not harassing each other for editing failure, which I think shows growth ;)
Re:Who? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just not a big deal anymore. Somehow we started not harassing each other for editing failure, which I think shows growth ;)
And if you *really* need to edit, replying to yourself is messy but gets the point across. I agree that allowing to edit/delete posts just leads to abuse of the system. Typos don't get fixed, but jerks and narcissists retract anything that turns out to be unpopular, which can make a whole thread useless.
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> Slashdot too is the ghost of its former self. Remember the Slashdot effect? Lively stories with hundreds of comments?
Yes, I remember. So where have the Slashdot users gone? To Reddit?
Hacker News seems to be thriving. The commentary on current tech is smart, even as the user base leans older (40+). This post from yesterday, "Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple," has received 389 comments. It's well worth reading.
Until this very moment, I have not thought about the business model for
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I can't really imagine people here leaving for Reddit. Reddit is maybe funny for playing the Reddit game, but it ain't really the place to have a meaningful discussion or find something insightful or interesting. At best, it's an outlet for corporations to hawk crap and to dig into your personal little filter bubble and hype yourself into hyperventilation about perceived problems.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't really imagine people here leaving for Reddit. Reddit is maybe funny for playing the Reddit game, but it ain't really the place to have a meaningful discussion or find something insightful or interesting. At best, it's an outlet for corporations to hawk crap and to dig into your personal little filter bubble and hype yourself into hyperventilation about perceived problems.
Here on Slashdot, we complained about beta, then it went away. Reddit went right ahead and ruined their site, which is why old.reddit.com still persists. As you state above, they also have the problem of groupthink and moderation whoring. Slashdot's moderation isn't perfect, but capping it at -1 and +5 prevents some of the worst abuses. That and the fact that ads look like ads not content, posts are arranged chronologically by default... yeah, I remember why I never left this site for reddit.
Re: Who? (Score:2)
Same here. The Slashdot Beta drove me to SN for awhile. I occasionally check out both. Didnâ(TM)t realize it had been 12 years. Christ Iâ(TM)m old
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Well, that was something Soylent had going for it over Slashdot, the goofballs with weird personal vendettas didn't exist over there. The signal to noise ratio was better.
Sadly, the amount of signal wasn't.
Aside of that, I have to agree with you. Every other social media site is totally useless as a communication and discussion medium. Slashdot is probably the only place left where you can actually have a sensible discussion with someone whose position you do not share without it descending into mudslinging
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the Slashdot effect?
That isn't a demand side change, it's a supply side. Slashdot wouldn't have had the power in the 90s to knock the internet offline if they were hosted at large hosting providers rather than some beige box on the end of some dude's cable modem. Sure Slashdot traffic has dropped off a bit, but that is tiny compared to the many orders of magnitude higher resilience even budget internet sites have these days against a traffic storm.
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Slashdotting is difficult now because of CDNs. I think a lot of people were put off commenting during the really bad days a few years ago, when the site was nearly taken over by far right asshats. If you go back and look at comments about things like Gamergate, and the moderation on those comments... It wasn't pretty.
The abuse also made people less willing to do interviews and Q/A sessions on the site.
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Slashdot is following right behind Soylent and fairly closely at that. I'd take odds that the vast majority of new users are just old users that posted anonymo
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I wish they would do subscriptions again.
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The thing I like about soylentnews is the dialog I have with other commenters, even when we vehemently disagree. There are trolls, to be sure, but the SNR is pretty good.
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I post there all the time because its not filled with right wing russians trying to skew the conversation and basically just ruin everything.
I rarely post here anymore because of the above. its no longer left leaning and no longer technnical. its just a green site that reminds me of the old slashdot. but this one and its userbase are not really my friends. all the ones I knew have moved on except for a few.
soylent > slash for as long as soylent has been around.
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I suspect getting rid of non-logged-in anonymous posts was the main reason for that improvement.
