Slashdot VS digg

Thursday, January 12th, 2006

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Digg.com will be the new slashdot , whereby Slashdot.org receives a lot of complaints and Digg.com receives a lot of praise. Most of these are comming from the Digg camp. There’s a article on The Guardian right now prematurely talking about Slashdot’s demise.

“Slashdot will take years to die,” Jeremy Zawodny, a respected engineer at Yahoo says. But he thinks sites such as Digg and Reddit offer something Slashdot can’t: the ability for readers collectively to pick stories they think are interesting, generating a community feel and a sense of power. At Slashdot, started in 1997, stories are chosen by a team of editors.
I’ve visited digg.com on occasion. It’s similar in content to a number of sites; mostly a mix of Slashdot.org, Geekpress.com and many sites that just post links to ‘funny’ stuff. The volume of ‘stories’ is high; much higher than most sites I know (except for FreshMeat.net). The links are generally pretty good, though I’ve seen some pretty bad ones hit the front page. But will it be the new Slashdot? I don’t think so.

The whole Digg.com hype-Slashdot bashing reminds me very much of the situation with another site..Kuro5hin.org. Kuro5hin too has a fairly large anti-slashdot gathering and they too believe themselves to be oh-so-better than Slashdot. Just like with Digg.com, I’ve also visited Kuro5hin for a while in the past. Just like with Digg.com, I didn’t stay around for long. Instead of focussing on their own little corners of the Internet, they’re more obsessed with beating Slashdot.org.

Let’s take a look at what Slashdot’s got to offer and what are some common complaints about Slashdot.

Slashdot

Pro’s:

• Quality stories.
  Sure, there are dupes (duplicate stories) now and then, but the general quality of not just the contents Slashdot links too, but also the summaries is, and has been for years, very high.
• Fairly decent volume of stories.
  Not too little; not too much.
• Stories that spark discussions
  Slashdot summaries of stories often try to spark discussions.
• Excellent discussion system
  Slashdot’s discussion system is top-notch. Nothing gets even close. The threaded replying, the score-based browsing, the easy navigation… Slashdot’s got years of experience with high-volume discussions and it shows in their discussion system.
• Excellent moderation system
  Slashdot’s moderating system is simply the best. Again, nothing beats it. Good posts float to the top – bad stories become invisible.
• Excellent crowd of posters with insightful, interesting and funny comments.
  This is of course mostly due to Slashdot’s incredible moderation system, but still. There are some very, very smart people on Slashdot. People with real oppinions and real knowledge.
• Fair amount of self-ridicule amongst posters.
  I absolutely detest a community that rates itself highly.
• Character
  I don’t know how to explain this one.. Slashdot simply has character. Where else would you find a post like this?
• Geek journalism
  Slashdot isn’t just about posting links to interesting stories, it’s also a form of journalism. Mostly by the commenters.
• News.
  Not just a big linkdump.
• Acceptable volume
  Slashdot has an acceptable volume of stories. I don’t like having my RSS feed reader getting spammed with stories.

Con’s:

• Dupes
  Duplicate stories are a problem on slashdot, according to its visitors. It has never really bothered me much, I hardly notice them even though the volume of stories isn’t that high. Besides, the insightful discussions make even the dupes valuable.
• Unselected stories
  Story submitters often complain about their stories not being accepted and posted to the frontpage. They especially complain when a different submitter with the same story does get accepted.
• Slashvertisements
  Some stories at times seem to be little more than an advertisement for a product.
• Linkwhores
  There are many complaints about story submitters who abuse the backlink Slashdot provides to a page of their choice when their stories are selected. Many argue that linkspammers, who simply submit many many stories and get a fair number of them accepted, are abusing this backlink to get impressions for their site. Slashdot even ran an editorial on the problem.

Digg.com

Pro’s:

• High volume
  Digg’s pretty high volume, which is nice if you’re bored. (Also see the con’s on this).
• Generally good links
  The gross of the links on Digg are interesting to me, which is good.

Con’s

• High volume
  (Also see con’s). Digg’s pretty high volume which is good, but it’s also annoying because it completely spams my RSS feed reader (which lists story in chronological order, not per site). The volume of the links also has an effect on their quality
• No editors
  Digg.com doesn’t have editors. This makes their stories little more than links to other articles. The quality of the stories also suffers from this. For instance, you’ll never find a link to one of those extremely annoying ‘funny’ movies. The relevance of the stories isn’t garantueed. Slashdot is “news for nerds, stuff that matters”. Though Slashdot often carries stories I don’t find interesting, they’ve at least been consistent for years in what they post. Digg.com posts too much bullshit about Ajax and a whole lot of other stuff that I’d much rather read from on a site devoted to such topics. This will never change on Digg.com; it will only get worse as it becomes more populair.
• Incomprehensible front-page
  Digg’s front-page is incomprehensible, story wise. I still haven’t figured out what makes a story get to the front-page, what makes it stay there and what determines the order in which they appear. It’s not chronological and it also doesn’t seem to be score related. Since their RSS feed mirrors their front-page, I can’t use their RSS feed (since my feed reader combines all the feeds in a chronological order).
• Worthless comment system.
  Flat commenting systems suck. ‘Nuff said.
• Worthless commenters
  Digg commenters are generally very annoying. The noise-to-signal ratio is so high that it isn’t just not worth reading or joining the discussions, it actually annoys me. Maybe this is because of their (non-existing?) moderation system, I don’t know.
• Moderation?
  Does digg even have moderation?
• Link dump
  Digg.com is nothing more than a link dumping site of which there are enough already.
• Envyous users
  Slashdot-bashing users and stories degrade Digg’s quality significantly. The users seem to be full of themselves, digg.com and digg.com’s founder(s).

In short, I don’t think Digg.com will be the new Slashdot. I don’t think Digg.com will replace Slashdot either. Both seem to serve very different purposes, even though the site owners seem to think differently. Digg is a high-volume tech-oriented link dump blog, ‘for the people, by the people’. Slashdot is “news for Nerds; stuff that matters”, complete with brilliant discussions.

Alarm.sh v0.2

Sunday, January 8th, 2006

Alarm.sh v0.2. Get it while it’s hot!

Changes:

• No output shown when in daemon mode anymore.
• Alarm.sh no longer adds alarms with an invalid date/time.

Bad surveys

Friday, January 6th, 2006

Since I graduated and got my bachelors degree, I’ve regularly been approached to participate in various surveys. Among them have been polls on the impact of pre-education on my last education, quality of my latest education and various other surveys.

To date I have not seen a single poll which was straight-forward in it’s questions. Every single one uses vague terms which I’ve encountered in the past but which have no reference at all to my education. Questions tend to be incomplete, vague, terribly formulated (to the point that the meaning of the question can only be guessed) or not in the slightest related to my personal situation (even though they’re still assuming it is).

The latest survey I’ve been approached for is one by the SEO which performs various market researches. They’re conducting research on the marketing field and positions of recently graduated higher educated. Since my time isn’t worth anything anyway, I decided to particpate in the poll. At 15% of the poll they completely lost me. I had no idea which particular education I’ve followed they were asking questions about. The poll listed the question under “Information Technology”. Yeah, nice, but I’ve followed more than one “Information Technology” related education, so which one am I awnsering questions for? Next to that, they were also asking questions along the lines of (rough translation): “Have you ever been deselected for an educational level or educational institute?”. What does ‘deselected’ mean? At first that sentence read like ‘selected’, but the awnsers did not make any sence. I had no idea how to awnser that.

One of the main problems of surveys like these is that they’re linear. By linear, I mean the questions are asked in sequence and there’s no way of telling what the next question will be. As a result it is impossible to put a certain question in perspective to the rest. Why are polls structured like this? Why not just list anything on one huge page so I can see what I’m up against?

My biggest gripe about these kind of surveys is that people actually base statistics and decisions on them. They don’t seem to realize that a large percentage of the awnsers are simply guesses. This explains why survey-results are so often complete bullshit.

Now, I have conducted surveys myself in the past, and I know how hard it is to get it quite right. Even harder is getting a meaningful and correct conclusion from the collected awnsers. But you’d think they would at least take the time to sit down with some people from the target group and walk through the survey with them.

Here are a couple of tips for creating better surveys:

• Show the complete survey at once and don’t conduct questions in a linear non-forward/non-backward fashion.
• Explain used terminology.
• Allow people to comment on each question and take these comments into consideration when drawing conclusions. If need be, throw away the results and start over. Better no conclusion than a wrong conclusion.
• Keep questions simple.
• Show questions in the right context. Announce the context before each question. Explain the context! This sounds elementary, but you wouldn’t believe some of these surveys.
• When conducting digital surveys, allow people to stop awnsering questions and come back to the survey later on (as in days, not minutes) so they can complete it.
• List an e-mail address or phone number for asking questions about the survey somewhere.
• Don’t ask questions in the form of “If such and such or such and such or this and that were the question, or this and that or somesuch was the question, would you say you were inclined to do this or that or such and such or not?” and then list five options with a follow up question about one of the options. I can just hear you thinking “Come on, nobody conducts polls with questions like that!”. Well, guess again.
• Less is beter.
• Don’t list multiple option questions like: A) 0-8. B) 8-15. C) 15-20, because I’m not very psychic and I can’t guess if 8 should be listed under A or B. Again, I’m not making this stuff up. I’ve seen this and many, many other unclear options.
• Do not assume people in the target group know what every term used means. Get somebody from outside of the target group to take the poll. If there are questions (s)he doesn’t understand, there’s going to be people in the target group that won’t understand them either.
• Do not list the conclusion you’re going to draw from the questionair in the questionair! Yes, yes, I know, you think I’m bullshitting you, but once again, I’ve seen it happen. Some time ago I saw a poll which, in it’s introduction said: “We’re conducting a survey amongst such and such group to determine too what degree the lack of this and that negatively influences the results of whatever“. Such a description will influence the target demograhpic.
• Each question should have a ‘biased’ checkbox. Usually people know when they’re giving a biased awnser, and they won’t be too lame to admit it, even if they’re doing it on purpose. (or maybe I’m just an exception).

Any professional surveyer will probably laugh and scoff at this little rant of mine but guess what? All your polls suck. I’ve only ever seen one decent survey in my life (except for one-question-yes-or-no ones) and that was a survey on instructor-competence at my last educational facility.

Oh, and this stuff also goes for the Dutch IRS, with their pathetic “We can’t make it any more fun, but we sure can make it easier!”. Yeah, right. If this is easier, I wouldn’t want to know what it was like before.

Update (I guess I’m not done ranting yet)

Why do they conduct surveys like this anyway? I mean, with the questions and the multiple awnsers and stuff? Why not just put down the question and a big entrybox where people can write their awnser? “We’re conducting a survey on the job perspectives offered by different educations. Please write the full name of your highest achieved/completed education and your oppinion on the job perspectives that eductation offers. Please restrict yourself to your previously held or current job.” Highly unscientific naturally, just like all the other surveys. At one point you’ve got to conclude that it’s not the way a survey is performed but the validity of the conclusions that’s important. Why make something as hard as drawing conclusions even harder by getting the data in such an ass-backwards way? This way you’re at least basing your conclusions on the oppinions of the target group, not that of the surveyor.

Some (Debian) backgrounds

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006

I found some Debian (and one Linux) backgrounds I had created some time ago on my computer. Decided to put them online.

localenv v0.1

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006

localenv is a collection of scripts that run other scripts and replace (configuration) files depending on the current profile, which is determined by the network you’re currently on. It is ideal for laptop owners that move between different networks.

Scripts are provided for discovering which network you’re on (by using known MAC addresses of machines on the network), running scripts in certain directories and changing configuration files.

Get version 0.1 here. Project page is over here.

Oh, right. Almost forgot

Monday, January 2nd, 2006

Oh, right. Almost forgot:

Happy new year or something positive like that.

DataQ v0.4

Monday, January 2nd, 2006

Due to some feature requests, I’ve made some updates to DataQ. Hereby I release v0.4 unto the unsuspecting public.

Changes:

• A new command has been added to the protocol: PEEK. PEEK can be used to pop the current message from the queue without actually modifing the queue.
• Hosts can now be specified with netmasks to give complete networks access to all the queues or a single queue.

Backup v0.5

Tuesday, December 27th, 2005

Even though it’s unmaintained, I still added a new version of the Backup script: version 0.5.

Changes include:

• Complete rewrite
• Much stuff moved to functions
• Pre, post, pre_each and post_each script support added.

Information harvested by NSA larger than acknowledged

Sunday, December 25th, 2005

From Slashdot:
The New York Times is reporting that the “volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged.” The NSA gained the cooperation of many American telecommunication companies after 9/11 to access streams of communication, both domestic and international, as a part of a presidentially approved program to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity.
What was it again? Oh yeah!

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out.

— Rev. Martin Niemöller

Land of the Free indeed.

MBNetFS

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

MBNetFS 0.3.0.

SMBNetFS is a user-space filesystem for Linux that allows you browse a Samba/Microsoft network much like the network neighborhood in Microsoft Windows.

All I can say is.. Finally!