My first year of undergraduate schooling at LSU, I had a conversation with a fellow Computer Science student named Mark. He, along with one other student in my class, used a Mac laptop for his programming and daily computer usage. At the time, I had already begun suspecting that Macs were going to be the superior platform, especially for programming and I asked him about what it was like using a Mac for development. Keep in mind that this was in early 2004, just 2.5 years after the original iPod was launched and Apple was still a small-ish computer company with a successful music side business.
We stopped by the library after class and he showed me many many amazing things. In fifteen minutes, my eyes were opened to a much larger world of computing techniques and strategies. One of the things he showed me was an early RSS Reader, a program designed to subscribe to the news feeds of websites. By using it, one could get an at-a-glance list of updates for huge numbers of websites all in one place! Since RSS was a new protocol, the primary users of it at the time were tech news sites, something I wished to consume voraciously.
Mark showed me his feed list. The one site that was in focus at the time was Slashdot, one of the premier tech news websites. Since then, it has been in my feed list. That is, until this evening. After over 11 years, I have deleted Slashdot from my feed list. If I can help it, I won't be going there ever again.
What changed? Two things happened.
First, relatively minor, is that Slashdot is often a day late with any significant news. Other sites are up-to-date within the hour, but Slashdot has gotten further and further behind. Minor announcements and events are posted about a full 24 hours after they occur, and really significant things still take over 6 hours to appear most of the time. This has been going on for quite a while, but I was not too concerned. I thought perhaps the delay gave such a prestegious site time to fully digest the event before reporting it. It may not be the most up-to-date, but it was often a site that reported the significant things and little else.
But the second reason, and far worse issue, is that their quality has consistently declined for a completely unnecessary reason...
Slashdot became politicized. It began reporting stories with an obvious political bias, or chose which stories to post based on political leanings and how it might effect certain groups. More and more frequently, stories with no significant technological content were posted. Slashdot used any and every illegitimate means of providing a tech fig leaf to justify its inclusion on a site about technology. Posts amounting to nothing more than a single person's naked opinion were given the same signficance on the site as real news. 'Scientific' studies holding up a correlation in a tiny sample size as "compelling evidence." And hundreds upon thousands of stories that read just like any non-tech news website: reporting what some thought about an event or what an event 'meant,' not simply reporting the event. So long as it was tangentally tech related, Slashdot would find a way to talk about it.
If Slashdot were a news website (and not a tech news website), I could almost understand, though there's no excuse for the rampant bias on display there. However, Slashdot is supposed to be about technology. Technology, as a study and discussion point, should be more empirical than just about any other field, save perhaps for mathematics. Technology is human-created from top to bottom, repeatable by definition, and quantifiable in nearly every respect. The idea that opinions are needed, at all, in technology news baffles me. So when politics (both traditional politics and cliques within technology) enters the fray, you can be certain that someone is trying to achieve some end not related to technology. And I suspect this group is the same group that has infected nearly every other aspect of culture, from gaming to literature to movies to other news sources: the politically correct, progressive, environment-worshiping relativists who pretend they understand science because they like to look at pictures of stars and Neil deGrasse Tyson. (Neil deGrasse Tyson, incidentally, is not actually that smart or compelling in my opinion. I attended one of his talks in person and he made several dubious claims as he hurled insults on those who opposed his views using strawman arguments.)
So that's why Slashdot has to go from my online consciousness: Politicalization, that cancer to legitimate reporting of facts and reasoned discussion of events. I canceled my Wired magazine subscription years ago for the same reason.