It was probably the right call... I just wish that wasn't how the world worked today.
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I’m just glad they somehow stopped all that obnoxious Nazi ASCII Art here on Slashdot.
Damn, it was so annoying seeing 5 huge swastikas on every damn post.
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I’m just glad they somehow stopped all that obnoxious Nazi ASCII Art here on Slashdot.
Damn, it was so annoying seeing 5 huge swastikas on every damn post.
Yeah and now the lameness filter blocks anything that looks like ascii art, including code snippets. The swastikas, penisbirds etc were all hidden by browsing at anything greater than -1.
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> The swastikas, penisbirds etc were all hidden by browsing at anything greater than -1.
Hey hey hey don’t lump penisbirds in with swastikas. I don’t want either spammed all over the place but penisbird is art and I wouldn’t mind if they were posted from time to time.
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and that guy that constantly complains that he can't sign up to things because he isn't "compromised" by "the man"
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I recognize your .sig and I have seen you about for ... 20 years now?
Slashdot was never left leaning. Many of the folks on Slashdot had (have?) values that left leaning folks like, but I would classify it more as crypto-anarchy rather than right or left.
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It's pretty well established that the Russian troll farms were pushing right-wing ideology in the US and supporting right-wing candidates, regardless of the actual politics in Russia (which also happen to be right-wing, even if they pretend otherwise)
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Gosh! I remember ranting and raving against the Slashdot Beta (just look at my sig!)
I *loved* PipeDot.org while it lasted, never got into Soylent.org.
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just created a thousand soxpups (Score:2)
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One of the head guys mentioned in Ncommander's post turned out to be a giant baby and when he didn't get his own way on something stupid he flounced off ranting about how everyone else was at fault.
When you run something on volunteer labor, you have to be prepared to compromise with others or do it yourself. Ncommander walked away in round one, opted for the latter in round two and threw in the towel in round three. A more suspicious sort might assume a Messiah Complex.
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Unfortunately, it's just the tip of a very... (Score:2)
...large and very ugly iceberg"
A Fatberg, then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Unfortunately, it's just the tip of a very... (Score:4, Funny)
It's been... 84 years...
(Damn, take some Metamucil)
Stuck with just slashdot now (Score:3)
Soylent at least kept the site sane looking. Even worked well in Windows 95 web browsers.
So lets see, threshold drop downs when selected are black text on a black background, comments are all bunched up on the left side, text overflows over the bar at the bottom of the page. Don't even get me started with the social media buttons or advertising. "Follow Slashdot stories on Twatter" How much do you get paid for that?
And almost the entire front page is filled with bullshit stories about "AI".
It is a good thing nerdy tech news no longer even exists, or I'd be really sore about what has happened to this site.
Re:Stuck with just slashdot now (Score:4, Interesting)
I dunno. Most of the time I find the YCombinator "Hacker News" feed [ycombinator.com] decent. It might not be your cup of tea if you're genuinely allergic to machine learning, but despite its close association with venture capitalism, it seems to me to be almost entirely free from sponsored bullshit and articles that are obviously motivated by people trying to manipulate investors. While modern Slashdot's AI stories are invariably low-quality second-hand journalism about ethical dilemmas or self-driving, the posts on HN tend to be actually technical. (Like they used to be on Slashdot!) This is something SoylentNews never really attained, since it was emulating a Slashdot that was already pretty run down by the time of the Beta crisis.
I can't help but wonder if Slashdot would have gone down a different path if it had been more Firehose and less "posted-by-editor-so-and-so", but perhaps it's really just found a local minimum where an ageing, ad-clicking readership is kept content with a glorified RSS feed aggregator that just reposts soft, tech-curious Ars Technica, Engadget, and Wired articles without any voice or soul of its own.
Re: Stuck with just slashdot now (Score:2)
I was here for the Jon Katz Welcome to the Hellmouth era. You learned to filter out the annoying posters
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And almost the entire front page is filled with bullshit stories about "AI".
