Does Anyone Believe Slashdot

Does anyone really take anything said at Slashdot seriously? And if so, why? Would, in particular, any regular Wiki reader take them seriously?

I'm not sure if I agree... There are a number of well educated people with experience in the industry that post to Slashdot - usually those who get their posts moderated up to 4+. I find the articles themselves (and the book reviews) are very valuable... As for the zealotry, remember that these are the people that will be working in industry several years from now.. and their opinions regarding intellectual property & the "revolt against corporatism" do have some interesting points to them. [many of them wrong, in my opinion, but certainly worth debate]

I sometimes worry, however, that the site will just implode upon itself because of the growing belief in its ranks that Slashdot is a centre for political action.

--StuCharlton

Personally, I just wish there were an easier way to filter out all the posts that have absolutely zero worth. SlashDot does cover a lot of cool topics, but I never have enough time to read an entire thread.

: Try http://www.alterslash.org/

FWIW, I am 22 and I've been working in the industry for over 5 years now straight out of high school. While my situtaion is obviously not TheNorm?, I wouldn't ever discard anyone's opinion based solely on their age. Unforunately however, you are right Sam... most of the waste comes from them.

--DrewMarsh

When reading a thread on SlashDot, there's a pull-down list box for "threshhold". Set it to 3 and then click on "change"; all the dross (or most of it, anyhow) will go away.

I can't stand slashdot, but being younger than the "average age" of their posters, and myself rabidly anti-microsoft (albeit in a quieter sort of a way), I can't help but think some of the comments on this page are unpleasant overgeneralisations :). -- LukeGorrie

Well Drew, I'm 22 as well, and have been in industry for about 5 years too.. so you're not alone. I do feel frustrated in the amount of over-generalizing and judgementalism that is common among our age group (on Slashdot). --StuCharlton

"Does anyone really take anything said at Slashdot seriously?"

Janes Defence Weekly does. See http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/07/120249.shtml .

[Sometimes a stir up is worthwhile... in this case, I think it is, because I think Slashdot is really growing in influence and there hasn't been a lot of discussion about this outside of the site itself.] --StuCharlton

Does anyone really take anything said at Slashdot seriously?

Oh, there's all sorts of great stuff there. Of course there is stuff to be taken seriously! On the other hand, There is a lot of static, even when you set the threshhold to 3. SlashDot is a little like wiki ... with a much lower signal to noise ratio. --EricHerman

See also SlashDot

What I find interesting about Slashdot is the growing political nature of the site. Part of me heaves over the unbelievably ignorant opinions thrown in the ring. I also think, however, that this is perhaps the only major forum for airing this issues out. [if only because the moderation tends to keep the S/N ratio down]

Examples of the growing political rhetoric. - The DVD CCA / MPAA lawsuit against the authors of the DvdHack?, DeCSS. People are considering boycotts against DVD's. Readers are joining the EFF and the ACLU. People are pledging to support the DeCSS's authors legal battle if need be.

Are people listening? DanGillmor? from the San Jose Merc is. [http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmor/] BrokenLink

- The growing "corporatism" vs. "individualism" debate, popularized by JonKatz?'s op-ed pieces, the SeattleWtoRiots?, etc. I think this debate is in many ways harder to swallow because it really exposes people to how complicated international economics and trade can get. At the same time however, it is impossible to ignore the corporate trend towards "bigness", as if fat == power. (no, fat = profit, the reason most corporations want to / try to get big, and the power only happens to protect the profit.)

Slashdot seems to be afraid of this trend, but they also believe that these corporations will be destroyed by the "Jihad of Open Source" and the revolt of the "proletariat masses" (sound familiar?).

I have an easier explanation: bigness means slowness. As an example, AOL/Time Warner is going to have a really interesting time generating NEW content, because I hope they don't think they're going to build the world's largest media conglomerate on BugsBunny reruns and back issues of TimeMagazine. And OpenSource will at the very least continue to keep these companies aware of the intellectual property debates ahead of us.

--StuCharlton

Reading SlashDot requires some grain of salt:

The stories are arbitrary selected, with no intention of beeing balanced or "fair". SlashDot lacks the basic decission making process story/no story which classical media like news papers have (not saying that newspapers are not biased).
SlashDot serves a community by telling these UnwashedMasses (as they name themself sometimes) what they want to hear.
SlashDot is US biased (AmericanCulturalAssumption), although OpenSource, and esp. Linux, is a much wider movement (just count the gun control threads on SlashDot, or the mentioning of some "amendments" which have no meaning outside the US).
Most stories are anyhow only pointers to other publications.
SlashDot has some pretty strange commenters, which might need medical treatment.
The SlashDot moderating system is sub-optimal. A recent demonstration showed how one can get a zero-information, totally crap, all made-up, comment to level 5 (almost the highest rate). BTW, it was a fine pice of SocialEngineering.
The moderation is as arbitrary as the selection of stories, based on nothing put personal preferences.

And still, this system brings up valuable information to read, interesting pointers to issues going on in the computer industry, and questions worth to discuss. I would, however, not make SlashDot my only source of information (as some readers tend to do).

Sam, I agree with Tim. Take the good, toss the bad. By reading Slashdot, I learn about lots of interesting things I wouldn't otherwise hear about. I also roll my eyes a fair bit. I treat it as a partisan news site, not a discussion forum. I rarely click to read the discussion, and when I do, I usually read it with a threshold of 4, not 3. If I really want to discuss something that was posted there, I do it here. (Oh, and I've set my preferences so I don't see anything by Jon Katz. LifesJustTooShort.) --GlennVanderburg

I agree that SlashDot has a far lower signal/noise ratio than Wiki. However, unlike wiki, Slashdot has fairly effective means to filter out most of the noise. To me, the PPR wiki is about 30% noise. Raw Slashdot is about 95% noise, but the filtering brings it down to a quite readable level. (I even read the Jon Katz discussions--some of the threshold 5 posts are reasonable.) In the discussion referenced above, one of the 13 "good" posts is an excellent summary of UN views on the subject (with a URL for more information), and is better than most "good" wiki pages. Slashdot has done an amazing job with a community at least 100 times larger than wiki's. (Slashdot could be better--I particularly dislike the low rating of anonymous "cowards", and the +1 "Karma" bonus seems to be too easy to get.)--CliffordAdams

How many posters does this place have compared to slashdot though? --AnonymousCoward