Slashdot posts Megway parody 3 years later.
May 9, 2004 12:24 PM   Subscribe

Slashdot just a bit late?
posted by hobbes (32 comments total)
 
I generally like Slashdot. I read it regularly and find it a good source of interesting news and stories. That said, what makes Slashdot great is also what makes it suck: anything an editor likes can get on Slashdot. This is hardly a criticism - it's really the point of Slashdot.

Having seen the occasional deluge of Slashdot traffic to my site, I've concluded that being Slashdotted is like the weather - it's hard to predict, and when it rains, it pours. It seems that pertinence and quality are not key factors in determining what gets linked.

As a result of the great sea of noise that is Slashdot, you get posts like todays Megway: out of date, out of context. There were even some replies that seemed to think that the Megway was real (to their credit - if this is a credit at all, I get the impression these people just read the headline and nothing more).

On the other hand, like here on MetaFilter, you get a human voice. Also like MetaFilter, you occasionally get a great reply by someone who truly understands the subject, or better yet, someone who is directly involved in the story.
posted by stevengarrity at 12:34 PM on May 9, 2004


Well, they can be forgiven the lateness, the web being a big place, but apparently quite a few of the commenters are blindingly dense, too. So, no absolution for anyone who didn't get that it's a joke.
posted by Hildago at 12:40 PM on May 9, 2004


We're #1!
posted by i_cola at 1:03 PM on May 9, 2004


I might be sticking my head into the lion's mouth here, but...

so what?
posted by nthdegx at 1:14 PM on May 9, 2004


nice catch, but I think this would've been a better metatalk post!
posted by mcsweetie at 1:19 PM on May 9, 2004


Slashdot can have good explanations of very technical subjects, but a ton of it's just really, really nerdy humor. If Slashdot had a filter for "Score 5: Funny", I'd actually go there more often. But look at one of the high rated jokes about solar cells:

"Of course, we all know the electric companies are going to call this "stealing energy" and patent the sun..."

Not that we at the cool lunchtable of Metafilter can be much better, but in general after reading about ten comments of nerdy jokes about Linux, Beowulf or whatever the new buzzword is, I cringe and want to totally not invite Slashdot to the next cool party.
posted by geoff. at 1:22 PM on May 9, 2004


So ... slashdot sometimes sucks, eh?

Like ... wow.

I can think of several criticisms of /., like the way I have to wade through a ton of crap to get anything informative or pertinent, and how threads veer off into seemingly endless irrelevance frequently, but like, it's never occurred to me that Mefi would be a great place to go "man /. so suxx0rz".

I honestly don't think the blue (maybe not even the brown) is the right place for this, hobbes. Sorry dude.
posted by Blue Stone at 1:23 PM on May 9, 2004


geoff., if you have an account, you can set scores for any category you want. You can set all "Funny" funny posts to have negative scores so they never show up, set "Troll" posts to +5 so you always see them, etc. Slashdot can be bearable with HEAVY filtering. Unfortunately the defaults there let a lot of crap through. Once a story has been out for a few hours, the moderation stabilizes a bit and any comments that have been erroneously rated high or low get what they deserve.

The people who thought the Megway was real probably didn't: a) read the site (they couldn't, it was slashdotted); and b) read other people's comments. A lot of people on the site post first and think later -- a lot of Slashdot people make it a goal to make "insightful" comments that'll get modded up right out of the gate in the pursuit of a higher "karma" rating (trivia: "funny" moderations don't count towards karma).

Semi-on topic, Slashdot had yet another blast from the past story today, this time from 2002.
posted by zsazsa at 1:34 PM on May 9, 2004


To be honest just the thought of a slashdot regular coming over here and reading criticisms about the site makes me feel acutely embarrassed. Slashdot is very very good at what it does.
posted by nthdegx at 1:35 PM on May 9, 2004


I tried surfing at -1 yesterday and my brain exploded. The horror.

Signal to noise, signal to noise..
posted by Mossy at 2:21 PM on May 9, 2004


It is official. Everyone confirms: Slashdot is dying.