Unfortunately, that is not the fault of the site.
That's just where the world is right now.
Secret Ingredient (Score:4, Funny)
Will they finally announce what SoylentNews is made from?
Re: Secret Ingredient (Score:2)
Re: Secret Ingredient (Score:5, Funny)
"soæ"
You found the secret ingredient.
Re: Secret Ingredient (Score:3)
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Will they finally announce what SoylentNews is made from?
Sounds like they're netting everyone go, so guessing it's *not* people. :-)
[*spoiler alert* -- from 1973]
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Obvious why it folded (Score:2, Funny)
I never went there, so there was no draw for readers.
Note that Slashdot is still here.
Also I don't think you can say "Goodbye old friend" for something started in 2010.
Re:Obvious why it folded (Score:4, Funny)
I never went there, so there was no draw for readers.
That's idiotic. You're a nobody. Who the fuck cares where you go?
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I initially read it that way (i.e. implying that he's the thing that draws readers, and he was never on Soylent so readers weren't drawn there). After some consideration, I think he's not quite that narcissistic, just bad at expressing himself. I think what he's actually trying to say is that he believes that if Soylent had any draw for readers he would have gone there. Since he never went there, it must have had no draw for readers. Still pretty egocentric, making the assumption that he's the benchmark
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After some consideration, I think he's not quite that narcissistic, just bad at expressing himself.
No, I suspect you just don't realize he was making a joke.
Slashdot should learn from this (Score:3, Insightful)
I joined Soylentnews when Slashdot started to have 80% social-justice-warrior stories. That's not News that Matters. Soylentnews provided a relief.
Also: Get that Unicode support merged. Slashdot is stuck in the 90s.
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> Also: Get that Unicode support merged.
But that would take work! /s
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I did as well, except it turns out that Soylentnews was just Phoronix with a different front page, providing a news aggregator for news already aggregated elsewhere, and the exception to that rule is stories covered on Slashdot.
Even know I scroll down the front page and I needed to get 3/4 of the way down before I find something that wasn't already discussed on Slashdot, and that unique story was nothing more than a link to a page explaining how register maps work on a microcontroller. That's not news, it's
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Re:Slashdot should learn from this (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, Soylentnews isn't perfect either, but at least it isn't the moderators flooding the site with stories confirming their bias. You have to learn to ignore a few of the active users.
Note: Slashdot regained some sanity a few years ago (when it was bought/sold?) and there were changes to the moderator team.
Why did Soylent News exist? (Score:2)
Why did this fork exist? I just took a look and it seemed to be just like Slashdot.
Response from the founder (Score:5, Informative)
Why did this fork exist? I just took a look and it seemed to be just like Slashdot.
I started SoylentNews.
Slashdot had been taken over by a new company, they wanted to turn it into more of a coffee-table magazine with softer stories to appeal to a larger audience, and had a version "Beta" that showed the new format. People hated it.
I mean... people really *really" hated it, and despite tremendous criticism from the user base, management was adamant that Beta was the future of Slashdot.
And in a moment of weakness I decided it would be better to fork slashdot and keep the audience, and so registered the domain "dotslash" and posted a bunch of comments alerting people to the alternate site and if anyone would like to help they could and so on.
"Dotslash" was too derivitive and could have opened us up to trademark and other problems, so we had a contest for a new name and "Soylent News" came out as the winner. The tagline was "Soylent News is people!".
The intent was to keep the tech/science news aggregation and remove some of the more modern UI changes that put so much whitespace on the terminal. I mean, people don't notice now, but the original slashdot packed a ton of information on one screen. Progressive UI changes kept adding extra space, so that nowadays everything has whitespace above, below, and to either side of everything.
