Month: February 2000

Last month, I posted an article about
Slashdot
moderation. Since then, I thought about many more
things
related to Advogato, Slashdot, other web sites, and
moderation
in general. I will post a follow-up soon, probably as a
new article because this is going to be a bit long. Stay
tuned…

Yesterday, someone posted a link to
Advogato in a
Slashdot
story. In a few minutes, Advogato was slashdotted…
sigh! Fortunately, Raph reported
a
few hours later that Yosh was able to
rescue Advogato by moving it to Berkeley’s XCF (home of The GIMP,
GTK+ and PRCS). Thanks,
Yosh!

I was expecting to see dozens of new Advogato accounts
created
yesterday or today by Slashdot readers. For some reason, it
did not
happen. Maybe because Advogato was mostly unusable when
most people tried to access it. But maybe also because
Slashdot
and Advogato do not have the same kind of readership.

I suspect
that a number of new visitors thought that Advogato was less
entertaining than Slashdot and left quickly. Also, Advogato
does
not allow Anonymous Cowards: you have to identify yourself
and
be certified by others before you are allowed to do anything
useful. This is
probably enough to discourage those who would like to post
something quickly without thinking much about what they
post. But don’t get me wrong: there are some
bright
people on Slashdot who think before they post and provide
very
interesting comments (doing more than trying to collect
karma points by repeating what the main story says).
Anyway,
it will probably take a couple of days before we can see if
Slashdot has any real effect on Advogato. Maybe those who
could not reach the site yesterday will come back today and
create a new account if they like Advogato.