Poll

I completely gave up and quit Slashdot, then later SoylentNews, because of poor story selection. Before giving-up on discussion sites all together, I tried Pipedot, and found higher standards. If it had gone differently, I wouldn't be here, and over the past year, Pipedot might have been very much dead.

The reasons why are many... You can mod-down users spouting trash, but not front-page stories (or their editors). It has cascading effects, as well... When a story is trash, nearly all the comments on it will be ripping it apart, while anything about the subject gets lost in the noise. And the kinds of stories a site gets greatly influences the community of readers and contributors... It was the technical focus that gave Slashdot its audience and high-quality contributors, while it was likely the politics and other trash that have driven its decline.

While the site has some good features, it's got plenty of bad ones, too. Replies are still sent as a link in a bare-bones e-mail. Some things you can do under stories you can't do under direct comment links (like moderation). There's no nice user-summary page that shows your comments, moderation, reply counts, and submissions. Instead that info is spread across multiple info pages, harder to get at and therefor less useful. Pipedot works, and quite well, mostly because it's still small. Things like the RSS Comments Feed are great, but would be nearly worthless on a bigger site.