NCommander had done the initial fork of the software and had got it running, which took an enormous amount of effort. Because of that effort, he felt that he should be CEO of the organization: he got a couple of the other tech people on his side and quite literally held the software for ransom, threatening to go start his own site (with the software that he had worked so hard on, but without letting Soylent News use it) if I didn't relinquish control to him.
It was not pretty. I put my initial stake up for sale, someone in Boston put up the money on behalf of the site, and I was out.
Then Slashdot quietly killed Beta, so there was no reason to leave.
I had secured funding for the next 3 years, and was about to start selling advertising. I was trying to get 1-on-1 interviews with someone - I forget who and where, but it was a tech person on the other side of a war that had broken out at that time. I thought it would be interesting to have Soylent News be a primary source of news, and in particular an unvarnished viewpoint that didn't go through political channels. I was in discussions with people as to how to set up an encrypted interview with someone without them giving away their location and identity.
Soylent News had great potential, and there were a lot of things that it could have done to make it one of the mainstream news sources. I think of that when I see all the new news outlets that have sprung up in the intervening years - Soylent News wasn't one of them.
I'm sorry to see it go.
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Thanks for Soylent - I joined very early on and its been in my RSS feeds more or less since it started.
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NCommander had done the initial fork of the software and had got it running, which took an enormous amount of effort. Because of that effort, he felt that he should be CEO of the organization: he got a couple of the other tech people on his side and quite literally held the software for ransom, threatening to go start his own site (with the software that he had worked so hard on, but without letting Soylent News use it) if I didn't relinquish control to him.
You're saying the person who did the labour refused to let the results of the labour be used without being compensated? Isn't that just how the labour market is supposed to work?
Sharing the work load (Score:4, Interesting)
You're saying the person who did the labour refused to let the results of the labour be used without being compensated? Isn't that just how the labour market is supposed to work?
I'm saying that *one* of the people who did *some* of the work found himself in a position of power and took advantage of it. He was offered the position of technical director where he could have been the lead for creating new features and applications for the site. He would not have had to worry about things like sales, corporate management, taxes, and the like.
Instead he wanted to be CEO and be responsible for everything about the company.
Also note that this was something like 3 months since inception, we were still getting our legs under us.
After the transition, I'm pretty sure it was like Atlas shifting the entire planet onto his shoulders: he was completely overwhelmed by the amount of work, effort, and attention needed to manage everything. I'm also pretty sure that he had no experience finding and hiring people to take over aspects of management, so his CEO position kept dragging on him for years.
So no, I'm not saying anything like that. I thought tech director was a good fit for his skills, it would have given him a slice of the profits (if we had any), and it would have been much less of a burden.
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"... And in a moment of weakness I decided it would be better to fork slashdot and keep the audience, and so registered the domain "dotslash" and posted a bunch of comments alerting people to the alternate site and if anyone would like to help they could and so on ..."
Thank you for your work, sad it is the end, however wouldn't "backslash" (alternatively "backslashdot") be more appropriate for the name - unless it was "politically" not acceptable?
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I seem to remember that at one point, "Backslash" was the name of the editor interface of the Slash software that runs Slashdot.
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Old internet is dying (Score:5, Insightful)
And it seems like Slashdot is the only bastion still holding out. It exists exactly in that goldilocks zone of being large enough to enable a meaningful discussion while still being small enough to not be an interesting target for nation state trolls, astroturfers and other "opinion shapers" trying to derail any and all meaningful discussion that might endanger their preferred narrative.
Aside of Slashdot, there isn't really much left that has this quality. At least not to my knowledge.
Which makes me wonder, where did all the people go that used to be here?
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It exists exactly in that goldilocks zone of being large enough to enable a meaningful discussion while still being small enough to not be an interesting target for nation state trolls,
I think it's nice that we have our own, garden fresh, home grown morons who I've got to know over decades. Hi Superkendall I know you're on this story!
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It exists exactly in that goldilocks zone of being large enough to enable a meaningful discussion while still being small enough to not be an interesting target for nation state trolls,
I think it's nice that we have our own, garden fresh, home grown morons who I've got to know over decades. Hi Superkendall I know you're on this story!
