As confirmed on the Wikipedia article entry on Slashdot.org. Here are the top four reasons Slashdot sucks:

• The frequency of reposts (also known as "dupes"), where editors approve articles for the front page, often slightly reworded, that have previously appeared on the site. Since the major responsibility of editors is to sift through article submissions, reposts leave the impression of incompetence. Some readers have called for mandatory procedures to search for Slashdot dupes before an article is published.
• Some article summaries have typos, misleading titles, or errors. An example of this is an article titled "Spain Outlaws P2P File Sharing" where the article summary states that Spain is banning all P2P file sharing, a huge fuss ensues in the discussion, while the reality is that Spain only made it a civil offense to pirate movies, which is hardly "Outlawing P2P".
• As one of the largest forums on the Internet, trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon. It is an offbeat and complex subculture involving sometimes repetitive and sometimes obscene comments featuring a mixture of Slashdot celebrities and other unusual juvenilia.
• The Slashdot editors are sometimes accused of posting (and even preferring) stories that are, themselves, thinly-disguised trolls, which encourage large numbers of postings in response.

My previous post about getting duped into responding to a troll about pedestrian legislation that was never introduced or even mentioned, then getting marked -1 Flamebait for pointing this out is further evidence of the last item in the list. Well, enough bashing on ./ for now. It just sucks.

Wendall