![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_V48_SiJm-_g/RrKccxkGf-I/AAAAAAAAA3M/-Xr9veLoIPM/s200/slashdot.png)
For quite a long time, slashdot has been outplayed by digg and even reditt as a social tech news site. Slashdot made their site too difficult for a story to make it to their homepage and thrived on insulting any story submissions that weren't by their own "club" of long-time users. To save themselves from falling further behind digg and reditt, they have developed Firehose which looks pretty much like - well it looks a lot like digg! They’re It looks a little different as stories are assigned a color from red hot stories all the way to to violet or cold stories. Cold stories are like the buried comments/stories on Digg.
As before, the really hot stories get chosen to make it to the front page by the Slashdot editors. Think of it as a Digg without the democracy. Firehose has been available in beta for logged-in members for a while, but now is open to all visitors of slashdot.
![](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_V48_SiJm-_g/RrKaAhkGf9I/AAAAAAAAA3E/P1YmElbwIZg/s400/firehose.png)
I'll give it some more time before totally writing them off, but count me as less then impressed so far. It will take more than a "firehose" to beat out digg.com - the king of social news. Slashdot has to do more than imitate its more-successful competitor and call it a hose.