22 ms·

A Pre-History of Slashdot

751 points by cmdrtaco 9y ago

reaperducer 9y ago
Coincidentally, 90% of what's on /. is also on HN. I'm not sure who's copying whom, but it seems like someone is wheezing someone else's feed.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Or they just cover the same interest areas? New Intel chips come out and both Slashdot and HN cover it, but not because someone is copy/pasting articles, it's just a story that both would cover. Slashdot has a lot less "Everybody should switch to strongly typed functional programming language X" articles than HN, while HN definitely has fewer Your Rights Online type articles.
  - AlbertoGP 9y ago
    Yes, and I've started reading it again a couple of weeks ago when I found that my account still worked. The reason to open an account back then was that the number of comments grew so large that I could not hope to read/skim them all and had to store the filter settings. The current HTML/JS seems lighter than I remember, which was a problem for me as I started moving to other boards like HN. We'll see. For now I've meta-moderated again after all those years. [edit] BTW, relevant discussion in /.: https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-of-stuff-that-matters https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-of...
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    An article or two or three would be one thing. But when I can flip between the two windows and see NINE of the same articles, there's something afoot. It's a big world out there. Lots of news to be had. Someone's being lazy.
- drallison 9y ago
  HN is a latter day Slashdot, but there are differences. Slashdot curated the news whereas HN is mostly a list of pointers with references to articles.
- chaoticmass 9y ago
  I typically see stuff on HN first and then on /. a day or more later.
- EpicEng 9y ago
  Yes, extremely strange that two sites focused on the same niche would have similar content.
drallison 9y ago
Slashdot has been a major influence. Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot. Sergey Brin, for example, was a great fan. To be mentioned on slashdot was a meant instant saturation for a website. Personally, I miss CmdrTaco's wry take on the new of the moment.
- cmdrtaco 9y ago
  Thanks!
  - blakesterz 9y ago
    Wow, just realized something totally crazy.. Honestly, I ended up where I am today because of Slashdot. In 1999 I wanted to build a Slashdot site but had no idea what I was doing. So I sat down and just learned how all that stuff worked, ran phpSlash for a while, then Slashcode, then Drupal. All the while I kept learning to code and run servers because of my little site. All the while new doors opened, and I kept working and learning... and now 18 years later I'm doing what I do because of your site. I've had a great little career, so many thanks for helping me get here :-)
    - cmdrtaco 9y ago
      That makes two of us!
    - onion2k 9y ago
      +5 Interesting
    - Nelson69 9y ago
      I will echo this. I absolutely knew I was a software engineer pre-Slashdot but it shaped what and where and how I do that. And I also have had a very good run so far. So thank you for that impact on my life. I did a book review on there, way back when, and I meet Rob and Hemos at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (I guess it was 1997 or 1998) as I took part in the "Loki Hack" (they might have brought food, I don't fully remember.) I don't know how to fully describe it but I was a fresh out of school engineer at IBM, generally introverted and shy, and I somehow felt like I needed "permission" to take part in opensource and the community. Not permission from work, that was actually very very easy, but more like "where do you start" and I didn't want to look like a fool. Someone else was running a project and I had some ideas and had no idea if my ideas meshed with their mission. It's just easy to stand on the sideline and talk about stuff, but you sort of have to take a risk and put yourself out there to take part, and maybe I needed "permission" to do that. The slashhdot guys were particularly down to earth, and laid back and totally welcoming, Hemos even told me that they could probably send me more books to review if I was up to it, just made me feel totally welcome for my fairly trivial contribution. I think it's really easy to turn away newbs with a bad experience and these guys didn't do that. A big website and a business are some neat things to be a part of and to have created, but to be really early members of a new community and to do that well and welcome people and grow it and nurture it is a major accomplishment.
blakesterz 9y ago
Feels like the Slashdot guys chased the wrong end of blogging. Rather than seeing what Drupal/Wordpress saw (building the site is the real money) the Slashodt folks chased the advertising/traffic side to their site. It seems really obvious now, 20 years later, that they should've spent time on Slashcode and made that better for a larger audience and they could've maybe turned out to be something like Drupal or WordPress now. I totally love slashdot still, tried like hell to run Slashcode many years ago, but it always feel like they were focused on Slashdot.org rather than making slashcode work for many other sites. (really not meant as a criticisms at all, just thinking about the good old days and what its like looking back now)
- cmdrtaco 9y ago
  Our shoestring budget probably prevented us from chasing that rabbit like it deserved. And Frankly there were far more seismic shifts that rocked us more.
  - alex_hitchins 9y ago
    Can you divulge any of those seismic shifts? Would be interesting to hear.
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    I'd also love to hear some behind the scenes details if you're willing. I was on /. every day for years.
- bluedino 9y ago
  >> they should've spent time on Slashcode and made that better for a larger audience and they could've maybe turned out to be something like Drupal or WordPress now. I'd be curious as to how much of the original code is left, but there's "Forked from Slashcode, rehash is the codebase that powers SoylentNews.org, powered by mod_perl 2" https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash I wonder if a Perl-based CMS would have became as popular...Part of the appeal of Wordpress is any goober that 'knows a little PHP' can hack on it.
- 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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hprotagonist 9y ago
I have some real fond memories of reading slashdot before classes in high school. I think my favorite was the day Rob proposed, and I was late to AP chemistry because I was frantically reloading the page to see what happened.. Through it i discovered the EFF, the jargon file, the FSF, and much else (hot grits, anyone?), and I miss that community. I haven't spent any serious time there in about 8 years.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I check the comments from time to time, but i fear the place is crawling with paid shills these days.
  - lightedman 9y ago
    You can pretty much safely ignore most things coming from 7-digit UIDs and not have to worry about the shills so much.
- baseten 9y ago
  I haven't thought about Natalie Portman covered in hot grits in some years, so thanks for that.
conesus 9y ago
I never publicly announced this but I loved Slashdot’s friend/foe system so much that I built it as a cross browser extension for Hacker News. It’s called Hacker Smacker and it’s on GitHub. https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker Supports not only friends and foes but also friends of friends and foes of friends. Makes it easy to scan the HN homepage and comment threads and see what’s good. Much like how Slashdot’s friend foe system highlighted the good stuff in threads.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  I read the Slashdot FAQ on the Friend/Foe system, but I still don't understand it. Is the idea just that it lets you filter a comment thread to emphasize comments written by people you're interested in (friends)? Does it hide the comments of foes?
  - snerbles 9y ago
    Slashdot's score weighting is configurable. You could even add a positive score offset to foes.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    The impression i have is that it gives fores a personal -1 on their comment score. So unless they get some +1s from others, or you have set /. to show everything, they will vanish below the breakpoint. Note though that anyone can look up who has them flagged as foe on /..
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Yes, alter the displayed scoring. Also based on the 2nd degree information, friends of friends and such. I would use it behind the scenes to look for bad accounts too. Someone with lots of foes would be a candidate for some silent moderation.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Been looking for something like this, as i have been using RES over at Reddit for a similar purpose.
seanalltogether 9y ago
I wonder where sites like slashdot and digg will continue to fit in to the news landscape over time? If I'm looking for tech news straight from the horses mouth, I often end up at arstechnica, anandtech, or verge. If I'm interested in the zeitgiest I might look to HN or reddit. Is there a middle ground to this that's viable?
- zokier 9y ago
  I love(d) /. article summaries, even if the quality of editing was a running joke. Also the fact that it was simple sequential list and not constantly changing and living front page was a nice aspect. On HN you might miss a good story either because of bad title or because not checking the front page often enough. On the other hand aggressively refreshing HN and optimistically clicking more links leads to massive overload. Personally I think the middle road of /. hits a very good balance.
KGIII 9y ago
