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RIP Kuro5hin

kuro5hin.org

191–200 of 278 posts

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#191

First there was Slashdot, but CmdrTaco insisted on picking the stories for us. He called it an "omelet". Kuro5hin came along to fix this, but discouraged posts that were just links to pages elsewhere on the web. IIRC, this was called "link farming". How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. Digg then encouraged links, but sh…

I'd argue the reason we thrived was because we knew we had to be a platform for communities (subreddits) from the beginning. No single frontpage can be home for everyone, but tens of thousands of communities on a common platform, can scale forever.

Slashdot was definitely the OG, though. Got to meet CmdrTaco at a talk I gave a little while ago and tell him thanks for everything he did to inspire us at Reddit.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd not heard of this community before. Before my time, I guess. The idea of publishing something or not is rather interesting. It presumably encouraged much higher quality content.

K5 as it was usually shortened to, had a few very interesting people on it back in its heyday such as Micheal Crawford who wrote about Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and localroger who wrote The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. It was reddit with all the weird kids.

Michael Crawford is here on HN, in case you were wondering. When I first saw his name, I definitely did a double-take and had flashbacks to his OggFrog posts. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MichaelCrawford

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#193

Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone forever, but it may be a little while before it reappears. There's a very good chance that it will reappear in the form of an archive of static html pages though, not a live community. So if you'…

Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#194
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First "the fappening" attracting juvenile sexist dudebros and alienating the rest, now /r/the_donald (and I'm skipping a lot of drama). It's not a coincidence that the best subs are the ones where the goals of the sub are clearly defined and the mods enforce the rules with an iron fist (/r/AskHistorians is the best example of this).

Can anybody explain how /r/The_Donald even happened? I can't tell if it's serious about Trump or if it's the new containment sub for dudebros. I'm very surprised at how often posts from there show up in /r/all.

Reddit, as a text forum, has a common problem with Poe's law: dry satire is sustained for too long and starts to be taken seriously.

Subs that start as sarcastic mockery become havens (and recruiting posts) for true believers.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First "the fappening" attracting juvenile sexist dudebros and alienating the rest, now /r/the_donald (and I'm skipping a lot of drama). It's not a coincidence that the best subs are the ones where the goals of the sub are clearly defined and the mods enforce the rules with an iron fist (/r/AskHistorians is the best example of this).

It boggles me that there's no way to filter out specific subreddits on /r/all without using some custom viewer or plugin. Or am I missing something?

Log in and unsubscribe, visit reddit.com/ instead of /r/all

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#196
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but we can't pretend that the low quality of the defaults doesn't affect the quality of the good sub-reddits.

Does it? A subreddit is as good as its moderators; a good team can keep a sub from being flooded with trolls, or even regulars who are unfamiliar with a sub's rules or culture.

It does.

When a really nice niche subreddit is thrust into the lime-light by becoming a default, it usually dies from an influx of low-quality default users. If it doesn't die from that, the moderation team has to really step up their job - a job they're not getting paid to do which means moderation teams get overworked and burned out, and the quit and the sub dies from lack of moderation. If the subreddit is survives that, the more successful approach seems to be for moderation to become very heavy-handed, which does quite well in a number of places, but also forces a change to the subreddit's culture that was doing well before it became a default.

If the answer is to not become a default sub, well, then the low-quality of the default has affected a good quality sub from becoming a default and prevented quality content from reaching more users.

Unfortunately, a good moderation team doesn't just appear, and one way of acquiring talent is to gasp pay for it. Reddit's avoidance of paying moderators results in relying on unpaid volunteers to do the bulk of the work, so good teams are few and far between, and horrible racist troll-y shit is de jure.

Reddit wants to be "the front page of the internet", but when the default not-logged-in front page features shit like "What's the difference between a feminist and a gun? (self.Jokes)" (pulled just now), it's never going to rise above being dismissed as the front page for horrible trolls, racists, and misogynists.

If I'm supposed to make an account then wade through a pile of shit subreddits just to find an AskHistorians diamond or two, how about I just don't wade through the pile of shit at all?

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#197

Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone forever, but it may be a little while before it reappears. There's a very good chance that it will reappear in the form of an archive of static html pages though, not a live community. So if you'…

Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.

Yeah I don't really mind continuing to host it -- in archived form it wouldn't be any burden. But I'll talk to people.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#198

First there was Slashdot, but CmdrTaco insisted on picking the stories for us. He called it an "omelet". Kuro5hin came along to fix this, but discouraged posts that were just links to pages elsewhere on the web. IIRC, this was called "link farming". How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. Digg then encouraged links, but sh…

Digg pretty much died when it was co-opted by political players. Even /. took a hit when they allowed politics free reign

when it comes to tech sites and geeks the last thing you want in intelligent stories and conversation is politics

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#199
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase 'In these days of political correctness…' talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, 'That’s not actually anything to do with "political correctness". That’s just treating other people with respect.'Which made me oddly happy. I started imagi…

Yes that certainly sounds very nice (pretending that political correctness is only about "being nice"), but in my opinion is an excellent example of the problem. Some topics are going to hurt people's feelings, there's no getting around it, so if "treating people with respect" is an absolute, then it is in many scenarios outright censorship of ideas. The article you links claims that is simply not true but offers abs…

http://i.imgur.com/dmgpS.png

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#200

What's an SJW?

Social Justice Warrior, an attempted dogwhistle[1] used by GamerGaters / men's rights activists / anyone of scared of a more equal society, in a derogatory way against people who promote equality and not being a dick on the Internet. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

SJW are the kind of people who will post things like this: http://catsickles.tumblr.com/post/105335581709/to-do-list-br...

The key part is the warrior - they started fighting for what is good and became everything they were against (discriminating based on color, gender, sexualorientation).

Is that most of the feminists? No. As evidenced by how many reasonable people you can find when you look at tumblr under the cisgender tag.

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