I'd like a feature that will disable comments from ever showing up when I view Slashdot. You see, I occasionally click a link in my aggregator to read a story on /. and then end up reading the comments.
I'm not sure why, but I do. It's like looking at a really nasty picture. I know I shouldn't but it still happens.
The only saving grace is that I read at the highest possible filtering level, but still.
Now that I think about it, there's an even better solution: /. should provide a full-text RSS feed. Then I'd never accidentally get sucked in.
Posted by jzawodn at March 20, 2004 10:51 PM
Slashdot will never provide fulltext rss because they rely on ad revenue. Dont click the links :)
How odd, I get sucked into reading the comments too. On a bad day, its nice to just grep out the ones modded "Funny".
yes to full-text! when i click through to their site i never see anything but the story (if you can call the blurbs stories). ads are blocked out and i never bother to go down the fold to read comments. it always seemed a waste that they're doing all this dynamic processing for me, and it benefits neither me nor them.
besides, they could always put ads in the rss feed, and most readers do not yet have ad blockers.
Heres a full-text RSS with top scoring comments only-
http://alterslash.org/rss_full.xml
http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss doesn't qualify then? It's not full text, but it does thin out the process a bit.
joat, I think the Jeremy does subscribe to that Slashdot feed. Since it only includes an excerpt of the post (instead of the entire post), if the post is interesting, he has to click on the link in his aggregator to open up the page in Slashdot. Since that page contains all of the comments for the post, he then gets suckered into reading the comments.
Maybe a better solution would be to have the permalink be the non-comment version of the page, and the comment link to be the comment version of the page. Then Jeremy could click on the permalink and not have to deal with all those comments.
What's wrong with reading /. at 5? The comments at that level are a hell of a lot better than most things on other sites, such as people who post Yahoo! feature requests on articles about /. :)
Yes, they are obviously of quality those 5's. Shall I open up any post that has to do with Microsoft and see which comments get a 5 and which get a 1?
Insightful my ass. Slashdot's like a little playground where everyone throws sand at each other until one of the losers come by and then they walk over and beat him to a pulp.
Then, the next time he comes by they do it again, because this time he deserves it for not being smart enought avoid the play area in the first place.
Useless, back-biting and time-wasting. Some /.'ers deserve a better place to hang out, but they get lost in the huge sea of people who have nothing better to do than beat up passers-by.
I have to second woof here, the alterslash feed is great, even includes a graph of the signal to noise ratio of the comments.
Set your comment preferences to give -6 modifiers for every possible moderation, as well as for karma. Or just set your display mode to "No comments."