I lost access to my first account because I lost access to the email address. This was quite a while back and it was a moniker less able to be tied to me. So, I eventually stopped posting as AC and signed up with my 'real' moniker. Same username as here. Anyhow, I seldom post there, as of late at least, but I've met a bunch of them in real life. Mostly, they're good people. Lately, I've found the HN conversation to be more stimulating. I should try to visit Slashdot later and see who dropped by. What I like best about sites like Slashdot is the vast amount of intelligence there. You will need to wade through some troll posts, but it is worth it to find the gems. Reading at -1 is not for the faint of heart nor for the easily offended. Still, I find it worth the effort. The new owners have done away with the hidden trolltalk board. They have disallowed the n-word, so people found a workaround using the few Unicode characters they do allow. Still, no sign of the promised UTF-8 support - which is funny because Soylent News got that figured out pretty quickly. I do like to point out that Slashdot was never good. No, no it wasn't. I read it before they allowed comments and, as mentioned, even had a five digit UID. (I lost it and now have a six digit UID.) Slashdot was never good. When people on Slashdot like to talk about how it was so much better in the past, about how the level of comments was so much better, I like to link them to the announcement of VMWare releasing their first VM software. The comments are mostly people insisting that it can't work, won't work, and that VMs are a bad idea - because they are quite happy dual booting Win95 and Linux. The comments range from mockery to disbelief that such a product could even exist - even though virtualization wasn't really new. So, no... Slashdot was never really great. I'm not even sure it was ever really good. And that was part of its charm - and still is. From GNAA to Yoda-in-your-ass guy, Slashdot is just Slashdot. The racism is rampant, the puns are still bad, and mobile is still broken, but not as bad as beta. Slashdot is like your drunk college buddy that you really hope doesn't show up at your wedding. And that's okay. Yeah, I'm going to have to visit later. If you do visit, I'd suggest reading at -1, just so you get the full experience.
Mc_Big_G 9y ago
I was always proud of having a slashdot userid < 262000 :) Definitely spent too much time on slashdot in the university computer lab.
- onion2k 9y ago
  You need to be less than or equal to 203094 to be one of the cool kids.
  - acomjean 9y ago
    ID > 20611, No wireless, Less space than a Nomad... Lame I always found it funny how the ranking of user by the order they joined encourages people to join. I guess its the same as not being a "green" user here.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
garyrichardson 9y ago
For me, Slashdot was the first big internet community. I wasn't materially involved in news groups before that. It's a little weird to think I wasn't 20 when I started using /. I was also a little surprised to see there's still a website at the URL. And I can still log in with my old username. And, for the record, my autoincrement user id was 6533. During the height of their popularity having a 4 digit id give me a bit of geek cred :)
jedberg 9y ago
Thanks Rob for the trip down memory lane. I have two to share: I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes. My second memory was when I was working for Sendmail. Because we were “famous” and appeared on Slashdot for every Sendmail release, one of my first jobs was helping the senior admins set up a new web server for Sendmail.org. I was told by the creators of Sendmail “this server must be able to handle getting Slashdotted.” So we bought the biggest Dell server we could find, put it in Level 3 in San Francisco (back when they still hosted things — that datacenter is now Dropbox’s HQ), and then I asked the creator of Bind if he could secondary my DNS on a.root-servers.net. When he actually replied and said yes I felt huge pressure to get that entry right and was a bit starstruck. I was also awestruck as I was doing tail -f on the logs and we hit Slashdot for the first time after setting up the server. I couldn’t believe one site could send that much traffic. If it weren’t for you none of that would have happened, so thanks Rob!
- fred_is_fred 9y ago
  > I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes. I did something similar but then at some point I ended up blocking slashdot.org in my hosts file because it was killing my ability to focus or get work done. I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    > I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work. I used to have one of those! Sadly, Natalie Portman filled it with hot grits.
    - otakucode 9y ago
      It makes my heart swell to know there are still those out there thinking of dear Natalie, petrified and with hot grits down her pants...
ChuckMcM 9y ago
Hah, my daughter was in Voorhees freshman year (hmm, it might have been Van Vleck (sp?) the first year but there was a year she was in Voorhees). And all this time she had no idea she was living and studying in a place of historical interest :-) The great thing this shares with a lot of stories about that time is that Rob didn't say "What can I build that will make me a million bucks?" instead he was just providing a service that was interesting and useful to him and people who shared his interests (which turned out to be a lot of people). Congrats Rob.
aklemm 9y ago
Ahh the memories, especially that time I got an Ask Slashdot accepted. That was a BIG DEAL for some reason. Addendum: Thinking back, Slashdot is where I came of age in tech. Also, I browsed casually without registering for at least a couple years before finally getting a userid in the low 600K area. I regret not registering right away!
MattGrommes 9y ago
Slashdot user #578 here. :) Besides pre-web stuff like Usenet and BBS boards /. was the first place I really felt like part of a community. I still remember fondly the times that stuff I submitted made it to the front page (like the story announcing the title of Star Wars Episode 1), like I was now "famous" with a bunch of people I really wanted to impress. Like most of us, I drifted away a long time ago but I'm always happy to see people in new communities who were around back then. Happy Birthday /. and thanks for all the grits!
- davidw 9y ago
  Yeah, I recall reading stuff there 'back in the day' and it was pretty cool. I tried to find my old account, but couldn't :-/ I did find a few stories I sent in in 1998.
- 300bps 9y ago
  Like most of us, I drifted away a long time ago I just checked and was shocked I remembered my password there.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    Wow, good memory, assuming your username, boasting of your new high speed acoustic coupler modem, is any indication of when you registered your account :-)
    - bdamm 9y ago
      Turbo button.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  Imagine a beowulf cluster of grits?
  - 9y ago
dekhn 9y ago
I am where I am today because of Slashdot. All those early articles about Google running Linux...
rmason 9y ago
Whether they know it or not Slashdot inspired a lot of Michigan startup founders. They proved that you didn't have to be in Silicon Valley to found a notable company. I well remember after reading Slashdot for a few months and then finding out that they were in West Michigan and being absolutely floored. Fun fact one of Rob's friends who helped found the company is now a professor at Michigan State University: https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html
- DocWoodside 9y ago
  Kurt is also involved with Sight Machine: http://sightmachine.com/company/#leadership http://sightmachine.com/company/#leadership
clutchdude 9y ago
Thanks cmdrtaco! Throughout the years, I'd turn to /. to keep up to date on latest shakings and goings ons. I first heard about MythTV there back in the heady days before the home media landscape was bought up and "civilized". I got to see a constant reminders of the failings for the RIAA and so....many....patent troll cases. I remember the crap packt publishing reviews too - basically getting someone to pimp their book. Tons of discussions on cell phones and where the technology was going before Apple did put out the 3g phone and created the walled gardens we have today...then reading about the jailbreaking and what not that was created. I owe a lot to /. for helping shape me into the slightly jaded but functional developer I am today. One of my fondest memories was the time we did an Oktoberfest party on the 10th anniversary of /. We were the only party in the state I think.
- visarga 9y ago
  I remember the endless IBM vs. SCO lawsuit discussions.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    heh, now i remind myself that i still have User Friendly in the RSS reader. Anyone know what Illiad is up to these days?
    - syntheticnature 9y ago
      Still posting comics? http://www.userfriendly.org/ http://www.userfriendly.org/
      - dpcx 9y ago
        He sometimes takes sabbaticals, and the users of the site will re-post old comics.
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        My impression is that the page has been doing reruns for years now, ever since he posted that he would be taking time off. I notice that they have since stopped labeling reruns with a original post date in the upper right corner.
titzer 9y ago
I learned about 9/11 from the slashdot front page. Wow, 16 years ago.
- isostatic 9y ago
  I did the same when the dupe was posted 3 weeks later
jonstokes 9y ago
Slashdot was a major inspiration to us as we grew Ars Technica, not to mention a major source of critical traffic and growth in those early years. Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)
- katastic 9y ago
  You seem to write almost exclusively CPU and tech articles. Good for you. I wish your co-workers would stick to technology and lay off pushing politics. [edit] Wow, the moderators couldn't even tell I was complimenting the guy.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I honestly agree that ArsTechnica has lost something since Jon quit (or he quit because the writing was on the door). And not as much the politics, as the feeling that the site has become more "partisan" in the tech world.
    - katastic 9y ago
      I know right? I don't feel like my opinion was really that controversial. Ars Technica has been a bittersweet story for years in all of the communities / circles that I hang out at. Some of their articles are great journalism. Others make you pine for "the good old days". I wish they'd bring back Computer Gaming World. That was the gold standard of computer journalism. You can actually find PDF's of every issue ever released online and if you compare them to today, they used to be so methodical and objective. They didn't read like advertisements and there was no forced-in message about the political climate. You didn't read about Battle Chess and get shamed for liking that the Queen looked pretty.
- sillyquiet 9y ago
  Yep. I found Ars via a link to a system build guide off of Slashdot oh so very many years ago.
- rtx 9y ago
  You all are doing good work too.
