Slashdot Firehose: Vote and Promote Slashdot Stories

Slashdot has launched Slashdot Firehose, a new way to let the Slashdot community participate in the Slashdot editorial process and decide which stories get promoted to the Slashdot front page. After the success of Digg, it was high time that Slashdot let the users interact with their system…

Introducing the Slashdot Firehose, they say users can now see all the content submitted to Slashdot: RSS Feeds and user submissions, to journal entries and successful completed Slashdot stories. Users can click the minus icon to demote a story or click the plus if you like the story and clarify ther reason too. You can also label if a story was binspam, or a dupe, or insightful.

A color coded system helps you identify useful content worthy of promotion. Red is the most popular, and highest rated content for Slashdot. Lower still is orange and and default submissions start at blue. At indigo, there are RSS feeds and journal entries. Falling lower to violet or black, is even poorer content.

There a more powerful way to filter Slashdot content. If you don’t like journals, you can just filter on -journal and they are gone. If you don’t want Slashdot stories, -story will get you there.

Is the Slashdot front page now totally community driven like Digg? No. The Slashdot editors still decide what gets posted…

“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. But we also think that having many eyeballs will help us more efficiently sort through the ever increasing volume of content on this here internet of ours. That’s why we’ll aim to strike a balance. Slashdot stories will continue to be posted by our editors. We will use the advice given to us by our readers. Sometimes we will agree, and other times we won’t.”

If you like voting Digg stories, you will enjoy participating in the Slashdot Firehose, a collaborative system designed to allow users to assist Slashdot editors in the story selection process. A story on the Slashdot front page can send huge traffic to your website in minutes. Check out more tips to get slashdotted and survive slashdot effect.