Sorry :)
btw: I also have a 5 digit account there (but not using
the
nym "Gringo").
Slashdot was my favourite site for many years... Until
Microsoft took it over with their vast army of astro-
turfers. I will never
forgive Microsoft for that. They
spoiled all my fun.
Were you there
during the Takeover Wars? You must have
been. Slashdot, which was well known
for Microsoft bashing
(and that bashing was well deserved, but I digress...)
opened up to accepting advertisements from Microsoft. Then
soon we started
seeing an excess of astro-turfers, talking
about the "New Microsoft", one of
their memes at that time.
We all fought back, vigorously. At every new
misdeed by
Microsoft, like for example ballet stuffing and other
boorish
behaviour to ram their Office Open XML format
through the ISO process, to them
modifying the user's
installation of Firefox, the astro-turfers would come on
stronger and stronger, in wave after wave, to defend their
master. You would
shoot down their twisted logic in one
thread and they would just put up in
another, repeating the
same twister logic that was short down
above.
Then they got mod points.
That is where it ended for me.
You speak of browsing at
+5. Just the other day I saw an inane, pro-Microsoft
comment
as first post. It was neither insightful, nor informative,
but
incredibly, it was modded up to +5 Insightful. I posted
an anonymous comment,
pointing out that the mod for this
comment which added nothing whatsoever to
the discussion,
was evidence of a broken moderation system. I suggested that
if the very first comment was rated at +5 even though it
offered nothing,
anybody seeing that would conclude that the
remaining comments couldn't be
worth reading.
Would you believe it, my comment was actually deleted? I
had never seen that happen before when I frequented
Slashdot. The only time
comments were deleted was when
someone made racists comments or the equivalent,
but any
other kind of speech, like dissenting opinion was
tolerated.
Now one
of the things I liked best of all about Slashdot was
the many intelligent and
truly insightful or informative
comments one would find. However, with a broken
moderation
system they will not be so easy to find these days.
Microsoft is
firmly in control there.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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