jasonwmiller 9y ago
cmdrtaco, thanks for all the grits, inventing the blog and the watering hole that helped facilitate the discourse and creation of the open source movement. #1794
- taftster 9y ago
  Actually this is a great comment. I wonder how many ideas grew out of Slashdot? What was its influence on the world? The "watering hole of the open source movement." +1 Insightful Slashdot shaped the minds, ideas and opinions of many people, and definitely changed the world. It helped get people into the internet, software development, perl, etc. Would HackerNews exist without slashdot paving the way? Interesting to think about.
raphlinus 9y ago
Slashdot was one of the main inspirations for Advogato. One clue in support of this is that the codebase was called "mod_virgule". The trust metrics were designed to be a more sophisticated moderation system than what Slashdot did, but in retrospect I'm not sure it actually worked that much better; Advogato never reached a mass audience and to the extent it had higher quality posts it was probably due to a smaller and more focused community. I still have my slashdot account (number 3148), but rarely use it. I can well imagine the "complicated feelings" that Rob has, and wanted to add my voice to the many saying that Slashdot was an important Internet space.
uuoc 9y ago
Ah, slashdot. Things were good in the beginning. Then they sold out to Dice. And Dice took it in a bad direction. So bad that a bunch of us abandoned it for the comp.misc Usenet group. And in my case, I have simply not returned, and don't plan to return, even though they 'claim' to be past the Dice era now. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
whathaschanged 9y ago
Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. It would be the equivalent of HN forcing autoplay videos and animated banner ads on each page. A lesson to reflect upon--monetizing is ok when it doesn't kill your userbase. My ID is under 5000 (cue the older ID replies) and I refuse to give them pageviews now.
- uuoc 9y ago
  Same here. I actively refuse to click on any url that goes to slashdot anymore. I've only been back, by accident, a handful of times when a "short link" actually expanded out to slashdot, and every time, I closed the page as soon as I realized where the shortened url was really headed.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it real dead.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    No, the redesign made it unusable, with an inscrutable learning curve. The astroturfers then took over once the organic traffic dropped off a cliff.
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      I recall that the redesign might have been very ugly but didn't increased the learning curve. Yet, the userbase stuck around and pushed for at least a way to get their old slashdot back. Complaining about slashdot's lack of unicode support was a in-joke. But then the astroturfing problem blew up and in no time killed slashdot. The community tolerated trolls, even the infamous GNAA, but slashdot's industrial-level astroturfing campaigns in what I believe to be collulsion with site maintainers was something that was massively abhorrent.
clairity 9y ago
wow, crazy, how time flies. i stumbled onto slashdot in late '97 as a side effect of wanting to put together a computer for a project. i still think it had the best moderation system, however complicated it was. it gave you lots of control on how you wanted to view comments.
jzl 9y ago
Is there a way to figure out when you joined? Not seeing a "member since" date. My id # is 7xxxxx (6 digits). I was reading it regularly for quite a few years, maybe 4-5 years IIRC, before finally deciding to sign up. No idea why I waited so long, I guess I was more into the articles than the commenting side of things. Dumb of me!
- rconti 9y ago
  Ditto. I just logged in to check. Mine is 2xxxxx (also 6 digits) and I, too, regret not signing up when I first started browsing -- was probably more like 2-3 years for me though. I'm guessing 1998-1999? But I really have no idea.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    My first account was 1xxxxx, lost that, second account 2xxxxx. I remember reading slashdot on NYE 1999, code red, the Billenium in Sep 01, and of course 9-11 when it was one of a few sites that stayed up. Back in the day the comments section was full of "famous people" like Wil Wheaton and Bruce Perens, which I found fascinating. Slashdot inspired me to jump to Debian in 2000, and E17. I didn't stick with e17, but did with Debian until about 07 when I transitioned on to ubuntu. The standard broadcast Linux build (1200+ machines on 6 continents) for a major UK based global broadcaster is ubuntu because of slashdot introducing me to apt after a coupe of years of frustration with rpmfind.net. Funny how these things work out.
chrissnell 9y ago
User #5825 here. Here are a few of my favorites: The whole anti-Microsoft movement on /. Thy were the evil empire and Google was saintly. It’s funny how times change. The weather station we sent you in hopes of doing a promotion for our weather equipment site, weathertools.com. OOG THE CAVEMAN. He was DevOpsBorat at least a decade before Twitter. The launch of Mac OS X and the launch of the first titanium PowerBook. That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever. LOL
- Isamu 9y ago
  > That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever. LOL Yeah, Transmeta. That whole "stealth mode" startup mystery kept the buzz going. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta Re Microsoft the evil empire: it was deserved at the time. But it's nice to see they have a better reputation these days.
  - organsnyder 9y ago
    My college laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046) had a Transmeta Crusoe chip, running at 800 mhz. It was slow as molasses, but could easily do 15 hours of battery life (screen on) with the drive-bay and extended batteries, all in a sub-note form factor. It was a perfect note-taking machine (all of my real dev work was done on desktops or via SSH/telnet). Transmeta may have had a short lifespan, but I think they played a big part in jumpstarting Intel's movement to focus on power consumption (remember, this was the Pentium 4 era).
    - housel 9y ago
      I was still using my Transmeta-based Sony Vaio Picturebook as a router running FreeBSD up through January 2016. Before that in the early 2000s it made a great, extremely portable hacking laptop. The attention Transmeta got on Slashdot was probably instrumental in my buying it.
      - organsnyder 9y ago
katastic 9y ago
I hope this doesn't come off as dickish but it's not intended as such: I was really expecting more... well... history. As soon as I get interested "he's gotta upgrade for the onslaught of users! How will he handle it?", the article stops. p.s. Just realized Mr. Taco submitted it himself. So let me add, "Hope your having a great day, and thanks for contributing to the internet and hacker culture." ... But I still want to hear more about your history. ;) I've thought about starting my own IT-centric social site so I'm dying for info.
soulskill 9y ago
I was with Slashdot for 8 years. There are a lot of memories I could share, but the thing I appreciated most about my time there was just how much Rob (and the core team of engineers and editors) really cared about the site and its users. It's rare to see such conviction from tech companies or leaders of large, user-centric websites. I'm not sure Slashdot's users ever really understood how much time and energy Rob expended defending the site from user-hostile changes tossed without concern from the upper echelons of the org chart. Thanks Rob.
- chris_wot 9y ago
  They sent pizza to Kuro5hin during a difficult time. That showed real class.
  - jrmg 9y ago
    Oh, man, Kuro5hin! That was such a great, diverse, welcoming site for a couple of years. So sad what it descended into.
    - chris_wot 9y ago
      For anyone who wonders why HN mods are overly strict, then note that Kuro5hin tolerated trolls and they utterly destroyed the site. It doesn't exist any more.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        It had limped along until a year or so back when the server finally fell over. The domain is parked now. But yeah, the trolls pretty much ruined it, life lesson. Rusty turned up running a Mastodon instance, though I haven't seen him for a few months.
        wowtip 9y ago
        The change in direction of content of kuro5hin, is that the trolls you refer to? I just visited sporadically and noticed focus drifted from tech related and interesting to political and sometimes into conspiracy theory areas around the time when I stopped visiting.
peter303 9y ago
Five digit slashdot here and star post name, but I have most switched to Hacker news. HN updates immediately, raises highest voted topics to top. I notice both cover the same articles. The slashdot ads are a lttle annoying.
johansch 9y ago
Ahh, memories. (I'm slashdot user #9784.) I remember when our tiny company (with a 2 Mbit/s uplink, iirc) was slashdotted: https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts-on-the-pike-programming-language https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts-on-... I was running (our homebrew) web server with debug output in an xterm (with timing details for every request served) throughout this ordeal, just to be sure it didn't screw up. (We didn't really have a thorough testing regime, ahem.)
delinka 9y ago
Has someone yet curated a list of All Slashdot Polls Concerning or Mentioning Cowboy Neal?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  1. Rob Malda 2. Bruce Perens 3. Natalie Portman 4. Jon Katz 5. Cowboy Neal
AndrewStephens 9y ago
I remember the early days of slashdot fondly, although I didn't actually make an account until a few years later. It was such an interesting mix of serious discussion, in-jokes, and amusing trolls (even the infamous goatsx troll that I fell for more than once.) I still think that the moderation and meta-moderation was one of the most interesting experiments in a self-governing commenting system, even though it was clear that it was mostly a failure in the long run. My conclusion is that a site needs hands-on human moderation to maintain quality. Slashdot is also a perfect example of the general life-cycle of cool social site. Humble beginnings -> lots of interesting people -> own little subculture -> lots of interesting content with some impenetrable in-jokes -> existing userbase ages out as they get jobs or have kids -> less interesting content, more in-jokes -> owners sell -> dry husk of a site remains.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  More like: 1. Group #1 joins who care about site 2. Group #1 improves site. Sense of "community" keeps things in check. 3. Site grows in popularity and group #2 joins 4. Site loses sense of community and ability to moderate itself effectively. 5. Group #1 leaves
  - ktta 9y ago
    For some reason I think this going to happen to HN too, and I feel it is at 3. And I'm not sure if I'm in group #1 or group #2.
    - supergreg 9y ago
      I think there's more keeping things in check here than at ./ when group #2 joined.
    - nathanm412 9y ago
      I think it's been at step 3 for longer than most sites have last. I know I'm part of group 2, but I've seen a somewhat consistent culture since I arrived over five years ago.
frankwiles 9y ago
Getting something on the front page of Slashdot was one of my proudest moments.
TekMol 9y ago
The notion of “A Blog” was years away, so I wrote my own code. I wish he did so for this blog post. When I visit it, I get a full screen popup first and after closing it, two dickbars that make it hard to read the actual content.
- shabbyrobe 9y ago
  Medium is shocking for this. I added this to my uBlock custom filters list and now it's not a problem any more: ! medium dickbars and other bullshit: ##.u-clearfix.metabar ##.metabar ##.js-stickyFooter ##.highlightMenu I have not limited it by domain so I can catch all the other Medium-based blogs that use other domains (hackernoon, etc). This raises my risk of false positives but that doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as all the extraneous garbage on their site does. YMMV.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
I once scraped a subset of all Slashdot posts for the month of October. There were some interesting trends. The bulk of posting is by old UIDs in the 100k to 300k range and those are dropping off rapidly, suggesting that it will die around 2022. Some of that is attributable to the rise of mobile and more frequent anon posts but that doesn't balance out the decline from logged in posts. There is also evidence of UID inflation by only issuing odd or even numbers during certain periods.
ciustuc 9y ago
Sharing the audio version of the article for those who'd like to listen to the article: http://bingewith.com/#id694 http://bingewith.com/#id694
wiremine 9y ago
I worked at The Image Group a few years after Rob left, and one of the designers there confirmed the story. > "I took a rejected template from a project at work" The version I heard was he pitched this as the actual website for The Image Group, except it had different colors and the boxes where on the left instead of the right. Crazy to think if ownership had accepted it. Side note: I built sets with Rob in high school: crazy and all around nice guy. Very high energy back then. I'll never forget his rant/love letter for Pascal I heard one day during a break.
crusso 9y ago
I was on slashdot from the very early days until way too recently. In 2011, I joined a startup company of young guys and one of them saw that I had a slashdot page up. He said, "Slashdot is for old people. Let us show you Hacker News".
disease 9y ago
slashdot was one of the few news sites that stayed up during 9/11. I think there was even a follow-up technical article about how they kept it up that day.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Could be how i first read about it back then.
- jonathankoren 9y ago
  Yeah, but that day showed just how weak they were in the journalism department. So many unsubstantiated rumors.
  - flukus 9y ago
    But "social media" was were you'd go to for all the unsubstantiated rumors back then. For the most part the news channels that day were sticking with the facts and weren't spending much time with rumors or speculation. I seems like the roles have flipped in the intervening years, for major events news sites are 90% wild speculation and reaction videos and slashdot-esque sites moderate better information to the top.
ocschwar 9y ago
What I miss about Slashdot more than anything was the editors and writers using the comments section to fact check the stories. Ye ghods, do I miss that.
gfodor 9y ago
I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :)) I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. At the the height of it these people were painted as communists by Microsoft (and if they had any real visibility in the media, I'd imagine they'd have gotten the same treatment.) But here I am today sitting at my desk at Mozilla committed to working only on open source software for the rest of my career and never writing another line of proprietary code, after having seen enough good and pure-intentioned closed source projects morph and turn bad after the pointy haired bosses, the "visionaries", and the investor class got enough control over them. I guess those days have always been in the back of my mind. It took a lot of life lessons to really understand how important the things the /. community was always debating back then around software licenses, privacy, and IP really were. Images of "billg" as the borg were fun, but behind those gags were serious conversations that ended up shaping our world, and ensuring to one degree or another there would always be a hedge against corporate control of software. In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web, a community like /. is sorely needed. Here we are on the modern day equivalent, a site owned and operated by a startup incubator. It's fortunate that a community like this exists at all in some form, but how truly times have changed.
- Nition 9y ago
  > The anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. Just a side comment, I feel like Hacker News is going this way with Facebook a little. Posts that tangentially mention Facebook, there's usually a high-rated comment about how Facebook is evil and since the user left Facebook their life has improved. Those "I don't even own a TV"-like posts are a bit grating as the top comment on every thread, but hey maybe like you say, it's really pushing towards a better future in the end.
beezle 9y ago
Wow.. time flys when you are getting old! To protect the mostly innocent, my uid is just over 64K, so definitely one of the early adopters. /. was definitely the premier place for nerdy/tech news prior to the dot.bomb and it definitely had an outsized influence in the tech world. Many have spoken of having their websites slashdotted though it was not uncommon to get email months and years later about a story submission. Somehow early netizens believed the submitter must be an authority and would be more than happy to answer their questions lol.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
trollied 9y ago
No mention of Natalie Portman or Hot Grits in the Post. Colour me disappointed.
fancyfacebook 9y ago
How convenient he left out the parts about how people used to trade pirated software and kiddie porn regularly in the comment section in the early days. They made a lot of money off of that, I can see how he'd want to forget about that unfortunate truth. Sure the internet was a much different place in the 90s, but still, it was practically encouraged by the admins.
akeck 9y ago
I learned about Slashdot from a screenshot demoing the Enlightenment VM.
fak3r 9y ago
In case the site is down, here's a mirror http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg
JoshMnem 9y ago
I wish that people would stop blogging on Medium, especially about Free software topics. I click the link and get an obnoxiously animated popup shoved in my face that tells me that I've read my two articles for the month and that I should log in for the full experience. Why should people be asked to sign in to follow a blog when there is RSS/Atom? Learning how to use Hugo, Metalsmith, Hexo, Pelican, or Jekyll is not difficult.
- Jarwain 9y ago
  For an author, I'd imagine there are discoverability and convenience aspects involved in the decision to post on medium, versus hosting one's own blog.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    Free software issues are more important than "convenience". Passively consuming TV shows from a couch is more convenient than developing technical skills and building things online, but one is objectively more useful to society than the other.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    I wonder if the author has ever hosted his own blog?
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  Works fine with NoScript. Never knew Medium had a page view limit.
  - pwg 9y ago
    Same here, NoScript, and never knew they had some kind of page limit on views. I do, however, have to run my "dickbars be gone" bookmarklet every time I view a page. But since dickbars seem to be spreading everywhere, that bookmarklet gets a lot of usage now.
fak3r 9y ago
Fact: Slashdot is dying It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when CmdrTaco confirmed that he is resigning from Slashdot, now that Slashdot market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all geek news outlets. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive geek news reading test. You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Slashdot YRO is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core contributors. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot contributors only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. Slashdot leader CmdrTaco states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Ask Slashdot stories are there? Let's see. The number of Ask Slashdot stories versus Slashdot posts is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ask Slashdot stories users. Slashdot book reviews (or, 'Slashvertisements') are about half of the volume of Ask Slashdot stories. Therefore there are about 700 Slashvertisments. A recent article put Slashdot Security posts at about 80 percent of the Slashdot market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts. Due to the troubles of OSNews, abysmal sales and so on, OSNews went out of business and was taken over by Digg, another troubled geek news site. Now Digg is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geek news dilettante dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead. Fact: Slashdot is dying (source from Thursday August 25, 2011 @12:39PM: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054 also notice I got a n00b to respond to me... oh, such simpler times ;) )
snapetom 9y ago
Fond memories, as many others have pointed out. I still check it out every few days. I find the stories there almost as interesting as the ones that make it to HN and a lot more interesting and educational than those making it to the top of reddit. Shot in the dark and off topic, but for years I've been trying to find a comment posted on /. during the Columbia disaster. A poster mentioned how he was part of some high school science program and got to visit the Columbia before her maiden voyage. When it was lost, he was driving across remote Texas on the way back from a client visit when he saw the debris across the sky. It was quite a sad and moving story, and I'd love to re-read it.
bluedino 9y ago
Perl Monks was my favorite thing that came from the Slashdot guys. I never got Perl, but did a few projects with it over the years and I was always amazed at how cool the community on that site was. www.perlmonks.org
jimjimjim 9y ago
so much nostalgia. big big thank you to rob and the rest of the team.
TailorJones 9y ago
Great. Yet another non-closable pop-up window.
Mediterraneo10 9y ago
I had a four-digit Slashdot UID (just over 4000, I think). I have lots of great memories of technical discussions. As a young man who had managed to install Linux on his computer but still knew little about programming or the mighty Unix tradition, it was amazing to be able to participate there in discussions with so many big names in *nix or Free Software. But some of my fondest memories come from trolling there with another account. Trolling Slashdot often wasn't like how trolling works on other news sites, where some user tries to make some controversial point or racist remark related to the submitted story in order to spark arguments and take the conversation off course. Instead, troll posts on Slashdot were usually completely unrelated to the submitted story. They consisted of themes that were sometimes coarse and tasteless, but which fascinatingly evolved over time as each troll adapted the copy/paste to new circumstances or his own personal whims. The million variations on "BSD is dying" is a good example, but my personal favourite was "X touched my junk". And while I was never so cruel to link to Last Measure, I was grimly impressed by the work that had gone into it, completely with having an autoplay audio file "I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORN!!!!" which must have cost a least one or two cubicle dwellers their jobs.
- rdslw 9y ago
  goatse.cx trolling under cloak of redirection... ah those early days...
  - bdamm 9y ago
    Even now I can see it, still burned into my amygdala. Ugh. However, the result was browsers starting showing you the link URL with a text in the info-box at the window base (remember those?) so I guess that was some positive result. Who knew this would be the wax-off training of the future?
  - 6nf 9y ago
    The GNAA and the ascii parrot
barkingtoad 9y ago
User #333 here. Back in the day, someone offered me oral sex for the low user number. What a perfect metaphor for the dot-com era: offering to wildly overpay for a social media asset that would eventually turn out to be useless.
- dotancohen 9y ago
  But if course you wouldn't have taken the offer, /.ers never have sex. That would require leaving mom's basement!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - devrandomguy 9y ago
    They could do it in ASCII, on IRC.
- cisanti 9y ago
  How do you know the proposal was real!? :)
ipunchghosts 9y ago
Does anyone else remember kerneltrap?
threeio 9y ago
I remember registering wwwslashdot.org in my young days of being a typo-domain advertiser (had to eat in college, I've repented) and CmdrTaco posted a message indicating that they "Must have made it because someone registered our typo domain." My mailserver crashed about an hour later from the flood. Lesson learned :)
ipunchghosts 9y ago
What's the story behind Anonymous Coward, the most popular slashdot user?!
hesk 9y ago
Can't wait to read the same post 10 years from now.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
wslh 9y ago
I enjoyed Slashdot every single day as a passive reader but not as an user. I never received feedback from the founders when I pointed them to incorrect facts in their news and the never corrected the posts there. I specially rember an important security issue discovered by the company where I worked (Core Security Technologies) that was mistakenly reported as if was found by CERT. You can say that this is very common but at that time Slashdot was the top influential place in the community and security wise.
attawahid 9y ago
I remember Chips&Dips and got confused one day when I couldn't find it. Started searching and found it again under Slashdot and have been a fan and loyal visitor ever since. Thanks a lot for this awesome write-up of Internet History :-)
qu4z-2 9y ago
Hey cmdrtaco. This isn't entirely related, but I just wanted to say thanks for the chili recipe from your blog. I've been using it for years and it's great. (I also miss the Slashdot that was).
jbgreer 9y ago
Slashdot user #4245 here, with comments dating to April of 1999, 2 friends and 1 fan, no foes or freaks. I also had the pleasure of meeting Cmdr Taco at an early LinuxWorld (1998?) in California. I admit it fed a lot of my biases at the time, but also provided a lot of useful information.
lazyjones 9y ago
User 8xxx here... Slashdot was great while it provided the best daily overview of IT stories. I wonder what changed - I can vaguely recall switching to heise.de and later HN. Perhaps the way it presented the stories worked better for a few major pieces per day and everyone tries to read "all" interesting stories every day now, so pages with just headlines and broader coverage took over? I miss the quieter "online life" of the late 90's...
dbg31415 9y ago
I remember, about 20 years ago, having an argument with someone on Slashdot. Then realizing, about 10 messages in, that I actually knew the person I was arguing with. Being able to connect with friends online, being able to make friends through dialogue online... the site was easily the best online community at the time. Bonus: Even 20 years ago it had better design than Hacker News! (= (Couldn't resist.)
mljoe 9y ago
I can trace almost everything that helped me professionally and even many of my tech opinions to something I read on Slashdot. Really the site that influenced me the most.
20721 9y ago
My favourite part of Slashdot was the trolling. Some classic trolls there like "egg troll", "The Turd Report", etc. with their quite absurd yet entertaining posts. Then there was the rather ruder trolling, like not knowing if the link you were about to follow was yet another Goatse Man. Or the more helpful trolls, such as ones taking music requests to spam as the first post. There was even a 'hidden SID' forum, trolltalk, which was rather amusing (and somewhat disturbing) until it was overrun by some Markov chain bot. And spinoff trolling sites like http://adequacy.org http://adequacy.org - satire to rile uptight nerds and amuse the rest. I think the bizarre trolling subculture, amidst the righteous frothing of Linux fanaticism, was what really made Slashdot. Anyway, good times.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- shaklee3 9y ago
  Eggtroll was, and still is, possibly the best troll I've ever seen. He carried it over to the newsgroups with elaborate multi-page trolls and crossposts. Whoever you are eggtroll, thank you for providing so much entertainment. Here's one of the archives: http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html
iamleppert 9y ago
Slashdot was truly a part of my youth, it was the site I went to when I was a teenager, in between taking breaks from coding. It made me feel like there were others out there like me and was a great source of inspiration growing up in a less than stellar childhood in Ohio. It makes me nostalgic for the web of yesteryear, when it was mostly about just a bunch of nerds sharing their passion for technology. Thanks, CmdrTaco.
fleeno 9y ago
We were one of their first advertisers! If I recall, we traded them some RAM and maybe a server case as part of the deal.
dghughes 9y ago
+5 funny
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wainstead 9y ago
I recall the incredible hype on Slashdot surrounding the release of Phantom Menace. Lucasfilm released few details and Slashdot seized on every little thing leading up to the release. I worked at the New York Times then (just a web programmer) and lucked into an advance screening two weeks before the film's release. I came right back to the office and wrote a review (in plain text!) and submitted it to Slashdot but it never got posted. Rob, if I spoiled the film for ya, sorry about that! It seemed in the last two weeks before Phantom Menace was finally released you were a lot less enthusiastic, and I wondered if my early review put a damper on it. I grepped my ISP account and found the original file: http://www.panix.com/~swain/review.txt http://www.panix.com/~swain/review.txt
nl 9y ago
I had a 5 figure uid, but I read it for a long time before I registered. First started before the '97 Green redesign. I found a comment parser attack on '98 or so which let me post a "Powered by WindowsNT" on a FreeBSD thread. The ten minutes it survived was a highlight. I actually used an image from the Microsoft site because there wasn't anywhere else you could host images back then. One things I haven't seen mentioned is the hidden sids (remember sid=wahiscool?)
avenius 9y ago
I started reading slashdot around 2000-2001, being about 14 years old at the time. I would venture to say that slashdot and its community has been as educational (or even more) as school, and played a large part in my deciding to work in IT. Since I never signed up for an account there (I was a kid and knew I had nothing to bring to the table), I never experienced the friend/foe system or participated in moderation. Still, the site has had an amazing impact on my life and given me an insight into topics I never would have learned about otherwise. Nowadays it feels HN has taken over, but I still feel a need to express my gratitude for both the site and the community.
jackgavigan 9y ago
First post!!!
Shivetya 9y ago
I really enjoyed the early slashdot but lost interest when politics ran rampant in nearly every part of the site. the vitriol associated with it and more (stuff you could not see) just reduced the value the site had in my eyes. I honestly cannot remember the last time I have visited the site. tech sites need to keep their purity to stay accessible, politics, direct story posting or the constant indirect type, need to stomped out with a vengeance

751 points by cmdrtaco 9y ago

Coincidentally, 90% of what's on /. is also on HN. I'm not sure who's copying whom, but it seems like someone is wheezing someone else's feed.

jandrese 9y ago
Or they just cover the same interest areas? New Intel chips come out and both Slashdot and HN cover it, but not because someone is copy/pasting articles, it's just a story that both would cover. Slashdot has a lot less "Everybody should switch to strongly typed functional programming language X" articles than HN, while HN definitely has fewer Your Rights Online type articles.
- AlbertoGP 9y ago
  Yes, and I've started reading it again a couple of weeks ago when I found that my account still worked. The reason to open an account back then was that the number of comments grew so large that I could not hope to read/skim them all and had to store the filter settings. The current HTML/JS seems lighter than I remember, which was a problem for me as I started moving to other boards like HN. We'll see. For now I've meta-moderated again after all those years. [edit] BTW, relevant discussion in /.: https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-of-stuff-that-matters https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-of...
- reaperducer 9y ago
  An article or two or three would be one thing. But when I can flip between the two windows and see NINE of the same articles, there's something afoot. It's a big world out there. Lots of news to be had. Someone's being lazy.
drallison 9y ago
HN is a latter day Slashdot, but there are differences. Slashdot curated the news whereas HN is mostly a list of pointers with references to articles.
chaoticmass 9y ago
I typically see stuff on HN first and then on /. a day or more later.
EpicEng 9y ago
Yes, extremely strange that two sites focused on the same niche would have similar content.

drallison 9y ago

Slashdot has been a major influence. Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot. Sergey Brin, for example, was a great fan. To be mentioned on slashdot was a meant instant saturation for a website. Personally, I miss CmdrTaco's wry take on the new of the moment.

cmdrtaco 9y ago
Thanks!
- blakesterz 9y ago
  Wow, just realized something totally crazy.. Honestly, I ended up where I am today because of Slashdot. In 1999 I wanted to build a Slashdot site but had no idea what I was doing. So I sat down and just learned how all that stuff worked, ran phpSlash for a while, then Slashcode, then Drupal. All the while I kept learning to code and run servers because of my little site. All the while new doors opened, and I kept working and learning... and now 18 years later I'm doing what I do because of your site. I've had a great little career, so many thanks for helping me get here :-)
  - cmdrtaco 9y ago
    That makes two of us!
  - onion2k 9y ago
    +5 Interesting
  - Nelson69 9y ago
    I will echo this. I absolutely knew I was a software engineer pre-Slashdot but it shaped what and where and how I do that. And I also have had a very good run so far. So thank you for that impact on my life. I did a book review on there, way back when, and I meet Rob and Hemos at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (I guess it was 1997 or 1998) as I took part in the "Loki Hack" (they might have brought food, I don't fully remember.) I don't know how to fully describe it but I was a fresh out of school engineer at IBM, generally introverted and shy, and I somehow felt like I needed "permission" to take part in opensource and the community. Not permission from work, that was actually very very easy, but more like "where do you start" and I didn't want to look like a fool. Someone else was running a project and I had some ideas and had no idea if my ideas meshed with their mission. It's just easy to stand on the sideline and talk about stuff, but you sort of have to take a risk and put yourself out there to take part, and maybe I needed "permission" to do that. The slashhdot guys were particularly down to earth, and laid back and totally welcoming, Hemos even told me that they could probably send me more books to review if I was up to it, just made me feel totally welcome for my fairly trivial contribution. I think it's really easy to turn away newbs with a bad experience and these guys didn't do that. A big website and a business are some neat things to be a part of and to have created, but to be really early members of a new community and to do that well and welcome people and grow it and nurture it is a major accomplishment.

blakesterz 9y ago

Feels like the Slashdot guys chased the wrong end of blogging. Rather than seeing what Drupal/Wordpress saw (building the site is the real money) the Slashodt folks chased the advertising/traffic side to their site. It seems really obvious now, 20 years later, that they should've spent time on Slashcode and made that better for a larger audience and they could've maybe turned out to be something like Drupal or WordPress now. I totally love slashdot still, tried like hell to run Slashcode many years ago, but it always feel like they were focused on Slashdot.org rather than making slashcode work for many other sites. (really not meant as a criticisms at all, just thinking about the good old days and what its like looking back now)

cmdrtaco 9y ago
Our shoestring budget probably prevented us from chasing that rabbit like it deserved. And Frankly there were far more seismic shifts that rocked us more.
- alex_hitchins 9y ago
  Can you divulge any of those seismic shifts? Would be interesting to hear.
- EpicEng 9y ago
  I'd also love to hear some behind the scenes details if you're willing. I was on /. every day for years.
bluedino 9y ago
>> they should've spent time on Slashcode and made that better for a larger audience and they could've maybe turned out to be something like Drupal or WordPress now. I'd be curious as to how much of the original code is left, but there's "Forked from Slashcode, rehash is the codebase that powers SoylentNews.org, powered by mod_perl 2" https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash I wonder if a Perl-based CMS would have became as popular...Part of the appeal of Wordpress is any goober that 'knows a little PHP' can hack on it.
9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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hprotagonist 9y ago

I have some real fond memories of reading slashdot before classes in high school. I think my favorite was the day Rob proposed, and I was late to AP chemistry because I was frantically reloading the page to see what happened.. Through it i discovered the EFF, the jargon file, the FSF, and much else (hot grits, anyone?), and I miss that community. I haven't spent any serious time there in about 8 years.

digi_owl 9y ago
I check the comments from time to time, but i fear the place is crawling with paid shills these days.
- lightedman 9y ago
  You can pretty much safely ignore most things coming from 7-digit UIDs and not have to worry about the shills so much.
baseten 9y ago
I haven't thought about Natalie Portman covered in hot grits in some years, so thanks for that.

conesus 9y ago

I never publicly announced this but I loved Slashdot’s friend/foe system so much that I built it as a cross browser extension for Hacker News. It’s called Hacker Smacker and it’s on GitHub. https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker Supports not only friends and foes but also friends of friends and foes of friends. Makes it easy to scan the HN homepage and comment threads and see what’s good. Much like how Slashdot’s friend foe system highlighted the good stuff in threads.

jessriedel 9y ago
I read the Slashdot FAQ on the Friend/Foe system, but I still don't understand it. Is the idea just that it lets you filter a comment thread to emphasize comments written by people you're interested in (friends)? Does it hide the comments of foes?
- snerbles 9y ago
  Slashdot's score weighting is configurable. You could even add a positive score offset to foes.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  The impression i have is that it gives fores a personal -1 on their comment score. So unless they get some +1s from others, or you have set /. to show everything, they will vanish below the breakpoint. Note though that anyone can look up who has them flagged as foe on /..
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Yes, alter the displayed scoring. Also based on the 2nd degree information, friends of friends and such. I would use it behind the scenes to look for bad accounts too. Someone with lots of foes would be a candidate for some silent moderation.
digi_owl 9y ago
Been looking for something like this, as i have been using RES over at Reddit for a similar purpose.

seanalltogether 9y ago

I wonder where sites like slashdot and digg will continue to fit in to the news landscape over time? If I'm looking for tech news straight from the horses mouth, I often end up at arstechnica, anandtech, or verge. If I'm interested in the zeitgiest I might look to HN or reddit. Is there a middle ground to this that's viable?

zokier 9y ago
I love(d) /. article summaries, even if the quality of editing was a running joke. Also the fact that it was simple sequential list and not constantly changing and living front page was a nice aspect. On HN you might miss a good story either because of bad title or because not checking the front page often enough. On the other hand aggressively refreshing HN and optimistically clicking more links leads to massive overload. Personally I think the middle road of /. hits a very good balance.

KGIII 9y ago

I lost access to my first account because I lost access to the email address. This was quite a while back and it was a moniker less able to be tied to me. So, I eventually stopped posting as AC and signed up with my 'real' moniker. Same username as here. Anyhow, I seldom post there, as of late at least, but I've met a bunch of them in real life. Mostly, they're good people. Lately, I've found the HN conversation to be more stimulating. I should try to visit Slashdot later and see who dropped by. What I like best about sites like Slashdot is the vast amount of intelligence there. You will need to wade through some troll posts, but it is worth it to find the gems. Reading at -1 is not for the faint of heart nor for the easily offended. Still, I find it worth the effort. The new owners have done away with the hidden trolltalk board. They have disallowed the n-word, so people found a workaround using the few Unicode characters they do allow. Still, no sign of the promised UTF-8 support - which is funny because Soylent News got that figured out pretty quickly. I do like to point out that Slashdot was never good. No, no it wasn't. I read it before they allowed comments and, as mentioned, even had a five digit UID. (I lost it and now have a six digit UID.) Slashdot was never good. When people on Slashdot like to talk about how it was so much better in the past, about how the level of comments was so much better, I like to link them to the announcement of VMWare releasing their first VM software. The comments are mostly people insisting that it can't work, won't work, and that VMs are a bad idea - because they are quite happy dual booting Win95 and Linux. The comments range from mockery to disbelief that such a product could even exist - even though virtualization wasn't really new. So, no... Slashdot was never really great. I'm not even sure it was ever really good. And that was part of its charm - and still is. From GNAA to Yoda-in-your-ass guy, Slashdot is just Slashdot. The racism is rampant, the puns are still bad, and mobile is still broken, but not as bad as beta. Slashdot is like your drunk college buddy that you really hope doesn't show up at your wedding. And that's okay. Yeah, I'm going to have to visit later. If you do visit, I'd suggest reading at -1, just so you get the full experience.

Mc_Big_G 9y ago

I was always proud of having a slashdot userid < 262000 :) Definitely spent too much time on slashdot in the university computer lab.

onion2k 9y ago
You need to be less than or equal to 203094 to be one of the cool kids.
- acomjean 9y ago
  ID > 20611, No wireless, Less space than a Nomad... Lame I always found it funny how the ranking of user by the order they joined encourages people to join. I guess its the same as not being a "green" user here.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

garyrichardson 9y ago

For me, Slashdot was the first big internet community. I wasn't materially involved in news groups before that. It's a little weird to think I wasn't 20 when I started using /. I was also a little surprised to see there's still a website at the URL. And I can still log in with my old username. And, for the record, my autoincrement user id was 6533. During the height of their popularity having a 4 digit id give me a bit of geek cred :)

jedberg 9y ago

Thanks Rob for the trip down memory lane. I have two to share: I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes. My second memory was when I was working for Sendmail. Because we were “famous” and appeared on Slashdot for every Sendmail release, one of my first jobs was helping the senior admins set up a new web server for Sendmail.org. I was told by the creators of Sendmail “this server must be able to handle getting Slashdotted.” So we bought the biggest Dell server we could find, put it in Level 3 in San Francisco (back when they still hosted things — that datacenter is now Dropbox’s HQ), and then I asked the creator of Bind if he could secondary my DNS on a.root-servers.net. When he actually replied and said yes I felt huge pressure to get that entry right and was a bit starstruck. I was also awestruck as I was doing tail -f on the logs and we hit Slashdot for the first time after setting up the server. I couldn’t believe one site could send that much traffic. If it weren’t for you none of that would have happened, so thanks Rob!

fred_is_fred 9y ago
> I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes. I did something similar but then at some point I ended up blocking slashdot.org in my hosts file because it was killing my ability to focus or get work done. I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  > I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work. I used to have one of those! Sadly, Natalie Portman filled it with hot grits.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    It makes my heart swell to know there are still those out there thinking of dear Natalie, petrified and with hot grits down her pants...

ChuckMcM 9y ago

Hah, my daughter was in Voorhees freshman year (hmm, it might have been Van Vleck (sp?) the first year but there was a year she was in Voorhees). And all this time she had no idea she was living and studying in a place of historical interest :-) The great thing this shares with a lot of stories about that time is that Rob didn't say "What can I build that will make me a million bucks?" instead he was just providing a service that was interesting and useful to him and people who shared his interests (which turned out to be a lot of people). Congrats Rob.

aklemm 9y ago

Ahh the memories, especially that time I got an Ask Slashdot accepted. That was a BIG DEAL for some reason. Addendum: Thinking back, Slashdot is where I came of age in tech. Also, I browsed casually without registering for at least a couple years before finally getting a userid in the low 600K area. I regret not registering right away!

MattGrommes 9y ago

Slashdot user #578 here. :) Besides pre-web stuff like Usenet and BBS boards /. was the first place I really felt like part of a community. I still remember fondly the times that stuff I submitted made it to the front page (like the story announcing the title of Star Wars Episode 1), like I was now "famous" with a bunch of people I really wanted to impress. Like most of us, I drifted away a long time ago but I'm always happy to see people in new communities who were around back then. Happy Birthday /. and thanks for all the grits!

davidw 9y ago
Yeah, I recall reading stuff there 'back in the day' and it was pretty cool. I tried to find my old account, but couldn't :-/ I did find a few stories I sent in in 1998.
300bps 9y ago
Like most of us, I drifted away a long time ago I just checked and was shocked I remembered my password there.
- FabHK 9y ago
  Wow, good memory, assuming your username, boasting of your new high speed acoustic coupler modem, is any indication of when you registered your account :-)
  - bdamm 9y ago
    Turbo button.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
gm-conspiracy 9y ago
Imagine a beowulf cluster of grits?
- 9y ago

dekhn 9y ago

I am where I am today because of Slashdot. All those early articles about Google running Linux...

rmason 9y ago

Whether they know it or not Slashdot inspired a lot of Michigan startup founders. They proved that you didn't have to be in Silicon Valley to found a notable company. I well remember after reading Slashdot for a few months and then finding out that they were in West Michigan and being absolutely floored. Fun fact one of Rob's friends who helped found the company is now a professor at Michigan State University: https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html

DocWoodside 9y ago
Kurt is also involved with Sight Machine: http://sightmachine.com/company/#leadership http://sightmachine.com/company/#leadership

clutchdude 9y ago

Thanks cmdrtaco! Throughout the years, I'd turn to /. to keep up to date on latest shakings and goings ons. I first heard about MythTV there back in the heady days before the home media landscape was bought up and "civilized". I got to see a constant reminders of the failings for the RIAA and so....many....patent troll cases. I remember the crap packt publishing reviews too - basically getting someone to pimp their book. Tons of discussions on cell phones and where the technology was going before Apple did put out the 3g phone and created the walled gardens we have today...then reading about the jailbreaking and what not that was created. I owe a lot to /. for helping shape me into the slightly jaded but functional developer I am today. One of my fondest memories was the time we did an Oktoberfest party on the 10th anniversary of /. We were the only party in the state I think.

visarga 9y ago
I remember the endless IBM vs. SCO lawsuit discussions.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  heh, now i remind myself that i still have User Friendly in the RSS reader. Anyone know what Illiad is up to these days?
  - syntheticnature 9y ago
    Still posting comics? http://www.userfriendly.org/ http://www.userfriendly.org/
    - dpcx 9y ago
      He sometimes takes sabbaticals, and the users of the site will re-post old comics.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      My impression is that the page has been doing reruns for years now, ever since he posted that he would be taking time off. I notice that they have since stopped labeling reruns with a original post date in the upper right corner.

titzer 9y ago

I learned about 9/11 from the slashdot front page. Wow, 16 years ago.

isostatic 9y ago
I did the same when the dupe was posted 3 weeks later

jonstokes 9y ago

Slashdot was a major inspiration to us as we grew Ars Technica, not to mention a major source of critical traffic and growth in those early years. Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)

katastic 9y ago
You seem to write almost exclusively CPU and tech articles. Good for you. I wish your co-workers would stick to technology and lay off pushing politics. [edit] Wow, the moderators couldn't even tell I was complimenting the guy.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I honestly agree that ArsTechnica has lost something since Jon quit (or he quit because the writing was on the door). And not as much the politics, as the feeling that the site has become more "partisan" in the tech world.
  - katastic 9y ago
    I know right? I don't feel like my opinion was really that controversial. Ars Technica has been a bittersweet story for years in all of the communities / circles that I hang out at. Some of their articles are great journalism. Others make you pine for "the good old days". I wish they'd bring back Computer Gaming World. That was the gold standard of computer journalism. You can actually find PDF's of every issue ever released online and if you compare them to today, they used to be so methodical and objective. They didn't read like advertisements and there was no forced-in message about the political climate. You didn't read about Battle Chess and get shamed for liking that the Queen looked pretty.
sillyquiet 9y ago
Yep. I found Ars via a link to a system build guide off of Slashdot oh so very many years ago.
rtx 9y ago
You all are doing good work too.

