cadfael's Journal: The dearth of /.

Well now.

I have being reading /. for about 4 years now. I have seen it quoted on CNN, referenced in a paper I refereed (and rejected) for a conference, and grow into a somewhat usable site.

Now I see the dearth of /. I quite intentionally mean dearth, and not death. /. will probably survive indefinitely, in one form or another. Unfortunately, its gotten pretty uninformative. I see two trends.

The first is retreading...for this, I blame the editors. Too many stories are reposted within a short period of time (hello, Timothy?). If its not EXACTLY the same story, its close enough to another that it doesn't matter. One general case of this is "Lets pick on M$" I don't particularly care for M$. I have to use it at work and live with it. I also run Linux on a couple of boxes, and am involved in putting Linux in an embedded system. Its just better. However, the editors and population in general need to pull their collective heads out of their behinds about M$. Let them screw up as they have and they will become irrelevant enough to lose the market they have and become just another vendor. Overall, lets find stories that apply to the concept of News for Nerds, and please oh please, just for awhile, let it be stuff that matters.

Point two in the dearth of /. is the lack of useful comments. There is a lot of "me too" in the comments. If one views at +2, you miss a LOT of good trolls, but you miss most of the crap. Moderation seems to be failing to weed for us, but that is the nature of a self moderating system where critical mass has acquired a large group of people that don't actually read the comments in context.

Well, off the soapbox for now. Not like anyone reads this anyways.