Off My Chest
RULES:
I am looking for mods!
1. The "good" part of our community means we are pro-empathy and anti-harassment. However, we don't intend to make this a "safe space" where everyone has to be a saint. Sh*t happens, and life is messy. That's why we get things off our chests.
2. Bigotry is not allowed. That includes racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and religiophobia. (If you want to vent about religion, that's fine; but religion is not inherently evil.)
3. Frustrated, venting, or angry posts are still welcome.
4. Posts and comments that bait, threaten, or incite harassment are not allowed.
5. If anyone offers mental, medical, or professional advice here, please remember to take it with a grain of salt. Seek out real professionals if needed.
6. Please put NSFW behind NSFW tags.
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You just reminded me of how well considered slashdot actually was.
I specifically remember that if you did not have a history of positive contributions, you simply were not able to contribute.
There was some secret formula on the back end, and if you could even make a reply, consider yourself lucky and you better make it worthwhile.
This is going back 20 plus years, but I haven't been there since they instituted the fire hose. Not sure how they do it anymore.
It's been sold a few times and now a shadow of its former glory. I think they still do the thing where random users are selected each day to moderate comments, and anyone can log in and 'meta-moderate' those actions up or down. Can't see why any caretaker would change that. Comments still scored negative to +5, collapsed at <3, invisible <1. It's a good strategy for silencing crap, but it really promoted groupthink, because any comment that got visible would quickly be modded to +5 or -1. Still seems to have an editor-approval process for selecting stories from the firehose.
I think the main difference between /. circa 1998 and modern social media is that social sites in 1998 were small enough that the founder was a user, probably the main programmer, and probably fewer than 10 collaborators. Kids goofing around with their university's free bandwidth and direct connection to the internet, before firewalls became a thing. They might have thought about making some money, but it wasn't the main goal. More interested in a good experience for their users than in collecting all the possible users. My recollection is slashdot was one of the first sites to have programmatic content generation. I know I based my own first CMS off their 'slashcode.' In Perl.