So, Slashdot bills itself as being "News for Nerds". The implication being that it is about technology and science and all the stuff nerds (or rather, computer nerds) usually like.
However, somewhere along the line it seems the Slashdot crowd has become more and more hostile to what they claim to promote. Technophobia and closet luddism permeate the news articles, and the discussion related to them. Nowhere do you see more comments along the lines of "I just want a phone that I can make calls with!" and "Digital cameras will never be better than film!", and a hundred other similar opinions. The standard reaction to a new technological development seems to be either to belittle it, claiming that nobody wants it, or coming right out and calling it evil.
It is instructive to look at some older Slashdot threads about emergining new technology. For instance, the first announcement of the iPod:
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107
The editor's comment on it? "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." The following thread contains many examples of Slashdotters claiming the device will never succeed.
Slashdotters also like to mock people for reacting with fear to anything that contains a scary word like "nuclear", thinking themselves much better because they can see the objective benefits of nuclear technology. But drop a word like "RFID" into an article, and they will react with as much fear and scorn as any anti-nuclear activist. They'll go to extreme lengths to think up a scenario where this technology they fear could somehow harm them - in a recent story about RFID being used for tracking medicine shipments, somebody managed to imagine a high-tech robber who would use an RFID reader to scan people exiting a pharmacy to rob them of valuable drugs.
There are many other words that slashdotters fear - "propietary", "intellectual property"... Some of them I too agree with, but overall, the Slashdot discourse on these subjects is ruled by fear and dogma. Slashdotters denounce these things in others, yet do not see themselves doing the exact same things.
(Score:4, Insightful)
I think RFID was a bad example. It's quite obvious that RFID could be abused.
That said, I agree that the vast majority of slashdotters are talking out their arse. You'd think that having a +5 threshold would do help, but it doesn't. The only difference between most +5 and +1 is that the +5's know how to sound reasonable and authoritative. But they're still talking about things they have no idea about.
I think I most clearly recognized the ignorant group-think that goes on there when they discussed some technology behind audio codecs. Ie, the whole MP3/Vorbis/MPC/AAC/etc issue. The pure ignorance was staggering, but there were many +5 fools with delusions of knowledge pontificating about something they clearly knew nothing about. And the very few people who did, and attempted to correct the popular misconceptions, all remained at +1.
Oh, and the whole RTFA issue.
I started reading slashdot back in 1998. Back then it was fantastic. Being a recent linux neophyte, I learned more little tips'n'tricks about *nix in one day than I would surfing the web for weeks. But those days are long gone. Reading /. now rots the brain, and instills many beliefs that are misguided.
kuro5hin is a step up now, particularly for more esoteric discussion. But it also has its flaws. Anyone have suggestions for sites with high S/N ratio, or is going back to moderated technical newsgroups the only option?
> I think RFID was a bad example. It's quite obvious that RFID could be abused.
No, it's a perfect example in context, since I compared it with the attitude towards nuclear technology. It's obvious that is very dangerous, too. And both have very interesting and beneficial uses in addition to the abuses and dangers. Yet RFID is the one labelled as utterly evil, in almost exactly the same way anti-nuclear activists talk about nuclear technology.
http://www.arstechnica.com > /.
The discussion isn't as integrated into the actual news story as it is on SlashDot; you have to click a separate "discuss" link to head to their forums to talk about it. This might be a good thing or a bad thing; decide for yourself. Either way, there's a lot less volume all around, and seems a bit less prone to FUD (most of the editors, anyway).
(Prior post deleted because I wrote ./ instead of /. (sigh)
I used to read Ars Technica, but at some point their multiple-page stories on the front page on esoteric legal or technical topics got too boring to wade through. While I was away, they redesigned the site to look quite horrid and removed all actual content from the front page.
I'm with WAHa on this one. Besides, the only articles I ever found worth reading were the ones by Hannibal. Not to mention the forums are... worse than slashdot, if that's possible.
I will comment that Hannibal's articles generally were very good.
Oh, Ars Technica has had some real gems, that's true.
Personally, I am totally in love with Jade's strange stream-of-consciousness tech review articles. Sadly, there have been like five of them, total.
What's a tech site minus the fanboys, spammers and flamethrowers?
It's not a tech site. It's an anime site with something allowing people to yak on about computers.
Okay.
The backlash against the iPod was well founded. Why? Because slashdot was on top of every other music player out there beforehand.
So the iPod was a sort of "oh okay, now Apple wants to join the party" kind of thing.
You've got apple fanboys, and apple haters there...
Now, the nuclear/rfid crowd is to be expected. But guess what? After about 100 comments, you see a few +5 Interestings that battle those points back.
After a few months, the old arguments against some technology tend to not get repeated (and when they do, usually someone wises up and -1 Redundants it)
It's not Ludditism. It's cuz slashdot is JADED. This sploogy new tech stuff just isn't as exciting, unless it's really novel.
