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Journal Xerithane's Journal: At Slashdot, The employees PAY the employer! 39

Journal by Xerithane

This is just jacked, but at least it is revealed. CmdrTaco is marketing. That's all it is. It explains why Slashcode at first was so wretched it was a wonder it worked. CmdrTaco making empty promises, delivering half-assed goods, yet making it shine as much as possible.

Now the ability to pay to see the future. You pay to become an editor without the ability to post new stories, just to tell them how retarded they actually are.

"Yes, this story was just posted 2 times in a row. Here's my $5"

Why would anybody pay for Slashdot? I mean this seriously, also. The journals are nice, the comments are ok. I have a journal on my website that I never update because Slashdot is the central place. If the necessity to move happened, we could do it and remain in touch. RSS/XML feeds could provide a standard Slashdot-feeling to all our Journals (in fact I'm going to work on this, people setup friend portfolios and it will show their personalized Amigos page, but slightly different... all based off the RSS feeds. I know I have too much going on, but it's a quick little RSS hack and I _want_ to work on nerdfarm... or I'll just play war3 instead)

CmdrTaco tells you that you can avoid all the problems of being a Slashdot member by paying them to basically become an employee.

Here's what I'd pay for:

  • Competent editorial staff that understand journalism and the notion that posting a comment with a linked news site isn't journalism.
  • No unlimited moderation points.
  • Content Delivery Network, so sites get mirrored before Slashdotted for a period of 24 hours. I think this could be fair use, no?
  • Journals should look just like story submissions. I want a summary box, with a details box, link boxes, etc.
  • Journal titles that can be linked to in a Wiki style. Like ((At Slashdot, ...|this would be a link) and match at first At Slashdot and prompt you if there are multiple matches in the preview.

Until then, I am not paying for Slashdot. I'd rather pay to have someone shit on my neighbors lawn.

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At Slashdot, The employees PAY the employer! More

At Slashdot, The employees PAY the employer!

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  • I think if they offered subscribers unlimited modpoints (or extra modpoints), that would be a good idea.

    • I think if they offered subscribers unlimited modpoints (or extra modpoints), that would be a good idea.

      That would be extremely dumb. It would remove moderation from functioning. I could spend $25 and destroy the slashdot moderation system with 5 seperate accounts. Mod my friends up, mod my foes down. I can karma whore to keep my karma up from meta-mod.

      • It's in line with what they proposed already. I expect to see this innovation by the summer.

      • Moderation is broken anyway. People moderate in crazy ways - if they don't like a post, it gets slapped. If they agree with a stupid, unintelligent post, it gets a kiss. Intelligent replies to posts that are on topic for the thread, but not for the original story are "off-topic" (think about that).

        That, and the messaging system is messed up. There are so many dupicate posts, because every thread forks too many times. How many comments say basically the same thing, but are responding to different branches of the tree? Too many.

        Joel [joelonsoftware.com] has an interesting take (indirectly) on why the /. system is not very workable.

  • I'd rather pay to have someone shit on my neighbors lawn.

    How much we talkin here? And I want a contract with a signing bonus.
    • How much we talkin here? And I want a contract with a signing bonus.

      I'm referring to my drug dealing neighbors (well, the whole Apartment complex next-door really). You will have to sign a disclaimer stating if you get shot, it's not my fault.

      And lets go for $5 a nugget.
      • Suppose he has diarrhea? And do you think we can go in on a package deal? Some sonofabitch in my neighborhood has a large dog (judging by the poop) that feels the need to shit on my lawn. I'd like his lawn shat upon. And perhaps empty the kitty litter there as well.
      • Well, in the hopes of spreading global capitalism, I shall now insert some competition for Fortknox.

        If you have an entire apartment complex to hit, I could bring my shit catapult. I could spred several "Nuggets" for a fraction of the cost of the old method.

      • I'm thinking goatse competition!
        • I'm thinking goatse competition!

          You know, most people never put "thinking" and "goatse" in the same sentence. Much less "competition".

          I'm tainted. Horribly, horribly tainted.

  • How about being able to mod or delete other people's comments in your own journals as well?

    Personally, I've got no problem paying for a website that I enjoy whether or not I get any benefit out of it. There are three sites I've paid for (Geocaching.com, Buxley's Geocaching Waypoint, and Slashdot) with no real tangible benefit for me other than the "warm and fuzzy feeling" that I get for helping support a service that someone else otherwise provides for free.

    The "plums" I get from /. really aren't that big of a deal for me. I generally ignore the ads anyway (although I really wish there could be preferences to tell the site what sorts of tech I am interested in so the ads could be targeted better) and I don't get my panties in a bunch if I'm late viewing an article and a site has been /.ed and I have to wait a few hours to see it. I just feel that 100 days of ./ is worth $5 for me.

    I'm certainly not disparaging your views on not subscribing, I'm just not as cynical about Taco's "marketing".

  • in soviet russia, slashdot pays its employees!

    sorry couldn't resist the chance to make a soviet russia joke that doesn't *look* backwards. maybe in the near future, "in soviet russia..." will be replaced by, "on slashdot."
    • in soviet russia, slashdot pays its employees!

      Very well played :)
    • apparently, only half of the mods reading this journal have a sense of humor.

      i used a cliche to make a point. get it?
      • apparently, only half of the mods reading this journal have a sense of humor.
        I just love that I can get modded Offtopic in my own journal. I mean.. are they doing it maliciously or are they just really, really dumb?

        i used a cliche to make a point. get it?

        You know, today a guy posted that Japan was perfectly accepting of North Korea having nuclear weapons. I never cease to be amazed at the stupidity of some of the people on here.
  • Now I love /. I spend too much time here. But the reason why isn't what the /. staff brings here. /. was lucky that it's glorified "memepool.com + comments" content became a "community". The zoo and the JE's are pretty much the best thing now... but even this is little more than livejournal.com with a focus on the tech community.

    The problem is still the same: content. The staff provides none. The main discussions are not-native. The comments and zoo are all users. Hell at least Salon.com has daily original material.

    Subtract the users and /. is NOTHING. But the editors don't realize this. So instead we get this pandering type shit and primadonnas like Michael thinking that they run something.
    • Now I love /. I spend too much time here. But the reason why isn't what the /. staff brings here. /. was lucky that it's glorified "memepool.com + comments" content became a "community". The zoo and the JE's are pretty much the best thing now... but even this is little more than livejournal.com with a focus on the tech community.

      99% of my time is spent in the journals. If we can bring the journal community, and get the news feeds in another medium, the community can move. I'm pretty confident that I could run a comparable setup for about $1K a month (hardware+bandwidth). After banner ads, I could break even or make a few bucks. The content comes from the members, and I believe that a ranking system is key. I've ranted about this several times in the past.

      Subtract the users and /. is NOTHING. But the editors don't realize this. So instead we get this pandering type shit and primadonnas like Michael thinking that they run something.

      Subtract the users and /. is an RSS feed of submitted news stories. A lot of people read it this way, but it doesn't mean the users have to. I think that you should be able to select the Users, Types of articles, and display length for your main page.

      I want Twirlip's, Howells, etc. posts under the "News", "Announcements", "Warmongering" categories on my main page. I don't give a shit about My Rights Online. I like their writing, and their posting under certain categories.

      In other categories, I want different authors.
      • I want Twirlip's, Howells, etc. posts under the "News", "Announcements", "Warmongering" categories on my main page. I don't give a shit about My Rights Online. I like their writing, and their posting under certain categories.

        Now that would be a great feature. I'd even like to get linkage to high activity Journal Entries. Too often there are great JE's that get a lot of dialogue... but you don't have the owner in your friends so you miss out.

        Of course then it becomes more of a standard Forum. But the added communities features would set it apart. Reading 20 JE's in the morning can be difficult but if I could organize DaytonCIM's content into a more organized format.

        And maybe they could add a damn Sports topic.
        • Now that would be a great feature. I'd even like to get linkage to high activity Journal Entries. Too often there are great JE's that get a lot of dialogue... but you don't have the owner in your friends so you miss out.

