SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
dave562 writes: "There was an interesting article posted on Zero Hedge lately on the throttling of Netflix.
'For years, the Netflix streaming business has been growing like a parasite, happy to piggyback on established broadband infrastructures, where the broadband companies themselves have becomes competitors to Netflix for both distribution and content. Until now. Emboldened by the recent Net Neutrality ruling, which has put bandwidth hogs like Netflix which at last check was responsible for over 30% of all downstream US internet traffic, broadband providers are finally making their move, and in a preliminary salvo whose ultimate compromise will be NFLX paying lots of money, have started to throttle Netflix traffic. The WSJ reports (Paywall) that the war between the broadband-ers and the video streaming company has finally emerged from the "cold" phase and is fully hot.'"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Fnord666 on Friday February 21 2014, @12:11AM
A case in point is this article. We all know that the various digital media distributors are at odds with the larger carriers. There have been numerous articles posted recently about the topic. Without being able to read the article itself, I have no idea what makes this story any different than the dozen others in the last week about the same thing. Why is this article front page worthy and how can I, as a SN reader, find that out?
(Score: 5, Informative) by mattie_p on Friday February 21 2014, @12:53AM
Hi there, editor here. I goofed in editing. There was a very interesting article [zerohedge.com] originally linked in the summary that I accidentally deleted while I was formatting for publication. Oops! I just stuck it back in, you should see it soon. I agree that the primary source of a story here should never exclusively be a paywalled article.
As a side note: If you are submitting an article, hyperlink your source to keywords, don't just stick it as a raw URL in the beginning or end of your submission. Please make our jobs as editors easier and hot link it within your submission, so that we can continue to provide quality stories to the community. Thanks for reading! ~mattie_p
(Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @01:06AM
As a side note: If you are submitting an article, hyperlink your source to keywords, don't just stick it as a raw URL in the beginning or end of your submission. Please make our jobs as editors easier and hot link it within your submission, so that we can continue to provide quality stories to the community.
You should spell it out that way on the story submission page. I see that you have something to that effect, but it is a lot more vague than what you just wrote. It is OK to have longer instructions, just break them up into readable chunks, like a checklist rather than a "wall of text."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Friday February 21 2014, @02:06AM
Another thing I's like to see discouraged is link baiting by posting some thin blog post, or commercial site (like space.com) for a story when the free and more authoritative source (such as NASA.gov) is just as easily linked.
Of course, in some cases you might find someplace that provides more analysis than the direct source, but just as often people link these sites just to send traffic to them.
If its worth submitting, its worth researching, and following links a little deeper.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by hankwang on Friday February 21 2014, @07:20AM
"hyperlink your source to keywords, don't just stick it as a raw URL in the beginning or end of your submission. Please make our jobs as editors easier... "
Well, that's only fair if most submissions are accepted. To spend extra effort in embedding links is not worth the trouble if 4 out of 5 submissions are rejected. Probably not yet the case here, but it will be.
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by lhsi on Friday February 21 2014, @02:45PM
I put the effort in to hyperlink an article while submitting the story on my phone and it was still rejected ;-)
I think having some sort of feedback for why something was rejected would be nice, even if it was one of a couple of predefined reasons like "not interesting" or "out of date" or something.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday February 21 2014, @12:57AM
Agree re paywalled articles. Perhaps editors should research to find other sources?
I think the difference in this story is that net neutrality has been dressed up as some evil hippy concept, and the connectivity providers think that they will get away with it. Which they will, but that's veering in the direction of politics, so I'll stop here.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @01:02AM
It is pretty easy to get past these "leaky" paywalls. I read the article without any hassle at all.
Here's what I do:
(1) Install "self-destructing cookies" -- It is an add-on that deletes all of a site's cookies 10 seconds after you leave the site (close the tab or just follow a link to somewhere else). The default settings are pretty good, if anything you might want to turn off notifications because it works so well that you can just install it and forget about it for any site that you don't want to remember you. (It has a white-list for the sites you do want to remember you.)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sel f-destructing-cookies/ [mozilla.org]
(2) Install RefControl -- Lets you change the http-referer header on a per site basis. Then set it to use "http://google.com/" as the referer for 3rd party requests (first link to a website but not any internal links).f control/ [mozilla.org]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re
That's enough to get past most of these semi-paywalls like NYTimes, WSJ, etc.
FWIW, discovering this was a side-effect of trying to protect my privacy. It's just serendipitous that their desire to track the crap out of you makes them vulnerable to people who don't want to be tracked.
(Score: 5, Funny) by zim on Friday February 21 2014, @05:00AM
Oh come on. We're a slashdot replacement. This is no place for actually reading the articles..
Skim the summary and come into the comments to read and make outrageous arguments! It's the soylent way!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JeanCroix on Friday February 21 2014, @02:31PM