Slashdot Gets More Digg-like

Who's better at picking compelling news stories: Editors who work at nothing else all day or thousands of community members voting on what they like? Venerable tech news site Slashdot is betting that a combination of the two will work best.
The site released Firehose, a new interface and voting system, to Slashdot members today. (You have to have a Slashdot account and be logged in to see Firehose.) Like Digg.com, the "wisdom of crowds" news site that's shot past Slashdot in Web traffic, Firehose allows you to vote up or down on stories.

But unlike Digg, popularity alone won't get a story on Slashdot's home page. "Digg puts the fate of the story in the hands of the algorithm," says Project Manager Patrick McGarry. On Slashdot, in contrast, votes will essentially just bring the story to an editor's attention. Scuttlemonkey (aka McGarry), Cmdr Taco, CowboyNeal or one of the other Slashdot editors still have to give it their stamp of approval.
I tried the Firehose system today and found it a bit mystifying at times. But if Slashdot's developers can make it a little more intuitive, I think the hybrid system could be a good one. I've read both blogs regularly over the past few years and noticed a couple trends:
-- It felt like Slashdot was not infrequently slow to pick up on a story. I'd read an interesting entry on Digg Tuesday night and not see it on Slashdot until Wednesday morning.
-- Letting Digg voters choose your news can sometimes be like letting American Idol viewers fill your iPod. In other words, sometimes the crowd just isn't that wise. I saw an interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose in which he celebrated the fact that a serious story will show up on Digg right next to one on a monkey with 12 nipples. I'm as much a fan of freakish sexual characteristics in mammals as the next guy, but I do think that Digg sometimes ends up with too many nipples on the monkey, if you know what I mean.
Of course, for the new Slashdot system to be successful, the editors will have to really listen to the voters. I'm guessing that may mean fewer Linux stories and reviews of books on programming on the front page.
And I think they've got to make the interface itself a little clearer.

A couple of examples:
-- You can move a slider on the color bar to see lots of stories or just the highest rated stuff. But is it clear to everyone but me that indigo is for promiscuous reading ("You'll see the absolute dregs," McGarry told me) and red will yield only the cream of the crop?

-- There's a play/pause button to the left of this screen grab, the first I'd ever seen on site that doesn't play music or videos. McGarry explained that the pause button was to stop the page from automatically updating when new stories came in, something that could happen a lot if you chose indigo on the color slider. That made perfect sense after he'd explained it. But I saw no explanation on the page itself.
Firehose is still a beta (McGarry hopes to roll out a general release version in a month or two), so hopefully some of this stuff will be changed, or at least better explained in the final version.

Comments

Over at Alexa:
Slashdot: Traffic Rank: 296 Linked sites: 19,562
Digg: Traffic Rank: 78 Linked sites: 21,697

Slashdot masterbeta's in an effort to stem the loss of readership. Imitation is the sincerest form of desperation-whoops-flattery. Keep beatin' it out sd- if successful you'll be wake surfing.

crescentdave

March 02, 2007

10:17 PM PT

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