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from the I'm-so-meta-even-this-acronym dept.
jcd writes:
"I'm rather excited to get going with Soylent and to watch it grow. Nay, help it grow. I have lurked in /. for more than a decade (note: I'm not the same username over there, I know, how sneaky), and always wished I could have been involved with the beginning. So this is a great opportunity, and I joined as soon as I saw what Soylent was doing. Not to mention the fact that I felt right at home with the old style. It's very comfortable.
So here's a question for everyone. Are we going to be the same as slashdot? A clone that focuses as entirely as possible on tech related news? Or will we branch out to other topics? I'm interested to see either way. I posted a comment to this effect in one of our two existing polls, and it may be a community-wide assumption, but I do think it merits a discussion."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DarkMorph on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:00PM
The question is, what stuff matters now? If we stray a tad from the strictly technological news, I would be all right with it. General news ought to be permitted, particularly events throughout the whole world. Really do not want that "it's too U.S.-centric" issue again.
At the very least let's refrain from having those utterly idiotic articles from being run here. You know, like the ones everyone bitched about over on
(Score: 5, Insightful) by oodaloop on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:05PM
Agreed. Fewer junk articles, and more news from around the world. As an American, I'd love to see more articles about politics and other news going on in other countries without it being about what it means to America. I might even tolerate metric units in TFS.
Many Bothans died to bring you this comment.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ragequit on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:11PM
I second this. Things HAVE to happen elsewhere in the world, right?
The above views are fabricated for your reading pleasure.
(Score: 1) by TWiTfan on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:37PM
I'm not big on political stories. I guess they're better than those advertisements-disguised-as-videos that Robolimbo was infamous for posting on /. but not by much.
If real life were like D&D, my Charisma score would be a negative number
(Score: 1, Insightful) by sar on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:50PM
Please no politics. Politics is bullshit with no hard facts where anyone can fart and label it Truth.
I for one prefer science and technology where you can't bend facts.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by oodaloop on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:59PM
What the politics is about may be bullshit, but the fact that elections are contested in a given country is important and factual. I want to know about laws being proposed, sanctions against countries, what kind of person won the election in another country, etc. I don't want to hear left-wing vs right-wing debates about the same tired subjects, but some political stories are important to know about.
Many Bothans died to bring you this comment.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by sar on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:21PM
Contested elections will be interesting for me if TFA includes nice statistical analysis of tampering. Or analysis of security holes in yet another e-voting machine.
Politics enough but still on technology side would be pirate party premier in some country. More for the fact that he would understand computers and would probably do some interesting decisions while in power.
Or some baltic country completely ditching physical currency and going electronic only.
With who won elections in other countries I am not so sure. Too many countries, too many similar parties, too many unknown names.
But what I would really like to see here more would be for example something similar to article about this uber nerdy lady that wrote how she decoded GPS signal from audio feed of some helicopter video of street car chasing...
(Score: 1) by quadrox on Friday February 21 2014, @01:23AM
I loved that Slashdot posted anything that matters. Maybe there were a few useless articles, but overall I would rather have to much diversity than to little. I want to keep up to date on all the important stuff in the world - this excludes celebrity gossip, but definitely own will include politics.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:03PM
Whilst I almost entirely agree, whenever you have things like the DMCA and DeCSS, detaining Jens and Dmitry et al., and shit like that, which is stuff that matters to a nerd like me, you can't but dive into US law and US politics.
So politics only where there's a strong nerd interest.
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to slashdot
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Buck Feta on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:30PM
>> I might even tolerate metric units in TFS.
If Soy is about science and tech, the style guide ought *require* metric units.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by kwerle on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:57PM
Ugh! If you want to see world news, use the BBC - it's awesome!
I want a software/IT/tech/science site, not another world politics.
My .02
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday February 21 2014, @05:41AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Insightful) by goody on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:04PM
You can go to the BBC or Al Jeezera to get political news from other countries and without an American slant. I say keep this site about science and technology -- real news for nerds.
