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Slashdot lets users vote on stories with Firehose

Slashdot Firehose
Once upon a time, before Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and the relaunched Netscape, there was Slashdot. The original social news site for geeks allowed users to submit and share interesting articles with their peers back when Web 2.0 wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye.

While there's still an active community of Slashdot readers/commentors/submittors, the site's not resting on its laurels. This week, the site pushed its Firehose service into wider release.

What's Firehose? It's Slashdot's answer to the new crop of user generated news sites. It's basically Slashdot classic, but with voting. Each story has a + or - next to its headline. You can use the icons to vote a story up or down.

The stories are assigned a color based on their popularity. The top stories are red, and the least popular are black. You can use a color slider at the top of the page to filter the stories you see. And a Slashdot editor picks some of the hottest stories of the day to put on the front page. If you're a purist, you can skip the Firehose experience and continue visiting Slashdot's main page for your news unsorted by the wisdom of the masses.

[via Mashable]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

CiviballsI have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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