Another more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community
when CmdrTaco confirmed that the number of Slashdot readers has dropped yet
again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all the internet-using
population. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly
states that Slashdot has lost more and more readers, this news serves to
reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete
disarray.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing
is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any
future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very
bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose
readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood, spewing forth from between the
legs of CowboyNeal and his big, hairy mangina.

Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If
Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among lowly AC goatse-trolls. Slashdot
continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in
time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.

Fact: Slashdot is dead.
posted by keswick at 2:36 PM on May 9, 2004


The weird thing is that we made the parody site of their launch site. It looked exactly like the segway.com site for about three months, after which they changed it. Anyone looking at it today would totally miss that point, which I think was the key to it being somewhat humorous at the time.

I do remember a couple folks from the segway.com team emailed us soon after the megway thing launched, telling us that we need not fear a cease-and-desist because everyone in the company thought it was a riot.
posted by mathowie at 2:44 PM on May 9, 2004


It is amusing to think of some poor Slashdot reader, trapped in a twisty maze of Perl code and browsing at -3b or whatever, catching up on the latest pop culture riffs from 4 years ago.
posted by crunchburger at 3:22 PM on May 9, 2004


It's amusing to think of some poor Metafilter reader, trapped in a twisty maze of straw man arguments and micro brewed beer or a mocha latte, browsing lofi from their cell phone, catching up on the latest blog culture trends.

Not meant to be a reflection of you, crunchburger, anyone in particular or Metafilter as a whole. Generalizations just cause me to react this way.
posted by sequential at 4:06 PM on May 9, 2004


so, who's got the lowest slashdot user number?

(61695)
posted by quonsar at 6:50 PM on May 9, 2004


Maybe someone invented a Linux-based time machine...
posted by Dark Messiah at 7:27 PM on May 9, 2004


quonsar, I out myself... 6853.
posted by Gyan at 7:29 PM on May 9, 2004


one, obviously. duh.
posted by trondant at 7:32 PM on May 9, 2004


211601

My three-digit Fark number is much more impressive.
posted by NortonDC at 7:38 PM on May 9, 2004


5517. Had to look it up.
posted by alumshubby at 7:44 PM on May 9, 2004


659
posted by Kip at 7:59 PM on May 9, 2004


I'm so l337, I don't even have a /. account.
posted by PrinceValium at 8:37 PM on May 9, 2004


Is this 'Slashdot' something you need a computer to have heard of?
posted by snarfodox at 10:12 PM on May 9, 2004


516
posted by PenDevil at 12:00 AM on May 10, 2004


6196

Slashdot died years ago.
posted by websavvy at 6:31 AM on May 10, 2004


1700.
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:32 AM on May 10, 2004


4062. It would be alot lower (I was a regular reader before they even had user accounts), but I held out in protest for a while when they instituted them. I've posted exactly one comment in the past 3.5 years. Slashdolt is dead.

I bet someone here has a lower ICQ number than I, too. (871887)
posted by jammer at 7:34 AM on May 10, 2004


Who has the most slashdot comments?
posted by shepd at 10:00 AM on May 10, 2004


My number's not low, but... 66600. Yeah.

I have this terrible habit of not registering accounts for a site/service until long after I've been visiting/watching them for a while. (In /.'s case, a long while.) My MeFi and ICQ (1564518) numbers would be at least an order of magnitude lower, had I not been too lazy to register.
posted by Jairus at 4:13 PM on May 10, 2004


how did you manage to 'lurk' on ICQ (217069 here) without an account?
posted by quonsar at 6:01 PM on May 10, 2004


I have 70439 so I must have been a few months behind you, Quonsar.

I remember when I could browse /. at 4 and still be interested in most of what I saw. Now I browse at 5 and rarely find anything really insightful. It's only good for the headlines (The new ones, anyways ;) ).
posted by halonine at 8:06 PM on May 10, 2004


quonsar: I used my friend's account. His was/is in the 10XXXX range, if I remember correctly.

I thought ICQ was such a silly idea, too. I figured anyone who wants to chat with anyone else would just /msg them on IRC.
posted by Jairus at 9:28 PM on May 10, 2004


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