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Hideously out-of-date, but still amazingly relevant! This is from about July of 2000 :-/ |
OK, you say, what's this all about?
slashdot.org, or /. as it's often refered to in inner circles, is the somewhat-famous "News for Nerds: Stuff that matters" website that is now often trumpeted as a sounding board for the Linux and Open Source communities.
I've been on at /. for a good while now as talks_to_birds -- my user number is #2488, which is interesting in that there are now user numbers well up in the 200,000 range...
OK: so here's the deal:
At /. you can create a user name, and sign on as a specific user, (well, hell, you could have a coupla different personas, but that's another matter..) and make your posts, and everybody kinda gets to know who you are, and it's all munchy and like that...
BUT: it's also always been possible to post to /. as an Anonymous Coward, or AC for short.
So you can post anonymously, and no one ever knows who you are (OK: sure Commander Taco and the guys can trace IP #'s, but that's not the point).
A long long long time ago, the very issue of AC posting was a topic in and of itself, but no one's gotten into it lately, and a long long long time ago the whole deal was supposed to be this:
The Anonymous Coward sign-on was intended to allow the freedom of expression that comes with anonymity.
In other words, you could be free to say whatever you wanted, because The Man® couldn't find out who you were, and so you were free to speak your mind...
And a lot of people bought into that, and so it went.
My thinking is so original, and so so revolutionary, and so so so threatening to The Man®, that The Man® would surely hunt me down and snuff me out in a moment and squash me like a bug if only The Man® could find me!
Yeah, right...
...you and Thomas Paine.)
But anyway, the AC issue went away, we were gonna keep AC posts, and time passed...
...and now, it's now, and now what we have as a general rule is the simple fact that for most topics on /. the vast majority of posts are by AC's, and the vast majority of them are pure bullshit.
Spam.
Diarrhea of the brain.
Period.
Now, we're having posted to every topic, over and over again, such gems as:
The topic for today is: The Gay Flu (Score:0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on 10:17 Saturday 22 July 2000 PDT Hello kids! Today's topic is the gay flu, alsko known as HIV. HIV causes AIDS. HIV came about from one of those gay party islands in the caribbean - gay men...
and the ever-popular:
OOGs journey (Score:0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on 10:13 Saturday 22 July 2000 PDT Continued from this poorly moderated post... As OOG_THE_CAVEMAN awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in the computer lab into a Harvard law student. He was lying on his clothed, as if it were wrapped in a business suit, back, and when he lifted his head a little...
and who can forget the classic:
The effect on the Community (Score:1) by Anonymous Coward on 9:54 Saturday 22 July 2000 PDT This is having an important effect on the open source community. I've studied it and have come to several conclusions, which are illustrated in the following articles. 1. Forbes Magazine article 2. "Microsoft on the Defensive" 3. "Reflections on the Cathedral and the Bazaar"
This last one is posted again and again and again and again (as in fact all of these examples are..) and contains no substance whatsoever, entirely aside from being totally off-topic to the thread being posted-to...
You notice the (Score:1)?
Posts to /. are given a score, which can be moderated up or down by users with sign-ons -- I've moderated many times, and my turn comes up automagically maybe every 10 days or so...
AC posts start out at 0; logged-on posts start out at 1; and the moderators adjust posts upward or downward to taste.
"So, so maybe somebody will moderate the AC spam down, and it'll kinda just not be a problem. You know, somebody could just sweep it under the rug, so to speak..."
Well, Bobby, that would all work kinda OK, in theory, except that now the sheer volume of the AC spam is so great that the moderators have a real problem keeping up with it.
And except that that's not what the moderators are supposed to be doing, anyway.
A point to which I shall return...
So what happens is some of this crap gets moderated down (Score:0 Troll) and that supposedly is gonna make it less visible.
But the less-visible deal only works if you're a registered user, and if you change your personal settings to Threshold: 2. This lets you just cruise right on by all the nonsense, and all you ever see is a 2 replies beneath your current threshold and you've got the tinted windows rolled up tight on your stretch limo and you never even know that the riff-raff is out there!
Cool!
Ignore the problem!
AC spam? Who cares!
"Problem? I don't see no stinkin' problem!"
OK: you don't see a problem, but I do (now returning to point above, newcomers)...
Threshold: 2, then on the /. home page you'll see, for each article, something like this: ( Read More... | 14 of 100 comments ).
Which means you're going to see 14 of 100 comments for this particular article at your setting of Threshold: 2...
...and which means you're not going to see 86 of 100 comments.
Do the math.
100-14/100=.86
Fully 86% of the posts to this particular thread are 1's or under. The vast majority of these are AC posts, and the vast majority of those are spam, repeated over and over again, by the same small group of people (you can pretty well tell this..), repeated on every single article that gets posted.
And that's pretty typical of most topics, these days..
I think that's a problem, and here's why: /., whether it knows it or cares, or whether its supporters know or care, has become a defacto spokes-person (spokes-site?) for the Linux and Open Source community.
What you have here is a setup for any newcomer to view the Linux and Open Source communities as a bunch of (I gonna be blunt, here..) total f*cking idiots.
Just the previous week I submitted a proposed article to Ask Slashdot.
The proposed topic: AC/Free Speech, redux...
The principal point:
At that I was being charitable...
And so far my submittal hasn't seen the light of day.
As I started working into this whole topic, I took direct action by replying to some typical, blatant AC spam with the following:
Re:OOGs journey (Score:2) by talks_to_birds (jsage@finschhaffen.com) on 10:50 Saturday 22 July 2000 PDT (User #2488 Info) http://www.finchhaven.com/pages/acspam.htm FIGHT! For your right! To ban AC spam! Desperate times call for desperate actions! t_t_b -- I think not; therefore I ain't ® Spamdot: Spam for nerds; stuff that doesn't matter!
My idea was that, as a signed-on user, my posts would continue to score as 2's, and they would certainly remain visible over the 1's and 0's scores for the AC posts I was responding to, and maybe we could begin a dialog.
Yeah, right.
Most of my posts used to start at 2 (good karma?), as did this new series, but it wasn't long before any post on this theme was appearing at 1 or 0, and all my new posts now are starting out at 1.
A form of the legendary /. bitchslap? Or it could be that who ever's moderating lately just doesn't consider this issue important...
At any rate, I did receive one actual reply, from an AC, of course, which was interesting in it's own:
Re:More news here (Score:1) by Anonymous Coward on 10:25 Saturday 22 July 2000 PDT Well maybe if all the Linux fucknuts didnt think that Linux is a gift from God maybe we would post on topic.
hmmm...
A distinctly anti-Linux tenor there, don't you think?
Oh, yeah..
It's interesting to think that a long long time ago on /., the Really Big Problem was First Post! posts.
Now we have this incredible amount of pure bullshit, spread thickly throughout every single topic, to the tune of 75% to 85% of all posts on all topics ranking at 1 or under, and nobody in charge seems to care.
/. has turned into just one more god damn portal! Get the volume; get the eyeballs; we need numbers! We need big numbers!
It's not quality that counts any longer at /., it's quantity:
"Hot Damn! Raise the advertising rates!"
(Walks off stage right, humming "We're in the money")
So that's what I think...
Hideously out-of-date, but still amazingly relevant! This is from about July of 2000 :-/ |
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