I work with a bunch of geeks. And that's okay. They do their thing and I do mine. Most of the time I'm happy for them, that they get joy and happiness out of playing with electronics. Admittedly I disagree with a lot of their thoughts about life. People used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, then it was the sun, but now we all know that the computer is the focal point of the universe, projecting its cathode ray goodness on our souls. You can't eat, sleep, breathe, live or run a business without one, or so we're told.
I work with a bunch of geeks. And that's okay. They do their thing and I do mine. Most of the time I'm happy for them, that they get joy and happiness out of playing with electronics. Admittedly I disagree with a lot of their thoughts about life. People used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, then it was the sun, but now we all know that the computer is the focal point of the universe, projecting its cathode ray goodness on our souls. You can't eat, sleep, breathe, live or run a business without one, or so we're told.
But if there's one thing I have no tolerance for, it's the geek phenomenon known as slashdot.org, the sorriest case for content on the web I've ever seen pawned off and gleefully accepted by the masses.
When I look at magazines, newspapers, or any other source of information, I judge them on three items: usefulness/uniqueness of content, quality of that content, and the depth of coverage regarding that content.
Slashdot has none of these things. And yet people try to convince me that the people who run that website are working hard at it.
Say what?
That's right - when Andover.net filed its IPO, making the editors of Slashdot instant wannabe millionaires, someone in the office said "Those guys put in a lot of hard work, and they deserve the success."
Now, I write code for a living, and I work hard at it, so I have a good idea of how slashdot operates. I guarantee you that the entire website is little more than leftover code from college projects and other unrelated work. At the very best, it is ill-conceived and poorly developed, which explains in part why the interface is so miserably awful, and the site is unbelievably slow.
Let's theorize what goes on in the average day of the slashdot editors:
10:42 AM - get out of bed.
10:45 AM - first Dr Pepper of the day.
10:46 AM - unglue keyboard from desk, check stock market.
10:56 AM - find a few interesting tech stories on the web. This is easy, since users send them to us all the time.
11:04 AM - post said stories to slashdot, disregarding spelling and journalistic impartiality.
11:08 AM - start playing Quake 3 (or whatever the game of the moment is).
3:15 AM - go to sleep.
If I'm wrong about anything, it's that they get up even later than that. And I couldn't figure out what time that order the pizza for dinner. But they have pepperoni on them.
Content - The content of slashdot is, admittedly, targeted towards geeks. But apparently not very smart ones. Regardless of the target audience, the content is never challenging - it never pushes the reader to think. Have we become a society where the last place you really exercise your brain is in grammar school? The average news article on slashdot is little more than a snippet from some tech rag about a new product that everyone loves, usually with an editorial comment tossed in telling everyone how they should feel about it.
I can get that same crap anywhere else. The TV tells me what to think, newspapers and magazines back them up, and slashdot does the same exact thing and is somehow worshipped as a haven for free thinking.
Quality - Why not try out that spellchecker? One word for you slashdot folks: dictionary. Try one on for size. Work on your spelling and grammar, and once those improve I'll attack the quality of your writing.
Consider this - Jon Katz is the best writer on slashdot. If you're familiar with his work, then you might appreciate that, or you might realize how lousy the writing must be if that's the case.
Katz has written some decent articles for slashdot (In particular, his Hellmouth series). But he's too wrapped up in the medium to see what he writes about. He's too busy dropping buzzwords that define his writing more than his actual content.
But the truly amazing thing about him is - almost everyone who reads slashdot hates Katz. They loathe him. The self-proclaimed geeks who read slashdot don't want to be challenged by his writing. There are people who attack every article he writes, regardless of the content.
Depth - unless its the updated release schedule for the new linux kernel or a new game, you're not going to get much repeat coverage on slashdot. And you're not likely to extract much from an article unless you already knew a certain amount of information about the topic. Once again, the exception might be Katz, who writes multi-part articles, but mostly that's because he's a hopeless wheezebag.
The thing that really scares me is that all sorts of little slashdots are popping up all over the web, popular sources of sludge pawned off on the accepting readers, and we readily accept is all as verse. Is this what 200 years of the Industrial Revolution primed us for? 50 years of television? Or was it something else? In my short lifetime I've watched the quality of information sources decline to a point where coverage is simplistic enough that it could be fictionalized and no one would notice the difference. While people ignore the WTO or slaughters in Burundi, Angola, Cambodia, anywhere else to devote coverage to wonder drugs, the newest Internet craze, the Hollywood minute, or any other sort of "News you can use."
And now, in a time when information should be even more readily available, so much of it is crap that finding the gems is rarely worth the shit you need to shovel. The sort of crap you find at slashdot instead of insightful knowledge about this increasingly impersonal, computerized world that we all blithely accept and even embrace.
And that is why slashdot sucks. That website isn't encouraging any free thought, any independent thinking, and certainly not any dissenting viewpoints on the information age. And we all accept it, even 'credible' websites like Wired frequently link to slashdot as their source of expert information and news updates.
If you're not directly connected to the information you want, you're not likely to find anything of depth nowadays. And if you have that sort of connection, then why do you need the web in the first place?
As if cars, skyscrapers, television, mini malls, supermarkets, drugs, war, and McRainForest (brought to you by the Big Mac!) weren't enough, now we have to venture out on the web with millions of other people, and not once challenge out horizons or open our minds.