          One of the formulas I worked out was views over time decay. I have working code that (sucks) will display more prominent stories to people who have a filter setup (Show any story with a score over 500, or something). If a story gets really hot, and a user wants to see the top 10% of articles read than they don't need to always see that users stories.

          It's taking the zoo to a new level. The problem is I hate interface design. I've written some amazing backend support for relations but can never get the front end to work well.

          That and deciding mod_perl or php... :)
          • A few particularly crazy ideas:

            1. The ability to filter based on quantity of comments.
            2. The ability to filter based on the quantity of moderation, optionally of a specific type.
            3. Building off of 2, the ability to filter based on a stories percentage of a particular type of moderation of comments.
            4. Journal Moderator points for the owner of the journal, and any friends selected - optionally the ability to moderate the actual site could be used in conjunction with this.
            5. A Friend of Friend Journal listing. This should be separate from the Friends Journals, but would be worthwhile.

            Meanwhile, your idea for a journal without the slashdot sounds great. A few ideas for the service:
            1. A flat fee for creating a journal and/or
            2. A flat rate per entry and/or
            3. A flat rate per read entry (once per entry, not per time).

            Those depend heavily upon user preference.

            4. The ability to export your journals/comments.
            5. Signature History - per-users optional - a nearly worthless option, but fun nonetheless.
            6. A large selection of "who I am" links (AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, Slashdot, etc) - maybe even a selection of scrapers that could pull your friends off of various sites/programs and look for them on the site - this would be a bit ambitious.

            Last, I like interface design. Fair warning, I've made some really bad interfaces, but hasn't almost everyone who has tried?
            • I love your ideas. Lets start talking a lot more about this stuff, it's something I am very interested in.

              Last, I like interface design. Fair warning, I've made some really bad interfaces, but hasn't almost everyone who has tried?

              I have a very good designer, as far as photoshop goes. It's just turning it into HTML and working with templates + hooks into backend code that I don't do.
              • Sweet. HTML, templates I can do. Hooks will depend upon the language, but shouldn't be too tough.

                At my previous job I was an application developer for a while and built a number of web-based apps. I've been meaning to get back into it.
                • HTML, templates I can do. Hooks will depend upon the language, but shouldn't be too tough.

                  I also have someone else who wants to work with me for experience. It's probably going to be largely in Perl... since there is more capabilities for scalability. PHP would require more active C development, and I think that's unnecessary and more error prone.

                  I'll setup a message board on nerdfarm this weekend and we can talk more about it. I'll post another Slashdot journal discussing all the ideas and detail them out on Monday.
      • 99% of my time is spent in the journals. If we can bring the journal community, and get the news feeds in another medium, the community can move. I'm pretty confident that I could run a comparable setup for about $1K a month (hardware+bandwidth). After banner ads, I could break even or make a few bucks. The content comes from the members, and I believe that a ranking system is key. I've ranted about this several times in the past.


        You could probably rustle something up in a month or two in PHP or Perl which would be as you suggested; after all, it'd basically be a bunch of mini-Slashdots with some relationship modifiers. How hard could it be? ;-)
        • You could probably rustle something up in a month or two in PHP or Perl which would be as you suggested; after all, it'd basically be a bunch of mini-Slashdots with some relationship modifiers. How hard could it be? ;-)

          If it's for myself, it'd be a weekend task. To make it scale easy, and provide flexibility for what others may want to do, it would be a more difficult task. I could see it sitting in the 1 - 2 month range to get a working beta out.

          I need two things: mod_perl or PHP, I can't decide. And an interface monkey.
          • Then again, I think a geek community would be able to handle function over form; as long as the site works great they probably won't mind something mildly ugly.

            (Though a little eye candy is always nice.)
            • Then again, I think a geek community would be able to handle function over form; as long as the site works great they probably won't mind something mildly ugly.

              Interfaces are functionality. Eye-candy aside, I just care about a properly flowing interface. I do not think I can do this with any degree of success.

              Slashdot is definitely not what I would call... enriched in the eye-candy sense, but it is highly functional and usable (but getting less so, in my opinion)

              I can code efficient backend modules, it's just getting a front-end to work with them properly.
  • Taco said it here [slashdot.org]. Bascially, "However we hope that enough of our users will think beyond that and try to support us. Programmers, Editors, OC3s and Racks of web servers cost money.".

