January 25, 2002

10:38 PM

Alterslashtakes all the hard work out of reading Slashdot. On a single page, it compiles the day's headlines, along with the top five rated comments on each, and graphs the signal % over time for each thread. Think of it as an automatic digest, showing just the best of Slashdot, each day.
posted by mathowie (15 comments total)

a better interface for sure -- but, for my taste, that wasn't too high a bar either
posted by victors at 11:02 PM on January 25, 2002

Oh, man, those signal/noise graphs are brilliant.
posted by nicwolff at 11:29 PM on January 25, 2002

Interesting just how quickly the number of new comments fall off after the stories are posted. I always knew it was fast, but damn. Further proof that the Slashdot comment system is just a big game, with people fighting to get in early in order to get a good score.
posted by Potsy at 12:15 AM on January 26, 2002

I'm assuming those graphs are built on the fly. Does anybody know how that is done? Is it some function of PNG graphics that I don't understand, or (horrors) is all the content on the page actually human edited?
posted by willnot at 12:37 AM on January 26, 2002

PNG is just an image file format. There's nothing special about it that allows dynamically generated graphs. It looks like the graphs are updated once a minute by an automatic script.
posted by Potsy at 12:48 AM on January 26, 2002

php for one allows creating of graphics on the fly. looks to me as though it's updating every 10 minutes.
posted by titboy at 1:32 AM on January 26, 2002

Wow thanks Matt!
posted by internetgeniuses at 2:19 AM on January 26, 2002

That's cool! It turns slashdot into a readable, usable blog. When is the metafilter version going to be available :)
posted by mecran01 at 5:37 AM on January 26, 2002

wow.. i can actually read slashdot now (well, this incarnation of it, at least.).
posted by lotsofno at 6:07 AM on January 26, 2002

Self-plug: slashdot will become obsolete. I ain't done yet, though...
posted by costas at 6:42 AM on January 26, 2002

i kind of like how slashdot feels unorganized, like you can't read it without feeling like you keep missing the important stuff (which must be there someplace, right?)...having a readable blog-like format makes it seem like a totally different thing.
posted by fsck the police at 7:06 AM on January 26, 2002

Without the handful of replies to the top five comments I'm really missing out. The top five usually mean whoever is best skilled at playing the party-line or fooling the moderators. Plus listing the replies to posts it doesn't list aint helping much.
posted by skallas at 8:39 AM on January 26, 2002

It'd be good if you could apply such time saving filters to everything in life.

"I wish to be American citizen."
"Great. Here's your driver's license, gun, and bag of Cheetos. The course on swearing is down the hall. Next."
posted by dong_resin at 10:02 AM on January 26, 2002

The top five usually mean whoever is best skilled at playing the party-line or fooling the moderators.

I only really take issue with the 'fooling the moderators' bit. If you've spent any time on /. , you'll know that anyone can be a moderator if they've been a member for a while and the code randomly chooses them. How you can 'fool' a random individual from a pool of tens of thousands escapes me. Plus, every member gets to meta-moderate, which offsets any 'fooling' you may have done to the moderators de jour.
posted by phalkin at 9:10 PM on January 26, 2002

How you can 'fool' a random individual from a pool of tens of thousands escapes me.

Its really easy, just post something inflammatory or act like you're an expert. If you're convincing enough you'll get modded up and eventually have a dozen or so replies telling you you're wrong. Eventually the post will have something like +5 up and -3 down or so. I've BS'd my way to many 5 point posts at /. so lets not assume it doesn't happen.
posted by skallas at 10:51 PM on January 26, 2002