I was supposed to work a lot today, but after eleven hours I was exhausted and went home. Just had some dinner, now I’m writing this entry and heading over to The Girlfriend’s place to get her and the rest of the girls she lives with hooked back on to the interweb again.

A while ago I introduced you to Digg. At first glance it looked like an excellent source for good tech news, but having used it for a while now I’ve concluded that it really is crap. The main weakness of Digg is the lack of a decent moderation system. People digg stories, and the most dugg stories are shown on the front page. But there is no way of “undigging” a story, or to moderate down a story or a comment. It also looks like Digg is attracting a younger crowd than the much more mature Slashdot, which is not a vad thing in itself, it’s just that some of these kids can’t accept that they should just shut the hell up. A bit like in real life, I guess.

The level of control is much higher on Slashdot, people are free to submit stories to the site, but the visitors themselves have no control of what will actually be posted, this is a decision made by the editors. A method that works very well, at least in my eyes.

Both Slashdot and Digg let the users comment on stories and comment moderation is just as important as controlling what is let lose on the front page. Digg let’s you rate comments by assigning them a numeric score, but I’m not sure if this has any effect at all - I have yet to see a comment with a score assigned to it. Slashdot lets the users moderate the comments through a system they call Meta Moderation where the visitors moderate the comments. It is also possible for a registered user to filter out what comments they don’t want to see. Has a Slashdot comment been given a low moderation score? Well, I’ve told the system that I don’t want to read those comments so they are nicely tucked away while comments given a high moderation score are visible. In that way, the people that should shut the hell up can scream as much as they like - because I don’t hear (see) them. Thank you, Slashdot.

Another thing you’ll never see in Slashdot is site bashing, something that seems to appear quite frequently on Digg. And it’s, of course, Slashdot that is getting most of the hammering. Digg has potential, but as long as it’s crammed with pimple faced fourteen year olds, and there is no way of getting rid of them, I’m sticking with Slashdot. Some Slashdot users are leaving the site in favour of Digg, but I’ve got the impression most stay faithful to the old dog. Traffic numbers from Alexa backs this assumption. Slashdot visitor number are stable while Digg’s is increasing rapidly. But these visitors are not coming from Slashdot. My guess is that these are users who didn’t find Slashdot interesting and prefer Digg’s style instead: The pimple faced fourteen year olds that just can’t seem to shut the fuck up!

Have fun, kidz.

This nerdish rambling doesn’t stop here.

Slashdot mentions a story about Mark Russinovich detailed investigation of a rootkit from Sony Music.

The rootkit introduces several security holes into the system that could be exploited by others, such as hiding any executable file that starts with ‘$sys$’. Russinovich also identifies several programming bugs in the method it uses to hook system calls, and chronicles the painful steps he had to take to ’exorcise the daemon’ from his system.

A very interesting read if you’re a nerd. Like me.

In Digg’s defence, I should probably mention that the story got a large number of diggs and hit the front page about forty five minutes before it was posted on Slashdot. Also, it could be that we’ll see lots of nice changes on Digg soon, after Digg raised a whooping $2.8 million in venture capital.