i guess this is as good a place as any to post this...
i've been visiting osnews.com now for quite a while, and i feel i should speak up now about the rapidly declining overall quality of the site.
my criticism is mostly concerned with the way comments are moderated. comments can be voted up or down by users, and only registered users can post comments now. disallowing anonymous comments resulted in an immediate dramatic decrease in comment quality and dramatically increased the amount and visibility of personal attacks and trolling. also, before anonymous comments were disallowed, anonymous comments started with a score of 0 by default and comments by registered users started with a score of 1 and unregistered users have never been able to vote comments up or down, which has skewed the whole comment moderation system in favor of trolls, and against people who actually have lives outside of the internet.
i for one will be trying my hardest to troll these fuckers until anonymous commenting is allowed and the comment moderation system is fixed or -5 is the default view level for comments.
It doesn't look like that place gets much activity to begin with.
I found their announcement of disabling anons. http://osnews.com/meta/read.php/1136041002/anonymous_posting_gone_for_good.html#comments The admin who replies in the end acts like a real dick.
it used to get more activity before they disabled anons. articles used to get 300+ comments all the time. now it's rare for an article to even get 100...
and yeah, the admin is a real dick...
> Seriously, this stuff always amazes me. If people are so put off, why
> bother doing something, why not just leave?
Are there any good general computer news sites left?
I don't think it's a matter of anonymous vs non-anonymous; I think it's a matter of community-driven (bazaar model, if you will) vs editorial (cathedera) driven.
Around 1998-2000 (the last time I seriously looked at it) OSNews was oriented around the submissions and participation of the people who read it; while I'm sure there were editors, they were in the background and of no importance. Flash forward to now, and apparently you have full-fledged "OS News Columnists" (I heard about eugenia from slashdot; apparently she was a bit of a cunt in her own right) which was the first step toward OSNews becoming its' own elitist playground.
Now you have editors, Columnists and moderated, rating posting.
Because of the inherent elitism that OSNews has chosen to embrace, the only people who will stick around are the karma whores and other gamers. Quality posters DON'T care about registration and ratings (look at the quality of posts at the Ars Technia forums sometime), but they DO care about having to cope with elitist circle-jerks and apparently that's what OSNews has degraded into (apparently degraded into starting with the hiring of full-time columnists instead of being driven by community contributions).
For all practical purposes, OSNews is dead.