Penguin

http://www.slashdot.org/ -- News for nerds: stuff that matters.

A site on the net that links to interesting news articles for geeks/nerds etc. Doesn't quite have the same editorial quality as most people are used to (duplicate posts of stories are a regular occurance) but it's still the website of choice due to it's wide range of fascinating content. (No, I don't mean the comments.)

I'd look at it more if I could filter the comments that have been modded up as "Funny" away, Lord they piss me off. --GlynWebster

You can, Glyn; there's now an option to assign modifiers to moderations, ie that you won't see +1 Funny moderations, therefore they won't count towards a total and in general you won't see them.

Oh neat. Because there are sometimes very informative contributions in the comments section, often better than the articles themselves. (I think the lesson here is to never let geeks vote on what is funny.) --GlynWebster

By the time I had net access, quality was already in the dumps, so I never really got into that community at all. The Quit Slashdot.org Today! movement homepage might be of interest. --AristotlePagaltzis

I've never found anything that has the volume that slashdot does. Sure volume is inversely proportional to quality, but I like knowing a little bit about a lot, most of the really fascinating articles I find on slashdot I've already heard from somewhere else, but slashdot does have a nice quality of having 10 or so articles that I can browse when I'm bored. -- PerryLorier

I read Slashdot through http://www.alterslash.org, Jonathan Hedley's attempt to hand-edit Slashdot. If I see something interest there, I go look at the full Slashdot entry. --GlynWebster

Hmm, perhaps thats the way to go. I ran for a while "Infomer" which watched for people mentioning URL's on IRC and putting them into a blog. It was interesting (people tend to mention some pretty good URL's), but it was very bloated with crap (things that look like url's, but are only examples, people pointing to the same copy of different pages etc). I always wondered about doing up a weblog where anyone could submit a "story" and then everyone voted on how good the story was. Stories voted highly by people who vote similarly to you are shown to you. So 'communities' develop of like minded people who post stories for each other to see. If you abuse the system (rate goatse links up for instance), then you will end up only seeing stories posted by people who post abuse (ie: all the stories you see will be links to goatse). --PerryLorier

Perry: I mentioned to you that I'd written a vaguely similar tool for UseNet. I've put it on my website where you can get at it: http://www.wave.co.nz/glyn/skimmer.py --GlynWebster