Before the ‘Digg effect’ you were ’slashdotted’. Slashdot was the first big boy on the social news scene offering a unique combination of user-submitted and editor-evaluated news. Then along came Digg and their brand of completely user-driven content (with no apparent editors) and they quickly rose to the top of the heap.
After watching Digg’s quick ascent and massive popularity, Slashdot began experimenting with a system that would give their users much more “say” in what is seen. The new system is called Slashdot Firehose and was just taken out a beta of sorts (only logged in members could see it) and launched today. So what is it exactly?
The Slashdot Firehose is a way for you to participate in the Slashdot editorial process. You are able to see all the content submitted to Slashdot: from RSS Feeds and user submissions, to journal entries and successful completed Slashdot stories.
You can participate by voting on these entries: click the minus icon if you don’t think the story is great for Slashdot, and click the plus if you do. Better yet, when you make these choices you can help further refine your decision by clarifying why you made the choice you did. You can tell us if a story was binspam, or a dupe, or insightful. If you don’t like the options provided in the pop-up windows, you can always open the tagging box and provide whatever tags you think will help Slashdot Editors, and other Slashdot Readers make informed decisions about the content they are reading.
So does this now make Slashdot just another one of the countless “Digg clones”? Refreshingly, they actually answer this question (without using Digg’s name of course).
Well first of all, we’re happy to use good ideas when we see them. Countless websites have knocked off our cool ideas, just like we joyously took ideas from those that came before us. But ultimately the idea here is not to imitate any other social network news site. We feel that the editorial layer that exists on top of Slashdot is important.
Slashdot still has a very big and smart audience and it can drive really qualified traffic (and links) for your site. It will be really interesting to see if they can gain ground on Digg and still keep their reputation as having a very high signal to noise ratio.
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One Response to “Slashdot Firehose”
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Slashdot has become one of the bigger and best niche targetted social bookmarking sites out there though.