Journal W2k's Journal: Slashdot needs better editors
...or better yet, the current editors need to introduce more stuff to let the users affect content. My main idea on this is:
Letting the users vote for what stories make it onto the front page. I've submitted a couple of stories, all with perfectly suitable material. I'm a professional journalist, I can say without doubt that nothing was bad, spelling, grammar or content-wise, about those submissions. No, there weren't any other submissions on the same topic posted instead. Still, none of those submissions made it onto the front page. I know that many people like to grouse about perfectly valid submissions getting rejected, and there is no way to find out WHY your submissions were rejected.
My suggestion: Add a new page to Slashdot, where as-yet unpublished stories are listed. They will, of course, have to undergo some rough screening by the moderators, but every story that's not an obvious duplicate or total garbage (spam, porn, goatse.cx, etc) gets listed. Beside each story is a selection box with ratings from 1-10, and a display of the current average rating of each story. When a user rates a story, the average rating is updated. After the story has been voted on x times, or has been sitting on the page x hours, it is either scrapped or published on the front page, depending on the rating. Any stories with a rating above x gets published, IMHO this value should be something like five, maybe seven.
Now, to make this a bit more feasible: Let's say only subscribers get to vote. Or only users with karma => 20 pts. Letting EVERYONE vote would probably be a mistake, but it's a great feature for those who subscribe.
A thought: Apart from the titles, the first three lines of the story could be included, or a link to read the entire thing. It might be hard to judge the quality of a story by just the title.
Another thought: If this system was implemented, I'd subscribe. JUST for the ability to vote on upcoming stories.
Third thought: While the above is probably not going to be implemented anytime soon (if at all), for now I'd be content with the editors having to specify a REASON WHY for each submission that's rejected. Really.
Letting the users vote for what stories make it onto the front page. I've submitted a couple of stories, all with perfectly suitable material. I'm a professional journalist, I can say without doubt that nothing was bad, spelling, grammar or content-wise, about those submissions. No, there weren't any other submissions on the same topic posted instead. Still, none of those submissions made it onto the front page. I know that many people like to grouse about perfectly valid submissions getting rejected, and there is no way to find out WHY your submissions were rejected.
My suggestion: Add a new page to Slashdot, where as-yet unpublished stories are listed. They will, of course, have to undergo some rough screening by the moderators, but every story that's not an obvious duplicate or total garbage (spam, porn, goatse.cx, etc) gets listed. Beside each story is a selection box with ratings from 1-10, and a display of the current average rating of each story. When a user rates a story, the average rating is updated. After the story has been voted on x times, or has been sitting on the page x hours, it is either scrapped or published on the front page, depending on the rating. Any stories with a rating above x gets published, IMHO this value should be something like five, maybe seven.
Now, to make this a bit more feasible: Let's say only subscribers get to vote. Or only users with karma => 20 pts. Letting EVERYONE vote would probably be a mistake, but it's a great feature for those who subscribe.
A thought: Apart from the titles, the first three lines of the story could be included, or a link to read the entire thing. It might be hard to judge the quality of a story by just the title.
Another thought: If this system was implemented, I'd subscribe. JUST for the ability to vote on upcoming stories.
Third thought: While the above is probably not going to be implemented anytime soon (if at all), for now I'd be content with the editors having to specify a REASON WHY for each submission that's rejected. Really.
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