BlogCadre - slashdot

Slashdot disables threading due to posting bug

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:57:28 -0600

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately.

Digging Alexa - how the geek demographic doubled overnight

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:52:03 -0500

It seems to have passed without huge fanfare, but on April 20th 2006, the Alexa rankings for tech sites around the globe suddenly doubled, literally overnight.

The Day The World Got Geeky

Ian Clarke writes, "Did the world get geekier around April 20th?"

Some kind of change to how Alexa calculates traffic – or did something happen to so dramatically affect these four websites? Perhaps a bunch of geeks suddenly decided to become Alexa users.

Alex Walker noticed the phenomenon as early as the 27th, titling it "The Great Internet Spike of 2006." Alex noticed that only tech sites seemed to benefit from the Alexa bump:

sites with no notable ‘tech-skew’ (i.e. CNN.com, EBAY.com, etc) have either held firm or been shuffled backwards by the sites bubbling up around them.

Have Alexa changed their statistical algorithms?
Is this a temporary anomoly?
Which sites lost out the worst?

Even Digg users have been speculating:

hayseed: also possible that a crapload of people installed the alexa toolbar at that time as a result of some sort of promotion ...

hottuna: Alexa is so incredible unreliably its strange that the site hasn't been shut down.

jarcoal: exactly. there have been several articles reporting major traffic boosts in the last few months. i'll bet this is all some stupid glitch.

When Elephants Fight

I've been looking at this a bit, and I'm convinced it's no Alexa glitch. Rather, the Alexa population did, in fact, change overnight.

Here's the funny part: Digg users were the scalawags who did it!

Slashdot in trouble?

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 19:18:25 -0500

Upon my daily ritualistic visit to slashdot every night at 8:03 i was suprised to notice the formatting was tragically messed up on the website(as you may see). Quickly i snached a screenshot to document this historical event falling upon one of the Internets most trusted technology websites corruption. So at this i leave you to decide Server Error or part of a larger conspiracy?

(larger picture)
http://static.flickr.com/73/161294712_1c0ade7ec6_b.jpg

Slashdot CSS Redesign Contest

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:08:10 -0500

Slashdot has launched a CSS redesign contest for their site.

A few months back we went and redesigned Slashdot with fancy new CSS templates. The idea was that with a new clean CSS framework under the skin, we could more easily redesign the look & feel of the site. At that time I mentioned that we wanted to have a contest to redesign Slashdot. Well that time has come.

Go here for more information on the contest--the top prize is a brand new laptop valued up to $4500.

Digg vs Slashdot Update

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:46:17 -0500

So... A response to my last article: Digg vs. Slashdot: A Comparison article seemed to be better-suited to Digg. I would have thought it better to Slashdot.

But what I found most interesting about getting that article on Digg was that, in the end, all the response I got to the article seemed to match perfectly my stereotyping of Digg: That is, no continutity in comments, no useful conversation, and no sense of community. All in all, it appears that everyone on Digg doesn't seem to be capable of understanding that article. One really good response came out of that post - and, of course, it wasn't on Digg. This article "Why Digg sucks... and how it could be better" sums up basically everything I didn't say, and that was how to go about improving Digg: And that is to put up a comment system that supports conversation, so that you can see which conversations are replies and which ones aren't.

Digg vs. Slashdot: A Comparison

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:55:47 -0500

For some eight years, Slashdot has been the most well known provider of News for Nerds. I doubt that anyone would disagree with me if I said it wasn't well deserved. The editors of Slashdot know well their target audience, and (for some strange reason), they know which articles tend to fit into the site well and which ones don't. Digg (pushed heavily by Kevin Rose, formerly of TechTV), is a newcomer to the world, but has still managed to become a formidable force in terms of the number of visitors it is able to pull to the sites it promotes. I recall hearing on an episode of TWiT that Kevin hoped to outdo Slashdot at some point in time. So, it makes sense that they should be compared.

Weighing the Internet - Slashdot Update

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:18:46 -0500

Kaorimoch writes, "Perhaps a better term would be "Counting the people on the internet"? That weighing stuff is for things with, well, MASS."

Hobotron also makes this point: "Bad sample population, low sample size with ONE DAY, NO inclusion of error propagation across statistical barriers. When you multiply estimates, you multiply error as well."

These and other great comments from the slashdot crowd really got me to thinking that my thouroughly researched scienterrific study really missed the boat.

Not typically one to miss the opportunity to futher the advancement of literal interpretation of analogy and armchair statistics, I leave you with the following thought.