Rusty Foster Isn't Dead

While he was vacationing with his wife, Kuro5hin founder Rusty Foster was killed — at least in the eyes of Facebook. NBC News details how it happened: a "pal" pranked both Foster and Facebook by notifying the social site of Foster's supposed death, providing as documentation the obituary of another, much older man by the same name. Getting the Facebook version of his life back took some doing; based on this article it seems much easier to convince Facebook that you're dead than that you're alive.

I first reported on this

[Arno Stark]

received bad karma for it. Looks like the repost made it to the front page. I contacted Rusty on Twitter after it was found out to be a hoax, but he blocked my account. Before he blocked me, he admitted he knew Josh did it. I think it was done on purpose for free publicity for Kuro5hin and Rusty Foster to breath life into their dying web site.

Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[Seumas]

I stopped over at Kuro5hin a couple years ago. Curious as to how things had come along, since I last was there. It used to be a decent mix of deep content, generated by its users. Usually heavily tech oriented and definitely geek oriented, otherwise.

HOLY SHIT WHAT HAS IT BECOME?!

When I last looked, it was just article after article about the most vile shit that makes the comments on articles that drudgereport links to look intelligent. It was just a bunch of crap by anti-abortion nuts, anti-gay nuts, and shit about Sandra Fluke being a slutty cunt. I am completely baffled as to what happened. It used to be on par with slashdot. Maybe even better, in some ways. Now it looks like it's just a place of navel-gazing propoganda for hate-filled truthers, birthers, anti-everything idiots. I thought it had been attacked, actually, and returned a couple weeks later to see if they had fixed their website. Then I googled a bit and found that it had been in this disgusting state of ruin for *years* and nobody really knew why.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[plover]

A lot of people bitch about the slashdot moderation system being crap, but when you see sites like kuro5hin fail like that, you have to consider that it adds huge value.

Re:Shitfest of Kuro5hin

[TheLink]

Doesn't matter if you have a good moderation system if you have crappy moderators. The Slashdot admins do ban some people from moderating. The moderation at Kuro5hin was presumably done by sock puppets of various warring factions.

FWIW I've stopped getting mod points for years. Maybe I was a crap moderator. But whatever it is, Slashdot is doing better than kuro5hin.

That said, Slashdot does seem to be declining in quality - lots of troll stories that seem to be designed just to get comments and hits. Heck sometimes I think they purposely leave in or even add editing errors to generate more comments. So the top 25% of the comments end up being comments about the crappy editing and nothing to do with the story.