Electric Monkey Pants

Slashdot’s redesign finally went into effect today. Creepy, isn’t it? Slowly, the old design will be erased from our memories and replaced with this new, graphic-heavy design. Don’t get me wrong; I like it, but it’s not that great. I think it captures the spirit of slashdot, and the new way that articles are blockquoted it cool, but I also think it looks a little too “clean.”

The cool part of the old design is that it was confusing enough to keep a lot of trolls and noobs away (or at least keep them confused about what the hell the purpose of the site was because it wasn’t immediately obvious that it was a community-tech-news-aggregation-blog). I remember when I first started visiting; I had no idea what the fuck was going on. I didn’t know that all the stories were submitted. I didn’t know they were simply linking to stories all over the net rather than doing proper write-ups (or any actual reporting) of their own. In a way, the old design hid the site’s flaws behind a facade of crappy design. Now that facade has been stripped and I daresay that slashdot will have to step it up a notch.

They’ve added some web 2.0 yumminess, like collapsable nav structures, but that alone will not compete with Digg. I think the biggest problem on the site is the editors who routinely ignore good stories (such as the ones I submit!) and post shitty stories on obscure tech bullshit that nobody cares about. Cheap Printed Official Ubuntu Linux Documentation is exhibit A. Currently the story has 10 posts (and no one has a post modded above +2). An unpopular story rarely gets below 100. I know everybody loves Linux on the site, but do they have to post a story everytime Linus takes a monster dump? Sheesh.

There’s lots of good tech-related stories out there, but many of them have the taint of politics, which seems to scare the editors, especially that tool, Zonk. He’s just an idiot gamer if you ask me. Of course, I might be bitter ’cause he constantly rejects my stories. But my stories are good, dammit! 🙂 Ah well, that’s why this blog exists. No longer can my inchoate ramblings be squelched by the privations of an idiot gamer. Nay, I will post my worthless thoughts for the world to see if they accidentally stumble across them through a search engine! Yes, it’s good to be the king of this castle.