From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Mon Apr 16 2001 - 15:20:14 MDT
-------- Original Message --------
From: "Sean Colbath" <sean@colbath.org>
Subject: Re: Manythings2.com digest #1
To: <silent-tristero@world.std.com>
Since I made the original inflammatory off-the-cuff remark, I should
probably justify it, rather than simply huck out the remark and then
disappear into the aether :-). Warning, however, this is probably qualifies
as a not too well thought out, slightly disillusioned flame.
My basic gripe is that the whole Slashdot community has talked big for a
long time about being a new kind of interactive community, yet in the last 6
months has decended down to approximately the level of Usenet, in terms of
cliquism, unusability, low signal-to-noise ratio, spelling flames, spam --
you name it. And Usenet at least has been around for what, nigh on 20
years?
The promises of dynamic moderation and the like have mostly gone nowhere
that is discernable, and the various sites are now mostly a collection of
what are essentially vanity pages. They have been gobbled up by the Linux
dotcom collective, and instead of being absorbed by the body and co-opted
into a corporate arm, they have gone exactly.... nowhere. Which just might
be worse.
Now, maybe this is the generic fate of online communities. I'm sure there
are people on this list who have done research in the area who can say one
way or the other. And there's probably nothing wrong with that, I
suppose -- the generic rule of "it's my site with my rules, and you can play
that way or leave" is fine by me. But I guess I'm getting pretty sick of
having them held up as some sort of epitome of the open source linux driven
hacker community way of doing things. If that's what they are, then... ick!
We certainly do better than that on this list!
While this probably sounds pretty bitter, I don't mean it to -- I'm not in
competition with Taco et al, I'm not in the business of online-community
making and I still have Slashdot in my favorites, for now. But I guess I'm
burned out on the hype.
----- Original Message -----
> |At 04:58 PM 4/12/01 -0400, you wrote:
> |>All I can say is, Everything2 is built by the Slashdot guys. 'nuff
said.
> |>:-)
[It's been a long time since I looked at much more than the
headlines on slashdot. The discussion? Never. But that's
partly because I've changed my browsing habits. I now browse
further up slashdot's food-chain, going directly to kuro5hin
or eurekabytes or ... ---pozzo]
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