Bonum Certa Men Certa

Fun Weekend, But Very Slow News

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 19, 2024

Steak Cooking On The Grill

There's no holiday (here or in the US) this week/end, but news is very slow/scarce, at least in English. We're struggling to find much journalism and something that resembles exclusive, investigative reporting. This leads to a shortage of ideas (or topics to cover).

We have a lot of material to publish next year, but that's work in progress and it'll need patience. It will surely come out when the time is right.

If you wish to suggest an idea of/or some topic we can cover, come to IRC and tell us. soylentnews.org (SoylentNews) has been having severe IRC issues lately, but we've had persistent uptime for over a year and are active all day long.

Topic suggestions through IRC make sense because we don't do "comments" anymore. Hackaday explained nicely just 7 days ago what comments mean to their people. To quote:

You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’s angular and futuristic designs, but it doesn’t have to be to your taste. Then someone else is like “you don’t even need a computer case.” Another commenter informed us that he doesn’t like to watch videos for the thirtieth time. (Yawn!)

What all of these comments have in common is that they’re negative, low value, non-constructive, and frankly have no place on Hackaday. The vast majority are just kind of Eeyorey complaining about how someone else is enjoying a chocolate ice cream, and the commenter prefers strawberry. But then some of them turn nasty. Why? If someone makes a project that you don’t like, they didn’t do it to offend you. Just move on quietly to one you do like. We publish a hack every three hours like a rubidium clockwork, with a couple of original content pieces scattered in-between on weekdays.

And don’t get us wrong: we love comments that help improve a project. There’s a not-so-fine line between “why didn’t you design it with trusses to better hold the load?” and “why did you paint it black, because blue is the superior color”. You know what we mean. Constructive criticism, good. Pointless criticism, bad.

That's not to say IRC is invulnerable to bad behaviour; but IRC moderation is different and "hit-and-run" attacks take a lot more effort than just typing a malicious comment.

Anyway, we've got lots of free time this weekend (all weekend tasks have been completed), so we welcome topic suggestions/recommendations. █

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