    Subscriptions are a way to help pay for slashdot, and donate if you'd like. As an added bonus they've added a few things too, but those aren;t the reason they offered them.
    • Subscriptions are a way to help pay for slashdot, and donate if you'd like. As an added bonus they've added a few things too, but those aren;t the reason they offered them.

      Subscriptions are donations that are wrapped with really horrible services. I will not donate to for-profit companies. Slashdot is owned by VA, they are a commercial entity. Just my philosophical stance.

      As for their expenses, they are amazingly over-hyped. Slashdot does not require as many editors as it has, nor as many paid programmers. It's an open source project, and most of the work is done by people who do not receive a paycheck from Slashdot.

      Their server and bandwidth usage is vastly over-quoted, and it shows their code is sloppy to not be able to handle the load Slashdot gets.
      • Slashdot does not require as many editors as it has, nor as many paid programmers. It's an open source project, and most of the work is done by people who do not receive a paycheck from Slashdot.

        Their server and bandwidth usage is vastly over-quoted, and it shows their code is sloppy to not be able to handle the load Slashdot gets.

        Good points. Do you think you could try to break down costs of programmers and bandwith. I'd love to see it put in perspective.
        • Good points. Do you think you could try to break down costs of programmers and bandwith. I'd love to see it put in perspective.

          Programmers I think is a moot point. A lot of the work is done by open source developers, or VA programmers who work on other projects. Slashdot should be an open source project, with no paid developers. If I get off my ass (this is sarcasm, I'm just way to busy, but I want this to change) and start building something, I dont' expect/want to get paid for building a community system. Other people don't feel this way, but those people shouldn't be working for a Linux-based company.

          As for bandwidth, most of Slashdot is text based. I would say, on any given day, that Slashdot transfers on the order of 2-3GB a day. I think I'm being a little bit high on this number, but I'm not sure. Most page requests fall under 50K in size. Lets say they get 1 million page views a day. They say 300,000 visitors a day, and I think on average it would go to about 3 page views. As Taco has said on numerous occasions, most of the people do not view comments (as is obvious considering there are only about 10,000 comments a day (again, over-estimating))

          So, lets say for the sake of argument we have 1 million page views at 50K a page, every day. Times that by 30 days, and we have a little over 150GB a month in bandwidth used. You may want to double check my math here, I'm going pretty quick on this.

          Now, I can lease out a dedicated server that gives me 100GB of bandwidth for around $150/mo. I could setup two of these, and then put a database box for $450 a month.

          3 machines should easily handle one million requests a day. As for CPU performance goes, I can easily see building a system that can handle ~50 requests a second (4,320,000 a day) on two P4-2Ghz systems.

          The key is in two places: proper caching of static content and management of database connections.
          • Good points.

            What about spikes though? If the 150 GB of bandwith was spread throughout the day, 200MB would be enough. But I'd assume there is a spike (probably around 12 EST, lucnchtime on the east coast and California is starting their day,) a a few points where the amount of bandwith needed is tripled.

            As for the programmers, you have a good point. I wonder what they need them for, or why so many. That'd be interesting to hear answered.

          • "Programmers I think is a moot point. A lot of the work is done by open source developers, or VA programmers who work on other projects. Slashdot should be an open source project, with no paid developers."

            No, the coding of Slash is done by paid VA programmers, who mostly work just on Slash (we do other stuff too occasionally).

            The project is open-source because we believe in the concept of sharing, but contributions back from the community are pretty small, under 100 lines of code total. That is not to denigrate the contributions. (And it may be partly our fault -- we are working to make the code more accessible while we add features but it's still a very complex system.) Oh, and there are some great third-party additions/changes to the code in the works that haven't been released yet too.

            You wrote in this journal that "I have a journal on my website that I never update because Slashdot is the central place." I hope you don't think we just waved our hands and Slashdot magically acquired journals, journal discussions, the friends system, and the messaging system that notifies your fans every time you post a journal. Code doesn't write itself just because we released a project under the GPL. Brian and Chris are some really smart guys who put together a kickass journal system. They put a lot of work into it. If you like it so much, why are you using their work to insult their work?