*slow clap*
Well played. I wish I had mod points for that one.
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I went to Reddit very shortly after it formed and it was a pure Slashdot-with-your-own-editing clone. Very tech focused, and the founders have been interviewed where they directly said they saw themselves as a modern Slashdot.
Reddit has obviously drastically changed since the early times, but you can still get good individual subreddits where they're more focused than the karma-scoring game of
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Sorry, no. Reddit left a very foul taste in my mouth because of how it works. What you have there is the same you find in a lot of modern social media sites. The combination of parts of the site being run by volunteers and users rather than the owners of the site and the slew of unwritten rules of conduct create a very weird atmosphere where the people running subreddits are afraid of getting their turf shut down for allowing "bad" content, which leads to overly zealous censoring, which in turn leads to sel
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Sorry, no. Reddit left a very foul taste in my mouth because of how it works...
I'd still second 'Reddit', but with three caveats...
First, I think many 'aged out'. 30-year-old users who joined in June 1998 turn 55 this year...and while I personally would value their continued contributions, no doubt that many of them shifted to a non-technical career field, got busy with families, many have likely died, or even if none of those apply, moving up in one's career leaves less time to post on internet forums.
Second, I think Reddit's population is way, way higher than Slashdot's, even in its
Re:Old internet is dying (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah reddit. The site which just had their mental health department reach out to me because of an anonymous tip that I am at risk of self harming, or the site that banned me for 3 weeks because upon telling an idiot that what he would do will burn his house down he reported me for threatening violence (funny enough 6 months later he posted a picture of the thing he built burnt to a crisp with a fire extinguisher), the site that gave me 180 day ban for telling someone who doxxed me to go fuck themselves with the most painful garden implement I can think of, because apparently doxxing is a-okay but telling someone to fuck themselves makes me "toxic".
Yeah, nah. Reddit is no replacement for Slashdot. On Slashdot the worst that can happen to you is a -1 mod to oblivion. On Reddit you're entirely at the whim of pleasuring every fucking idiot mod on their power trip. Great site, but Slashdot is free whereas Reddit demands you pay with your self respect.
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The thing you have to keep in mind with Reddit is that it works like an elementary school. The proper way of handling being called a bad name is to go up to the nanny and tattle instead of simply out-witting the name caller.
Because then they go tattle and nanny sides with them.
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Re: Old internet is dying (Score:2)
Oh man, Digg... I forgot about that one. There use to be tons of sniping in the comments about how Digg was better/worse than Slashdot, then it just sort of stopped one day.
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Oh man, Digg... I forgot about that one. There use to be tons of sniping in the comments about how Digg was better/worse than Slashdot, then it just sort of stopped one day.
I was thinking about that reading this thread too. I remember there being a few digg stories that showed there then here a day later for a year or two and then I almost never thought of digg again.
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I agree that Reddit has a lot of problems, and one is giving mods way too much power. Got myself banned just for messaging a mod with a brag that I was going to change the world. No profanity, no insults. Banned anyway. I complained to the senior mod of that subreddit, and he agreed that banning me was too harsh, not justified.
Turned out the ban was a temporary one. But I was not then that familiar with reddit, and had no idea that a "ban" wasn't necessarily permanent. That's some bad terminology, a
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Was it one of those star-blade rotary lawn edgers? There was one that was constantly on TV commercials when I was a kid.
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I recently read an article that said among Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Reddit users; that Reddit users had the worst mental health throughout COVID. Now it is possible that Reddit users were the most likely to actually follow COVID restrictions or something like that but the site is just so overwhelmingly negative especially compared to screenshots from a decade ago.
That's something because I can remember installing a plugin to replace Youtube comments with Reddit comments on videos and feeling very p
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Aside of Slashdot, there isn't really much left that has this quality. At least not to my knowledge.
