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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 lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:41PM
16 year Slashdot veteran here (joined in 1998 when Linux and Open Source was just starting to heat up). I think I for one would like to see Soylent's focus be on constructive responses to the present Internet crisis.
And by 'Internet crisis' I mean the following:
* the centralisation of social media into feudal walled gardens ruled by corporate behemoths with insane market caps
* the NSA and telcos' infiltration and destruction of privacy at every level of the computing stack
* the related online security apocalypse we're currently living through
* the ongoing self-destruction of Linux as a viable alternative due to GNOME and Canonical taking an autocratic rather than user-led approach
See, I've been around since the 80s. I remember the pre-Internet era. In 1986 it looked a lot like 2014 does: 'social media' consisted of a tiny handful of online services (Compuserve, BIX, GEnie, The Well) alost exclusively US-centric. They were expensive, they were arrogant, they treated their users like commodities not friends.
And they died in a fire when TCP/IP, HTTP and SMTP became mainstream in the early 1990s. For a brief moment we had an open Web that anyone could publish to on equal terms.
In the mid-90s, there was HUGE pushback against the idea of an open Internet not only from the corporate dinosaurs, but from the NSA. Look up the Steve Jackson Games bust and Phil Zimmerman. The cypherpunks fought to make RSA encryption freely available. They succeeded, but only for a time.
Then circa 1998, the forces of corporate lock-in were circling again. This was pre-Google, so Microsoft was the incumbent king. They struck back with Windows 98 and Internet Explorer, aiming for total platform dominance. Netscape, previously Wall Street's darling and the closest thing to open at the time, stumbled and almost died. And then the Free/Open Source movement started fighting back (modulo lots of infighting between the Raymond/Torvalds and Stallman camps, but still).
And now it's 16 years later and we're here again. The openness of the Web is dying again. Open source has only got us one step of the way; now we have to fight for open networks. And that's going to be a lot harder because we can't fork and clone fiber. Instead of the openness of the x86 platform replacing the lock-in of the telephone companies, we've had the reverse: the iPhone has exported the closedness of telcos back into the mobile and tablet computing space, and the lock-in mindset of tablets and 'curated' app stores is now recolonising the desktop. And that's really, really bad for the future.
In 1998, Slashdot was one of the voices of sanity standing up and saying 'we can be better; we have to be better; there is a way forward; openness is the way'. The Slashcode karma-moderation system was an early demonstration of crowdsourcing before Wikipedia. It was a lamp in the darkness.
I hope Soylent can be that lamp for a new generation.
One of the best books on the current Internet crisis is Jonathan Zittrain's prophetic 2007 The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it>" [futureoftheinternet.org].
Please help us find a way to stop the ongoing privacy, security and openness disaster. Please work together to create new, open networks that at the very least can run on top of our decaying legacy infrastructure (if not beside them) and bring back privacy, openness and security. Help pioneer new ways of working together as a community that don't revolve around San Francisco startups with billions of dollars of venture capital making yet another text messaging or restaurant booking app.
That's the discussion I want to have, and the community I want to be part of.
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 1) by corey on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:14PM
I feel compelled to +1 this despite it not really being a list of suggestions for the question posed. I don't have any mod points unfortunately. I've been around Slashdot a similar timeframe and saw all this happen and look forward to seeing the same discussions occurring on Soylent. Tech/geek news and discussions about the future of the internet. And not so US-centric.
(Score: 1) by jcd on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:37PM
This is the sort of thing I'm really interested in too. Over the past couple of years, I mostly said "hah, kewl" if anything to the subjects on /., and found very little actual substance. I'm actually a liberal arts guy (don't shoot!), but I have tech running through my veins. Seeing it co-opted (or as you said, effectively re-co-opted) the way it is really stings, and I'd like to see more discussion about ways to avoid it.
"What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
(Score: 1) by Non Sequor on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:41PM
http://historysquared.com/2012/05/31/the-fox-vs-th e-hedgehog-forecaster-by-philip-tetlock/ [historysquared.com]
I think you're hedgehogging. Hedgehogs can have a lot of good things to add to a conversation, but when they run the conversation, tunnel-vision runs rampant. Sometimes things are parts of larger trends, sometimes they're isolated incidents. I don't think a call to arms to try to rally a community to evaluate every event in terms of a perceived trend is productive.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:07PM
Um. Yeah, that link is exactly sort of mindless trend-following Wall Street jargon I consider to be absolutely a huge cause of the current crisis.
Yes, I have a 'single big thing' I'm interested in. It's called having values.