            (I didn't work on the Journal, Message, and Zoo plugins much, so I'll toot Brian and Chris's horns for them :)

            "As for bandwidth, most of Slashdot is text based. I would say, on any given day, that Slashdot transfers on the order of 2-3GB a day. I think I'm being a little bit high on this number..."

            You are way, way low. :)

            • I hope you don't think we just waved our hands and Slashdot magically acquired journals, journal discussions, the friends system, and the messaging system that notifies your fans every time you post a journal. Code doesn't write itself just because we released a project under the GPL. Brian and Chris are some really smart guys who put together a kickass journal system. They put a lot of work into it. If you like it so much, why are you using their work to insult their work?

              I'm perfectly aware of all of this, but I'm also very aware of application development. I've designed some pretty massive applications that have web-based hooks into them. A journal system with a comment engine is pretty simple, and I don't think it's fair to bill it off as a feat of excellent engineering. It's nice, and functions well, but it's been done several times in the past. I'm not insulting their work, per se. I'm insulting the elaborate ego-filling that goes on with it. Lets not lose perspective, it's a journaling system. It displays text and threaded comments.

              The reason why I continue to stay on Slashdot is because I really like the simple and clean interface. Everything is mostly text, with the exception of a colored bar here or there. I play around with a lot of different layouts, and am very fond with the way that Taco did the original layout and that it's managed to stay mostly true since then.

              As for the bandwidth, how are you guys exceeding 3GB in text and icon transfers a day? I thought the average slashdot visitor only hit the front page (22K yesterday.) That is something that Rob said a while back, in regards to the comments not being an ultimately important part of Slashdot. Only a 1/3rd or so, but I'm lazy (don't really have much time either) to go find it, so my memory may be faulty.

              I did more detailed calculations and came out with a probable bandwidth usage of about 150GB/mo. I still am not sure why the expenses are so high for Slashdot though.

              Jamie, I really think you are a great guy and are one of the few people on the Slashdot staff that actually have a clue about the users. Please don't think I'm attacking the work that you do, or the other developers. From a development standpoint, I think it's a great system that could be coded better. No, I'm not interested in contributing, I have my own projects and I don't like a lot of the other staff.

              Rob repeatedly ignores the masses, he's getting better but he has consistently acted like a jack-ass towards Slashdot's better contributors. Michael is the same, except much worse when it comes to attacking Slashdot posters. It's the politics that makes Slashdot a shitty place, this is why I spend most of my time posting in the polls or the journals.
  • Right now, the added value from paying for slashdot is almost worthless. The stuff I can get for paying vs. not paying wouldn't even be worth paying 1 cent for.

    That said, even if these guys could put together their fairly low IQs and create something worth paying for, I would still not pay. Why? Simply, these guys have been dicks to their readers, and continue to be dicks (see michael, CmdrTaco, jamie). They have alienate too many with their thin skins, and petty retribution. If this site weren't free, nobody would be here anymore.

    It's too bad k5 is full of self-important wankers to be a worthy alternative to slashdot. Until there is one, I will stay in the sandbox and laugh at the idiots running the joint.

    • That said, even if these guys could put together their fairly low IQs and create something worth paying for, I would still not pay. Why? Simply, these guys have been dicks to their readers, and continue to be dicks (see michael, CmdrTaco, jamie). They have alienate too many with their thin skins, and petty retribution. If this site weren't free, nobody would be here anymore.

      I have to defend Jamie here. In my experience Jamie is the only "editor" that actually cares about maintaining some balance and fairness in the Slashdot crowd. He's helped me on several occasions and is always prompt, civil, and fair.

      Taco and michael are assholes. Taco gets paid to be an "editor" yet can't spell simple words. I'm not going to pay him for that, I'd prefer to have a true community driven, abstract news feed.

      The one thing I haven't figured out yet, is how to do it for not-logged in visitors. Do they just get the days most popular stories?...

      More designs. The hardest part about building a community is keeping the idiots and the self-righteous/important wankers out.

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