Which makes me wonder, where did all the people go that used to be here?
Hackaday has good news and information, and the comments section is pretty good for a free-to-use site. I get a lot of news there that I would have seen first on Slashdot back in the day. Hackaday's commenting is based on Wordpress and doesn't nest properly, and there's no up/downmodding. I wouldn't say it's a replacement, more of a complementary site. The internet is bigger than it was back in 2000 and not all the news fits on one site anymore :)
Re:Old internet is dying (Score:4, Interesting)
while still being small enough to not be an interesting target for nation state trolls
Holy crap you are oblivious to what goes on on this site. Just for fun browse slashdot stories based on timezones posted and watch the responses and moderation change over the course of 24 hours before it normalises and the trolls are drowned out. This site has heavily pro-China and pro-russia trolls. This site has active evidence of proper troll farming. I'm not even talking about the COVID era troll farm that registered 20 something misspellings of rsilvergun's username but actual innocuous looking trolls that out themselves with their many accounts when they f-up and log in to the wrong one to post a reply.
Slashdot's savoir is it's moderation system and that the people still outnumber the paid for trolls, nothing more. But it sure as hell isn't small enough to fly under some radar.
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Sure we have our share of trolls, but if you consider this a problem, you live a very sheltered life. You can actually have a relevant discussion here, even on controversial and/or political topics, and the derailing doesn't work (often) because people simply don't fall for them.
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I went to “The Well” which costs money every month. It was once one of the most influential places on the internet with a lot of important people and a 10k user count. It’s almost dead these days.
The day of the Ukraine invasion someone paid money to sign up, actually set up their profile, and then made a single pro-russia post full of nonsense. They never posted again but last I checked they were still paid up,
I imagine some troll was looking for “important forums” and was v
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Oh well the point was it doesn’t take much to get the attention of shills.
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I'm not even talking about the COVID era troll farm that registered 20 something misspellings of rsilvergun's username
If you were really paying attention, you'd know that all those posts are the work of one user - maybe best known as OMBad, but with a long previous post history as 110010001000
https://slashdot.org/~ombad [slashdot.org]
https://slashdot.org/~11001000... [slashdot.org]
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I seriously doubt this, and I know that over the years my posts have been called Russian or Chinese or Hillary Clinton propaganda a number of times - I'm not particularly pro Russia or China or Hillary Clinton, I'm certainly not getting paid to post here, it's just a thing people on Slashdot say if you disagree with them.
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Most of the nation-state paid trolls aren't being paid to post propaganda for their government anyway. Posts about how Putin is right aren't effective, so they gave up on that ages ago. It's far more likely that the people calling you a Russian troll are Russian trolls, because that's the sort of paranoia and disinformation they get paid to spread. Explanation: https://www.newyorker.com/news... [newyorker.com]
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As someone who likes do this to people from time to time I apologize in advance and offer some reasoning
1) You've said something so wrong, ignorant, or pointless that I have become suspicious. At this point I don't want to have a serious discussion anymore regardless if you're a shill or not and I say it because it's irritating if you're not and bad for your work if you are. Also in any case the focus of the discussion goes away from George Soros as the poster now needs to work on defending their identity
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News for Nerds (Score:2)
While I would agree that unfortunately we don't see the same variety of science, medicine and tech stories that used to appear, it is good to see that when
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LoB
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The entire industry has changed. Tech is not nerdy anymore. It's cool, the technologies we work with are less nerdy. Java and Python and REST microservices are just fine and Java has turned into a powerful language instead of being C++ for stupid people. But what most of us do today doesn't have that gritty burned in phosphor looking, baking dust on a hot transformer smelling, bit flipping, crunchy floppy drive sounding feel that things used to have.
I for every minute I spend learning boring polished te
Cool Name But- (Score:5, Funny)
First I've heard of Soylent News.
(but then I haven't been around on Slashdot all that long)