I'm not interested in hedge funds, trend predictions, or 'behavioural finance' (the very name gives me cold shivers). I'm not a speculator, I'm not part of the tech noveau riche. My dream isn't to flip a startup for $16 billion so I can afford an apartment in Seattle.
I have a boring IT job that pays the bills. I'm not here for the money. I'm here for the thrill I felt when as a twelve-year-old kid I typed RUN into a Commodore PET and knew I had a machine that was my own. I believe in the original ideals of Hackerdom: 'access to tools', in the sense of Steward Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog. Technology as a tool to be shaped by the users. Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms. Freedom to use, freedom to study, freedom to modify, freedom to share.
If you were here in 1998, you'll remember that that is what Slashdot stood for back then. Not just generic 'tech' and certainly not just the generic dotcom money bubble - Wired was already circling that particular drain. There was a loose movement with a shared cluster of values and spokespeople. Linus Torvalds. Eric Raymond. Bruce Perens. Tim O'Reilly. Lawrence Lessig. Pamela Jones. And in later years, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, writing the kind of post-cyberpunk science fiction with optimism and heart that was instantly recognisable as 'torn from the pages of Slashdot'.
If you don't care about values and you just want money, that's fine. But some of us believed - and still do - that the Slashdot crowd generally stood for more than just guessing the movement of crowds at any cost.
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 1) by Non Sequor on Friday February 21 2014, @12:01AM
Who said anything about money? This hedgehog/fox theory comes from literary criticism.
What i wanted you to take away was that people with singular ideals are more likely to be wrong in the way that they assess the future will play out. The people who are more likely to be right are the ones who integrate pieces of other people's ideals.
I'm not saying you shouldn't represent your ideals. But I think you should voice them without trying to be the nucleus around which a hive mind forms.
I appreciate openness, but I don't feel like it fixes everything and I tend to think that the Stallman wing of the free software movement tends to place things of utility to programmers on a pedestal above other concerns. That rubs me the wrong way. I think these things need to be regarded as an urge that needs a voice to be heard alongside the other things that people want.
My values are that I hate false clarity, I hate party platforms, I hate theories that everything is 'just so', and I hate perfection. But I love broken things that sometimes work.
(Score: 1) by lennier on Friday February 21 2014, @01:55AM
"Who said anything about money? This hedgehog/fox theory comes from literary criticism."
Possibly it does. But the site you linked to is full of links about hedge funds and financial trading, not literary criticism. You can see why I might be confused about the message you were trying to send?
"I appreciate openness, but I don't feel like it fixes everything... I think these things need to be regarded as an urge that needs a voice to be heard alongside the other things that people want."
I do agree that a singular focus can mean missing other details. And I understand that not everyone in the Soylent community today - heck, not everyone in the old Slashdot community in 1998 - shares the values I've articulated as 'hackerish'. I'm also not particularly interested in being any kind of nucleus; for one thing, I'm far too busy. What I _would_ like is to be an occasional part of a community that _does_ share those values. (Because I think they're important, obviously; they wouldn't be my _values_ if they were disposable nice-to-haves, they'd just be... passing trends and consumer choices, I guess.)
But I know that times change, people move on, and we don't always get what we want, or even what we need. Least of all agreement with everyone on the Internet.
Peace, and may your broken things at least sometimes work.
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 2, Interesting) by No Respect on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:16PM
So I kind of agree with some of what you're suggesting, but not all of it.
(Score: 1) by WildWombat on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:17PM
"In 1998, Slashdot was one of the voices of sanity standing up and saying 'we can be better; we have to be better; there is a way forward; openness is the way'. The Slashcode karma-moderation system was an early demonstration of crowdsourcing before Wikipedia. It was a lamp in the darkness.
I hope Soylent can be that lamp for a new generation."
This, a thousand times this. Your whole comment was spot on.
Cheers,
-WW
(Score: 1) by evilviper on Friday February 21 2014, @05:40AM
Are you sure you wouldn't just be better off signing-up for EFF's mailing list? Sounds like you're ready for their weekly "call for action" and continually doomsday for freedom of some kind or another.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a supporter of EFF, but their site doesn't need to be duplicated here. Plus, a news site with that kind of non-stop politics and related discussion would get utterly exhausting in short order.
Do YOU see ALL home-page stories?
dev.soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=1
github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/78
(Score: 1) by CoolHand on Friday February 21 2014, @09:16AM
Preach it, brother...
I still view the internet as having the potential to be both our brightest hope for the future of civilization, as well as tool for our darkest nightmares... Lately, it definitely seems to be leaning towards the latter. The only chance we have is if knowledgeable people keep fighting to inform the general populace and try to awaken them, and get them to take action.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams