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RIP Kuro5hin
- Theizestooke 11y agoKuro5hin was great in the very early days. A good, maybe somewhat more technical companion to Slashdot. At one point it started devolving into a collaborative blog with bad op-eds on politics, and fanfiction.
- viraptor 11y agoThe last part is painfully true. I came back a few years ago to check if K5 is still alive and what does it look like and could hardly figure out exactly what the article was about. Reality and fiction strangely mashed together in a very chaotic op-ed.
- chris_wot 11y agoAnd ridiculous troll comments about people who left the site a long time ago. I saw one comment recently about the user kitten, who died suddenly of a brain aneurism in 2010. They were still mocking him 5 years later...
- kbenson 11y agoNot just fanfiction, but original fiction as well. It got weird, but it was fun. I particularly liked localroger's stories, which due to another comment on this story, I now know are at localroger.com (thanks!). The other thing I remember from kuro5hin is that the trolls seemed particularly proficient. There was enough of a mix of people trying to have reasoned arguments and people there just to fuck with you, perhaps even the same person multiple times in the same argument, that some comment threads were particularly surreal.
- smegel 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin
- deanclatworthy 11y agoI'd not heard of this community before. Before my time, I guess. The idea of publishing something or not is rather interesting. It presumably encouraged much higher quality content.
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago> It presumably encouraged much higher quality content. Haha, oh boy. You're talking about k5, man. We practically prided ourselves on terrible and meta content. But yes, some of the longer-form stuff was truly interesting. You had to submit to some pretty grueling dissection of your work by a broad group of people, though, and I only front paged a couple articles because I didn't truly understand what was going on. I actually landed on k5 a couple months ago and read stuff I wrote in 2001, long before I realized the permanency of the Web. It was an interesting time travel experience to a long, long time ago. I'm half glad it's dead so that portion of my life slowly fades into history/archive, because I honestly have no idea what I was talking about half the time. +1 FP, dammit rusty
- chris_wot 11y agoAfter 2005 to 2006 the site became ridiculous. That's because Rusty had the guts ripped out of him when some arsehole photoshopped his wife's image on a pornographic image. The trolls laughed at it, but it destroyed the site and I really feel that Rusty never had the same attitude toward K5 ever again. This is why trolling needs to be banned. It's OK to have some fun, but when you start pissing in your own backyard, or let terrible people to take over, then they bully even the founders and everything goes to shit. Twitter should take note.
- jonathankoren 11y agoAll I remember was the annoying use of the word "USian". It always felt too much like a slur on that site.
- alfiedotwtf 11y agoAn article that's always stuck in my head was a longform on Economics 101. Damn interesting.
- a2800276 11y agoSad. Kuro5hin was a great community in the day. When did this happen? Oh how I loved the ASCII art reenactment players...
- chris_wot 11y agoI loved DrDuck :-) I still remember feeling shocked that trhurler died...
- lwhalen 11y agoI became good online friends with kitten through kuro5hin. I was very sad when he passed as well.
- stereo 11y agoKitten passed?
- chris_wot 11y agohttp://mirrorshades.org/wc/2010/02/andrew_m_zebrowitz_july_27_197.shtml http://mirrorshades.org/wc/2010/02/andrew_m_zebrowitz_july_2... His family setup an endowed fund at Emory. http://news.emory.edu/stories/2015/07/donor_grad_zebrowitz/campus.html http://news.emory.edu/stories/2015/07/donor_grad_zebrowitz/c...
- gherkin0 11y agoSo did trhurler: https://web.archive.org/web/20080113234818/http://www.swtimes.com/articles/2007/11/06/week_in_review/news/tuesday/news05.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20080113234818/http://www.swtime...
- llimllib 11y agoI forgot about that :(
- gedy 11y ago> "Kuro5hin — pronounced corrosion" Ah, all these years I thought it was a Japanese name..
- function_seven 11y agoWow, same here. Thought it was pronounced: KEER-oh-shin or keer-OH-shin
- userbinator 11y agoAmusingly enough, if you read it as "kuro-shin" that could correspond to the Japanese characters 黒心, which literally translates to "black heart". That's what I thought the name was supposed to be too.
- glandium 11y agoFWIW, くろ (kuro) is the "kunyomi" of 黒 and しん(shin) is the "onyomi" of 心. Japanese 2-character compound words don't mix onyomi and kunyomi. I don't think there is a character with a "kuro" onyomi or one with a "shin" kunyomi (well, there's 信じる (shinjiru), but that's a reading that doesn't go without the hiragana).
- Grue3 11y agoActually there's a lot of words that mix onyomi and kunyomi. For example, 親身 "shinmi" (relative): both of the characters have onyomi "shin", but 身 uses kunyomi reading "mi" in this word. Other examples are 見本, 強気, 親分, it's more common than you'd think.
- glandium 11y agoHeh, this is where this gets embarrassing... of course, they are common. They are so common that you end up losing track of them, hidden in plain sight. Looking them up, I now discover they even have names: 湯桶読み(yutouyomi) and 重箱読み (juubakoyomi).
- jonathankoren 11y ago
- seletz 11y agoWow. That's one of those moments I really feel old ... ;-p
- nikcub 11y agoKuro5hin ran a block-all in their robots.txt[0] so this is more historic internet content that will dissapear into the abyss. Anyone know of a mirror or an effort to mirror and host the site? [0] http://www.kuro5hin.org/robots.txt http://www.kuro5hin.org/robots.txt
- userbinator 11y agoThe robots.txt you see now is probably the one on the server "parking" the domain, and not that of the original site. A "site:kuro5hin.org" query shows results, so I'm guessing the original one isn't a block-all.
- ntoll 11y agoNothing via the wayback machine... :-( http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://kuro5hin.org http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://kuro5hin.org All that lost content...
- firloop 11y agoIIRC, a (current) robots.txt retroactively will remove public access to the Archive. RIP.
- AnonymousPlanet 11y agoThis annoys me to no end. It basically means that you can retroactively censor content by buying a domain that was parked for 10 years and then remove the old content with one little robots.txt. All of this regardless of the wishes of the original creators.
- vanderZwan 11y agoWill it also delete the content?
- userbinator 11y ago
- userbinator 11y agoPermanent or temporary outage?
- jonah 11y agoUpdated Date: 2016-04-28T16:31:29Z Creation Date: 1999-12-12T21:20:28Z Registry Expiry Date: 2016-12-12T21:20:28Z So the registration was transferred to gandi, it wasn't expired and then picked up?
- fencepost 11y agoWell, it still has Rusty's name in the non-obscured fields in the Whois data.
- brianberns 11y agoFirst there was Slashdot, but CmdrTaco insisted on picking the stories for us. He called it an "omelet". Kuro5hin came along to fix this, but discouraged posts that were just links to pages elsewhere on the web. IIRC, this was called "link farming". How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. Digg then encouraged links, but shot itself in the foot with a stupid redesign. Nowadays, reddit is king because it avoided the obvious mistakes of its predecessors.
- draugadrotten 11y ago> Nowadays, reddit is king because it avoided the obvious mistakes of its predecessors. reddit even seem to have found a way to deal with obnoxius moderators - allowing multiple subreddits
- erikpukinskis 11y agoThe solution to all problems is let your users do it.
- iLoch 11y agoNot if you want to make money though or have any real control of the direction of your company though, apparently.
- raverbashing 11y ago> or have any real control of the direction of your company though, apparently. Here's the secret: you never have If you push your company in a direction that gets you no customers you're done It's like a boat in the wind, if you're good you can maneuver using the sail and in a way go against the wind with some limitations, but you're still dependent on it
- nailer 11y agoThat's actually pretty spot on. I've ran popular communities that ultimately failed because we hadn't scaled moderation. As long as your content is good, scaling moderation will be the hardest thing for any UGC site, and if you don't build it fast enough the site will either get destroyed or you won't be able to work on the product due to fire fighting.
- fsiefken 11y agoI thought I remember it was already announced years ago by Rusty Foster that updates were stopped. Still it's one of those classic internet sites I frequented - just like the orange black freshmeat.net
- vinhboy 11y agoI am going to predict that Reddit will soon collapse because it is overrun with conservative minded people. It's starting to become a really hateful community.
- weanoob 11y agoReddit? Conservative? Are you joking?
- InclinedPlane 11y agoConservative is probably the wrong word, hateful being more correct. And it's a serious problem on reddit. The majority of redditors are generally left-leaning. But the hateful people on reddit are more organized and more dedicated. They participate in degrading the experience of anyone who doesn't believe the same as they do, and that drives some people away. Outside of the very few well moderated sub-reddits this is a serious problem. I wouldn't say it's enough to bring reddit down, yet, but it's pretty bad.
- vinhboy 11y agoThank you for this very well written response. I was struggling to say what you just explained so well. The reason I personally think it will destroy Reddit is because it has already ruined a few of the subreddits I subscribe to. Mainly /r/technology, /r/news, and /r/politics.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoA lot of the default sub-reddits are weakly moderated, and so very vulnerable to brigading, bullying, harassment, and boundary pushing. You see a lot of carefully crafted racism and "anti-sjw" posts in the default sub-reddits, for example. Bit by bit, drop by drop, they apply a consistent pressure. The mods of those sub-reddits are too dumb to figure out what's going on, or just don't care. Unfortunately, all of this slowly drives away people who are sensitive enough to care, or just ordinary people. For them, it's not worth it to "fight the good fight", is some dumb sub-reddit worth that cost? Of course not, so they leave and go somewhere else. This is a slow dynamics problem, and the "good" parts of reddit aren't strong enough to save the site. Realistically, if reddit itself does nothing then it's maybe a 50/50 chance whether or not these forces eventually poison the site for average users, and people just stop going there. For most people these things aren't super noticeable, yet, because they're still not the dominant aspect of the site, but they've driven away who knows how many people, and continue to do so, while the racists, homophobes, and misogynists still have their little clubs on the site. Some of the worst sub-reddits were banned a while back, but many horrid ones still exist. And the people who spend their time there spend their time posting and voting on other parts of reddit as well.
- dempseye 11y agoYou can still read legendary Kuro5hin contributor localroger's writing here: http://localroger.com/ http://localroger.com/
- taxicabjesus 11y agoMy story, 'Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0' was the last to post. I saved my diaries and stories about my adventures in the taxi, I guess I should buy a domain of my own.
- gnu8 11y agoPlease do that. I enjoyed your stories, particularly 'Who Are Your Lifelines?'
- taxicabjesus 11y agoGlad you liked that, thanks for commenting here. One of the pieces I've drafted but not yet posted is on the subject of "ordinary rendition", and is thematically related to the Lifelines piece. Rusty appeared above and told what happened (datacenter moved), and said k5 might come back some day. I rarely use twitter, but I'll put a link to my site here: https://twitter.com/taxicabjesus https://twitter.com/taxicabjesus
- sdabdoub 11y agoThanks for the link! For a while, the K5 fiction section was my main reason for going to the site.
- fencepost 11y agoThe Wikipedia page mentions that it was running on Scoop, but doesn't include that Scoop was written by Rusty as the framework for k5. Scoop went on to be used in a few other places, among them HuSi (where a bunch of core k5 folks moved to, though it's now pretty defunct as well). The most well-known site I'm aware of that used Scoop was DailyKos, which I believe started on WordPress, then moved to Scoop (highly customized and eventually almost entirely rewritten I think), then finally onto its own custom-build CMS. There may have also been one more stage in there. Source: 3-digit UID on DK, and was a regular way way back when on both k5 and HuSi.
- Jaruzel 11y agoI found a citeable reference[1] to back up your statement about Rusty being the original author of Scoop, and have updated the Wikipedia article accordingly. [1] Wikipedia is quite strict with how cites are referenced, and unfortunately, I couldn't take your word for it!
- atdt 11y agoGoogle's cache has approximate 480 story pages still in its cache. The Wayback Machine won't show any results for the site because of its current robots.txt. It'd be great if someone could scrape these pages and provide them as an archive. I am not sure how to do that without running afoul of Google's terms-of-service. List of URLs: https://dpaste.de/YbEq/raw https://dpaste.de/YbEq/raw
- userbinator 11y agoYou can use http://archive.is/ http://archive.is/
- r721 11y agoArchive.is supports batch archiving too: http://blog.archive.is/post/45031162768/can-you-recommend-the-best-methodscript-so-i-may http://blog.archive.is/post/45031162768/can-you-recommend-th...
- jgw 11y agoI was hoping "What Art Is" would be salvageable, but sadly not. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/19/143553/870 I don't even recall who wrote it now, but I've had it bookmarked for over 10 years.
- k5mumble 11y agoI would love a copy of that! Since I have diaries here: http://k5.semantic-db.org/diary-slurp/161942--archive-diaries--html-diaries--nested-format.zip http://k5.semantic-db.org/diary-slurp/161942--archive-diarie... I regret not scraping the stories too.
- atdt 11y ago(Update: I put what I managed to salvage up at http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/ http://atdt.freeshell.org/k5/).
- chris_wot 11y agoKuro5hin is really what I cut my teeth on before I discovered Wikipedia. I wrote an article on Buddhism, it wasn't that great but I learned a lot! I sure hope that the articles were kept somewhere - there were some pretty amazing stories. Including the time that one of the contributors made a joke about killing the president and the Secret Service came to his workplace...
- antod 11y agoI remember that story. I never posted anything on k5 though (seemed too hard/complicated to bother with), but I read it a lot and commented occasionally. Even the trolls were quite clever and good natured there for a while before they got outnumbered by run of the mill stupid trolls spilling over from slashdot.
- balakk 11y agoProbably just weathering another DDOS attack.
- Nursie 11y agoBye-bye K5. It was awesome knowing you in the beginning, then hell as it turned to a troll-fest, then fun for a few more years as it turned into a weirdly tight-knit community that abused each other for fun. I have two IRL friends from there now... But I won't miss it.
- PaulRobinson 11y agok5 was the first place where I realised that trolling was a hobby for some people, that I encountered the knuckle-dragging form of misogynism that has now come to the fore on Twitter and social media generally, and where I realised that long-form writing in a forum-structure could have a home. I loved k5 when it was good. But when it was bad… man, it was really bad. I will remember it with a sense of fondness, but given I only checked in on it twice in the last 4-5 years shows how little I'll miss it.
- cooper12 11y agoWhat's an SJW?
- ecopoesis 11y agoSocial Justice Warrior, an attempted dogwhistle[1] used by GamerGaters / men's rights activists / anyone of scared of a more equal society, in a derogatory way against people who promote equality and not being a dick on the Internet. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
- berberous 11y agoThis is an unfair comment. SJW became a term for a reason. South Park is pretty liberal and spent the entirety of last season mocking these people. See, also, the ridiculous 'safe space' drama at places like Yale.
- sjy 11y agoSouth Park's centre-right perspective is so well known there's even a political class named after it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_Republican https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_Republican
- logfromblammo 11y agoI always thought that the 4 main characters were proxies for different parts of American society, which re-aligned as necessary to fit the theme of the episode, except that Cartman is always the evil, self-centered, ultraconservative sociopath. For instance, if the boys were old enough to vote: Kyle - Bernie Sanders Stan - Hillary Clinton Kenny - Donald Trump Cartman - the secret genetic hybrid of Hitler and Reagan, but mostly Hitler, Eric Cartman If the boys were classic Universal Studios monsters: Kyle - Frankenstein's Golem Stan - Wolf-Man Kenny - Mummy Cartman - The Invisible Dracula from the Black Lagoon that Couldn't Die, in London If the show seems to have a right-wing alignment, it is probably because Cartman gets so much screen time as the over-the-top punchline to whatever joke it is that the other three kids set up, and he hates hippies and Jews with a passion (of Mel Gibson).
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y agoWell, at least some of my more embarrassing submissions are now gone forever.
- gherkin0 11y agoI used to post there when I was a lot younger. I'll miss it, but only its early days. It had decayed so much that it should have been shutdown a long time ago. I used to see some kuro5hin usernames I recognized on Metafilter, but for the most part I think they've left that site (or been purged, you can never really tell).
- reiichiroh 11y agoBut we still have memepool, right?
- robtaylor 11y agoWhy does it need to go offline? A read only state would cost peanuts.
- rustyk5 11y agoHey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone forever, but it may be a little while before it reappears. There's a very good chance that it will reappear in the form of an archive of static html pages though, not a live community. So if you'd like to, this is probably a good time to mourn what it was, although in that sense K5 has clearly been over for years.
- cbd1984 11y agoConsider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.
- rustyk5 11y agoYeah I don't really mind continuing to host it -- in archived form it wouldn't be any burden. But I'll talk to people.
- mst 11y agoI'd vote for "both" - since I'd love you to be hosting the archive on the original domain for the moment, but I have more faith in them not Failing to Deal with Stuff than you (and were I in your shoes I'd be thinking the exact same thing about myself) - and, also, I'm kinda hoping the internet archive will outlast us both unless we get immortality soon enough. Also, [insert gushing praise here], I loved k5 back in the day.
- orionblastar 11y agohttp://dontsuemebro.com http://dontsuemebro.com Del Griffin seems to be working on Scoop improving it on his Scoop site. He can run your Kuro5hin and maybe even fix the cancel button and other things. He's currently adding HTML tags and trying to fix the https links without the a href tag in autoformat.
- OnceIWasAQ 11y agoRIP K5. Truly an American Icon. -Q
- chris_wot 11y agoMay that meme die with K5.
- OnceIWasAQ 11y agoAs it should
- orionblastar 11y agoHere are two replacement sites: https://dontsuemebro.com/ https://dontsuemebro.com/ http://kr5ddit.com/ http://kr5ddit.com/ Kr5ddit is trying to be like K5 and Reddit, but it is still in alpha tests. Instead of Karma you get Kr5ddits for people upvoting your comments, posts, etc. Kr5ddits you can sell for bitcoins or buy for bitcoins. Kr5ddits you can use to upvote your own posts to the front page. But Kr5ddit has Server 500 errors it needs help in fixing so they can handle more users.
- orionblastar 11y agohttps://github.com/BlastarIndia/scoop https://github.com/BlastarIndia/scoop https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8026116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8026116 I saved a copy of Scoop and documentation by Del Griffin on how to install it on modern systems. I also posted to Hacker News if Scoop can be saved a while ago.
- circuit_breaker 11y agoAnother one I miss. Recently also was thinking about plastic.com
- dredmorbius 11y agoGood times. I remember stumbling on K5 as an alternative to Slashdot, trying out a different moderation method, and building its own CMS (Scoop, as several people have mentioned). I miss the sane discussion collapsing mechanism -- flat then threaded, then nested, then collapsed. It's a dynamic sites a decade-and-a-half later could use painfully <coff>HN</coff> <coff>Reddit</coff>. I had the pleasure of meeting Rusty back in the day. Good guy. I hope Maine's treating him well.
- fit2rule 11y agoI yearn for a return to USENET, when things really were distributed and uncontrollable .. these days we have so much content being generated around a nexus that is too easily controlled .. I wonder why we haven't re-invented USENET yet.