(Score: 1) by EJ on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:50PM
I'm sorry, but I'm just not at all interested in political nonsense. I can get that just fine from fark.com, and I'd expect as valuable a level of commentary from users there.
I went to slashdot.org when I wanted to know that Google was selling Motorola to Lenovo, that Google fiber might be coming to my neighborhood, or that my phone was about to be owned if I used its web browser.
I like the idea that SN could be a place where any story I see is something I'm probably going to care about. Politics just annoy me, and there isn't anything I can actually do about any of it.
(Score: 1) by oodaloop on Monday February 24 2014, @11:22AM
Can you do anything about Google selling Motorola to Lenovo? This site wasn't created to cater to just your interests. We all have varied interests, and we all see articles we like and article we don't like.
Many Bothans died to bring you this comment.
(Score: 1) by krishnoid on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:06PM
Virtually every member here is going to recall the slogan, "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters."
If we can't get the rights to that, I was thinking we could try 'Soylent News and Nerd Report'.
(Score: 1) by frojack on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:46PM
Or maybe just SoylentNerds? ;-)
Its got a ring to it.
But I'm not sure we want ALL the stuff that came from Slashdot. Some was getting pretty old.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 1) by unitron on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:38PM
Okay,so then there're two of us here old enough to remember US News and World Report.
Maybe even 3 or 4.
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 2, Insightful) by zim on Friday February 21 2014, @01:40AM
Drop it. Time to move onto something else.
(Score: 1) by JeanCroix on Friday February 21 2014, @10:13AM
(Score: 1) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 21 2014, @02:05AM
Since /. is still actively using that -- not on the page anymore, but it's still in the >title< (even in beta (fuck beta!), it's the one thing they forgot to wreck) -- I really doubt we can get away with using it.
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 21 2014, @02:08AM
s/>\(.*\)</<\1>/
*hangs head in shame, swears to use the preview button*
userscript: Expand/Collapse buttons on every comment [userscripts.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by E_NOENT on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:23PM
Maybe the true nerd cred comes from being interested in stuff that doesn't "matter" in the traditional sense (I can read about earthquakes in ${COUNTRY} or zero-day exploits on IE11 elsewhere).
Help! I'm trapped in a PDP 11/70!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dotdotdot on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:41PM
I don't care as much about "News for Nerds" as I do about "Contributions from Nerds". I appreciate the informative, insightful, interesting and funny comments no matter what the topic is. I have learned way more from the discussions than I have from the stories submitted. I don't mind a little "Stuff that Matters" mixed in, but I'm here more to get the "Perspective of Nerds".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SpallsHurgenson on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:43PM
I agree. I actually enjoy some of the discussions on Slashdot regarding politics or economics, because it allows me to read - and discuss - these important issues with other geeks; people who have some understanding of why I take privacy violations so seriously, or look at electronic voting with great wariness. Yes, I can read about this stuff on other websites, but there the focus tends to be much more black-and-white, My Team versus Your Team without much discourse on the underlying problems (this happened on Slashdot too, but as often was moderated down to tolerable levels).
It's not the topics - not the article - that draws us to Slashdot (or Soylent); it's the comments. I want to hear what other readers say, and not just their opinions on the latest Linux kernel or whether OCZ SSDs were really that bad. Micro-focused as we sometimes can be, geeks as a whole have more than one interest and have more than one dimension to them. I enjoy hearing from them on other issues than purely tech and science. I mean, where else am I going to get this sort of intelligent conversation?
(Score: 1) by Common Joe on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:21AM
I hate to say it, but the only way to keep people happy in a scenario like this is to categorize the stories. One person wants only highly technical articles while another would be happy with tech articles and general news. Apply a filter and both are happy. Stories would need to be able to fall into multiple categories. Making these categories, keeping them up to date, and keeping the users engaged enough to update their preferences with these categories is a big challenge.
Just my opinion