elsurexiste's Journal: Why I'm leaving Slashdot

tl;dr I quitted /. because it has little community value and fails its mission.

I'll start by saying that I stayed this long because, while /.-ers are awful, /. is great. The question was more about what positive elements had the institution that balanced the negative ones from the community. Of course, if I start by telling that I left because the cons were greater than the pros, I should clarify why I think so. In any case, the straw that broke the camel's back is today's article about SCOTUS and healthcare.

I said I like the institution and I truly do. First, news were, overall, relevant to its stated mission: "News for nerds, stuff that matters". This means, essentially, that news were oriented to technology, the digital/electronic world and science in general. The second part is a vow to promote relevant news. Relevant to whom? To anyone, of course! That's why the site run news from Australia, Rusia and even Argentina. Of course, the relevance issue won't ever be solved, but a priori there's no reason someone in Botswana or East Timor won't find these "nerd" news interesting. The article from SCOTUS and health care convinced me that it'll never achieve neither true global relevance nor geek relevance. I'm not talking about indirect relevance, which has saved many articles in the past, but irrelevance to anyone who isn't American. That's OK by the way: if 100% of editors are in the US, it's natural that news from the US are relevant, even if there's no technology involved. It's also OK when I say that /. runs news that sometimes don't matter.

Now, let's talk about the community. Actually, saying there's a community is an overstatement. eldavojohn, one of the best /.-ers I've read, stated something along those line a while ago. There's two kind of people here: (a) a few experts and (b) a lot of screamers with Bachelor in Everything. Most of the time, I could offset this mismatch by marking 5-point comments visible and <1-point invisible, but the last few months it mostly filtered group-think. Informative or interesting comments sometimes went through the wall, but not as much as I'd have liked. There's something else that's distasteful: the best way to gain karma and upgoats is to be one of the first to comment. As simple as that. This could easily be solved by a random, yet replicable, ordering of same-level comments, but there's no real interest in fixing this situation. It's a shame, because I submitted an article once and people wrote some nice, thoughtful comments on it. A lot of assholes were there, too, sadly. Of course, it's not about feelings but about how much effort can I devote to separate the chaff from the wheat. There may be a community, but it's being drowned in "-1: Overrated" for interesting comments and "+1:Insightful" for insulting ones.

So, I come to the conclusion that the site no longer offers me the kind of news I want. It also doesn't provide a community I can feel attached to. What to do? For the moment, I'll try Ars Technica. I'll get my international news from Al Jazeera and The Economist and Matt Strassler's blog will provide me with Physics news. Let's see how that works out!

Understandable

[djnanite]

Look at the responses to this story from a couple of weeks ago:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/06/19/2028229/womens-enrollment-in-computer-science-correlates-negatively-with-net-access [slashdot.org]

Now tell me that the majority of Slashdot commenters aren't complete douches.