Pipedot Turns One
On this day, one year ago, I registered the Pipedot domain name and threw up an ugly static webpage. Today, the site is a little less ugly and a lot less static. Although the original goal of creating a non-profit alternative to Slashdot has long since been obtained, I've continued the development of the code base and periodically add new features to scratch my own itch.
So my question now becomes: What's next? What other features would you like to see implemented over the next year to make this site even better than it is today?
So my question now becomes: What's next? What other features would you like to see implemented over the next year to make this site even better than it is today?
However, I don't think that we necessarily need MORE stories. The scope could improve, though. I'm fine with one story per week or two weeks. If nothing happens, nothing happens.
I'd like to see more stories related to computers and software. I really don't know any good sources for those kinds of news. IIRC Slashdot was like that at the beginning but quickly degraded to teenage girls' magazine stuff. I don't know what purpose bryan had in mind for this site, but this could be a good niche to focus.
I don't mean we should keep track of firefox releases every afternoon, I was thinking more like people doing PhDs contributing something interesting from their work, people solving a problem in a weird way at work etc.
Other slashdotty things we have here are user ids and karma (not sure we have karma here, sorry). I think karma is a counter-productive thing to have. How does it work here? If someone has enough karma, do they start off with higher scores for their posts? It was like that at slashdot and it sucked. There, groupthinkers got quite high karma and managed to stand out their shit in a sea of -1'ed but sometimes interesting posts. It really doesn't make much sense if you think about it. I could be an expert and write a very insightful comment about one subject, but that doesn't help anyone if I use that karma to spread around truther shit etc.
One thing we could have is an I agree button. Not moderation, just a quick way to express agreement with someone rather than posting 'yeah I agree'. There could be another one which says 'I don't agree' and tallies up independently. While we're at it, we could have something like 'you aren't even wrong'. I don't know, I just don't like the moderated post stuff.