You'll see them get excited when you start talking about firewire outputs on digital cable DVRs, for example. ROR.
kuro5hin sucks.
It's half trolls and half mental masturbation. Avoid it all costs (except to read diaries of people you like).
Unfortunately there is no slashdot replacement right now.
Which is why I have three accounts (I spread out my flames).
Yeah there is no slashdot replacement alright, no one else can replace the bandwidth bill webmasters get after a slashdot-effect.
And on the topic of Slashdot, here's a wonderful little sentence straight off today's front page:
> "Is this the first wave of the much anticipated reverse-migration which will be a hallmark of the 21st century?"
Slashdot, news for nerds.
Wakachan, news for otakus?
> otakus
Please don't make english plurals out of japanese words.
I am sorry, but we do not actually speak Japanese here, thus it's okay to rape their language.
age for agreement
That kind of thinking results in strangeness like Engrish.
Not that I'm complaining.
Ok, it's not really fair to kick a man (or site) when he's down, but what the hell, Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/28/0319239
Posting an ad for a company that makes stickers that "prolong battery life" by using "nanotech" as front-page news?
lol nanoceramic
Every time I look at slashdot, I lose more faith in the future of computing. Seems like everyone there is an overly biased linux zealot with no ability to look at a situation objectively at all.
If the future is as close-minded as this, we're fucked D:
No. We're employed (and they're not).
Time to kick a dead horse some more, because I found this too funny:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/03/0517211&tid=109&tid=216
It's a near-perfect parody of the archetypal Slashdot article!
And here's the perfect parody:
http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/01/15/0327207.shtml?tid=134&tid=164&tid=185
...except it should read "Scientists Create Supersoldier From Helium". ; )
I have to agree with this partially, mainly because there's an even worse example which was only half-mentioned above: the N-Gage.
I understand if Slashdot didn't like the iPod....very few did get it before it became a success...and on top of that, it tried hard to appeal to people by design and general shininess.... which isn't the number one way of impressing slashdotters.
The N-Gage, on the other hand, wasn't a success. It wasn't a design miracle either. What it was, was an easily hackable and in general quite programmable phone. I realized exactly how useful this is when someone appeared in some slashdot thread and explained that he ran four IM programs constantly on his N-Gage, without problems, and did it anywhere. Transferring information between the N-Gage and his main computer with bluetooth was of course no problem either.
Yes, it was crappily designed. But so are a lot of things. Some of these people mod PS2s by soldering them in tens of places - that if anything is badly designed hardware for the intended purpose. In exactly the same way the N-Gage could be made to work as desired after some kind of session of "defagging".
And of course, there's not really any need for anything more - if it's a bit larger than a normal phone and can run all your IM programs conveniently anywhere, it's a very good nerd item.
On the other hand, I want to defend Slashdot too.
Are a lot of the posts stupid? Yes.
Are a lot of the posts anti-new-technology? Yes.
Is this because they're reactionary? No, I don't think so.
While popularity and net entropy tends to do bad things to sites and this very probably is the case with Slashdot too (I'm quite new to it, so I can't judge that), I suspect Slashdot in part is just reflecting the tech world around it.
I'm often stunned and frustrated by the fact that many very important tech decisions and other things that definitely affect normal people are only discussed on Slashdot and/or Ars Technica. My local high-budget computer magazine (which started as an half-insider mostyly black-and-white thing in 1985) has about 100 pages of new stuff each month, but still fails to discuss any of the politics of computing: it's just dell-this or nvidia-that...even when they discuss Linux it's only a matter of tools.
Slashdot DOES discuss the politics of tech. This leads to very significan't problems: you can't - in my opinion - separate the "News for Nerds" from "Stuff that matters". Back when Slashdot started I'd guess that "patents=bad" was about gif and not much else. Now you can get hit with patent lawsuits from some company full of lawyer demons for releasing a tiny bit of code.
People might not be overtly positive towards new tech on slashdot anymore, but is it really their fault? I think the companies who do their hardest to take the fun out of tech are partially to blame. The N-Gage works as an example here too: sure, you can hack it, but if you're a US citizen, are you really sure you're not violating the DMCA, risking LOTS jail time?
The question is - does Slashdot's quite fanatical stance on many of these admittedly serious issues do more harm than good for the cause? It's becoming far too easy to dismiss issues as uninformed ranting by Slashdotters.
For instance, in an unusual show of integrity, Slashdot just posted a story about how an earlier article of theirs (about how AOL supposedly claims they everything sent over AIM) was pure bullshit: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/0138215&tid=158&tid=120&tid=215&tid=95&tid=17
This is quite depressingly common with Slashdot stories: Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are blow way out of proportion on the front page, and while they are often refuted right away in the comments, no retraction or correction is posted, except in very serious cases.