Slashdot content has become very predictable of late: most of the stories look to be either designed to start flame wars or to report sensationalist news items. They seem to fall in one of these categories:
- Is XYZ all that is cracked out to be (replace XYZ with the flavour of the day - AJAX, Google, OSS, Evolution)?
- Beating a dead horse, something that is universally reviled by the Slashdot regulars -- like Microsoft, DRM, SCO, patents, et al
- The latest shiny object unveiled by Google or Firefox
The articles that don't belong to these categories are either boring (Jupiter's 14th moon is discovered to contain traces of methane? Really? How
could I possibly have made it through life without knowing this?) or plain sensationalist.
The reason for my rant is one of today's /. items: a Japanese bank
loses a lot of money because of a typo. Nothing wrong with reporting this, but, never being one to let facts stand in the way of a good story, they hype it up so:
- The amount of money lost due to the typo is not $3 billion, as the story's headline misleadingly indicates
- No shares were sold at the price of one Yen
What's more, in the age of RSS, when one subscribes to the blog feeds of people like James Robertson, Bruce Schneier and Joel Spolsky, in addition to providing interesting insights, they also serve as an unintended filter on stories reported by Slashdot: if they blog about it, it's definitely worth knowing about (notwithstanding the argument regarding gatekeepers and all that). I might as well unsubscribe from Slashdot's feed and still not miss anything really relevant.
One thing Slashdot really excels at, though, is the quality of the comments. Provided you browse them at 3+, you get to read some very Informative/Insightful/Interesting/Funny stuff.