jasonwmiller 9y ago

cmdrtaco, thanks for all the grits, inventing the blog and the watering hole that helped facilitate the discourse and creation of the open source movement. #1794

taftster 9y ago
Actually this is a great comment. I wonder how many ideas grew out of Slashdot? What was its influence on the world? The "watering hole of the open source movement." +1 Insightful Slashdot shaped the minds, ideas and opinions of many people, and definitely changed the world. It helped get people into the internet, software development, perl, etc. Would HackerNews exist without slashdot paving the way? Interesting to think about.

raphlinus 9y ago

Slashdot was one of the main inspirations for Advogato. One clue in support of this is that the codebase was called "mod_virgule". The trust metrics were designed to be a more sophisticated moderation system than what Slashdot did, but in retrospect I'm not sure it actually worked that much better; Advogato never reached a mass audience and to the extent it had higher quality posts it was probably due to a smaller and more focused community. I still have my slashdot account (number 3148), but rarely use it. I can well imagine the "complicated feelings" that Rob has, and wanted to add my voice to the many saying that Slashdot was an important Internet space.

uuoc 9y ago

Ah, slashdot. Things were good in the beginning. Then they sold out to Dice. And Dice took it in a bad direction. So bad that a bunch of us abandoned it for the comp.misc Usenet group. And in my case, I have simply not returned, and don't plan to return, even though they 'claim' to be past the Dice era now. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

whathaschanged 9y ago

Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. It would be the equivalent of HN forcing autoplay videos and animated banner ads on each page. A lesson to reflect upon--monetizing is ok when it doesn't kill your userbase. My ID is under 5000 (cue the older ID replies) and I refuse to give them pageviews now.

uuoc 9y ago
Same here. I actively refuse to click on any url that goes to slashdot anymore. I've only been back, by accident, a handful of times when a "short link" actually expanded out to slashdot, and every time, I closed the page as soon as I realized where the shortened url was really headed.
geezerjay 9y ago
> Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it real dead.
- rhizome 9y ago
  No, the redesign made it unusable, with an inscrutable learning curve. The astroturfers then took over once the organic traffic dropped off a cliff.
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    I recall that the redesign might have been very ugly but didn't increased the learning curve. Yet, the userbase stuck around and pushed for at least a way to get their old slashdot back. Complaining about slashdot's lack of unicode support was a in-joke. But then the astroturfing problem blew up and in no time killed slashdot. The community tolerated trolls, even the infamous GNAA, but slashdot's industrial-level astroturfing campaigns in what I believe to be collulsion with site maintainers was something that was massively abhorrent.

clairity 9y ago

wow, crazy, how time flies. i stumbled onto slashdot in late '97 as a side effect of wanting to put together a computer for a project. i still think it had the best moderation system, however complicated it was. it gave you lots of control on how you wanted to view comments.

jzl 9y ago

Is there a way to figure out when you joined? Not seeing a "member since" date. My id # is 7xxxxx (6 digits). I was reading it regularly for quite a few years, maybe 4-5 years IIRC, before finally deciding to sign up. No idea why I waited so long, I guess I was more into the articles than the commenting side of things. Dumb of me!

rconti 9y ago
Ditto. I just logged in to check. Mine is 2xxxxx (also 6 digits) and I, too, regret not signing up when I first started browsing -- was probably more like 2-3 years for me though. I'm guessing 1998-1999? But I really have no idea.
- isostatic 9y ago
  My first account was 1xxxxx, lost that, second account 2xxxxx. I remember reading slashdot on NYE 1999, code red, the Billenium in Sep 01, and of course 9-11 when it was one of a few sites that stayed up. Back in the day the comments section was full of "famous people" like Wil Wheaton and Bruce Perens, which I found fascinating. Slashdot inspired me to jump to Debian in 2000, and E17. I didn't stick with e17, but did with Debian until about 07 when I transitioned on to ubuntu. The standard broadcast Linux build (1200+ machines on 6 continents) for a major UK based global broadcaster is ubuntu because of slashdot introducing me to apt after a coupe of years of frustration with rpmfind.net. Funny how these things work out.

chrissnell 9y ago

User #5825 here. Here are a few of my favorites: The whole anti-Microsoft movement on /. Thy were the evil empire and Google was saintly. It’s funny how times change. The weather station we sent you in hopes of doing a promotion for our weather equipment site, weathertools.com. OOG THE CAVEMAN. He was DevOpsBorat at least a decade before Twitter. The launch of Mac OS X and the launch of the first titanium PowerBook. That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever. LOL

Isamu 9y ago
> That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever. LOL Yeah, Transmeta. That whole "stealth mode" startup mystery kept the buzz going. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta Re Microsoft the evil empire: it was deserved at the time. But it's nice to see they have a better reputation these days.
- organsnyder 9y ago
  My college laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046) had a Transmeta Crusoe chip, running at 800 mhz. It was slow as molasses, but could easily do 15 hours of battery life (screen on) with the drive-bay and extended batteries, all in a sub-note form factor. It was a perfect note-taking machine (all of my real dev work was done on desktops or via SSH/telnet). Transmeta may have had a short lifespan, but I think they played a big part in jumpstarting Intel's movement to focus on power consumption (remember, this was the Pentium 4 era).
  - housel 9y ago
    I was still using my Transmeta-based Sony Vaio Picturebook as a router running FreeBSD up through January 2016. Before that in the early 2000s it made a great, extremely portable hacking laptop. The attention Transmeta got on Slashdot was probably instrumental in my buying it.
    - organsnyder 9y ago

katastic 9y ago

I hope this doesn't come off as dickish but it's not intended as such: I was really expecting more... well... history. As soon as I get interested "he's gotta upgrade for the onslaught of users! How will he handle it?", the article stops. p.s. Just realized Mr. Taco submitted it himself. So let me add, "Hope your having a great day, and thanks for contributing to the internet and hacker culture." ... But I still want to hear more about your history. ;) I've thought about starting my own IT-centric social site so I'm dying for info.

soulskill 9y ago

I was with Slashdot for 8 years. There are a lot of memories I could share, but the thing I appreciated most about my time there was just how much Rob (and the core team of engineers and editors) really cared about the site and its users. It's rare to see such conviction from tech companies or leaders of large, user-centric websites. I'm not sure Slashdot's users ever really understood how much time and energy Rob expended defending the site from user-hostile changes tossed without concern from the upper echelons of the org chart. Thanks Rob.

chris_wot 9y ago
They sent pizza to Kuro5hin during a difficult time. That showed real class.
- jrmg 9y ago
  Oh, man, Kuro5hin! That was such a great, diverse, welcoming site for a couple of years. So sad what it descended into.
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    For anyone who wonders why HN mods are overly strict, then note that Kuro5hin tolerated trolls and they utterly destroyed the site. It doesn't exist any more.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      It had limped along until a year or so back when the server finally fell over. The domain is parked now. But yeah, the trolls pretty much ruined it, life lesson. Rusty turned up running a Mastodon instance, though I haven't seen him for a few months.
      - wowtip 9y ago
        The change in direction of content of kuro5hin, is that the trolls you refer to? I just visited sporadically and noticed focus drifted from tech related and interesting to political and sometimes into conspiracy theory areas around the time when I stopped visiting.

peter303 9y ago

Five digit slashdot here and star post name, but I have most switched to Hacker news. HN updates immediately, raises highest voted topics to top. I notice both cover the same articles. The slashdot ads are a lttle annoying.

johansch 9y ago

Ahh, memories. (I'm slashdot user #9784.) I remember when our tiny company (with a 2 Mbit/s uplink, iirc) was slashdotted: https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts-on-the-pike-programming-language https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts-on-... I was running (our homebrew) web server with debug output in an xterm (with timing details for every request served) throughout this ordeal, just to be sure it didn't screw up. (We didn't really have a thorough testing regime, ahem.)

delinka 9y ago

Has someone yet curated a list of All Slashdot Polls Concerning or Mentioning Cowboy Neal?

dredmorbius 9y ago
1. Rob Malda 2. Bruce Perens 3. Natalie Portman 4. Jon Katz 5. Cowboy Neal

AndrewStephens 9y ago

I remember the early days of slashdot fondly, although I didn't actually make an account until a few years later. It was such an interesting mix of serious discussion, in-jokes, and amusing trolls (even the infamous goatsx troll that I fell for more than once.) I still think that the moderation and meta-moderation was one of the most interesting experiments in a self-governing commenting system, even though it was clear that it was mostly a failure in the long run. My conclusion is that a site needs hands-on human moderation to maintain quality. Slashdot is also a perfect example of the general life-cycle of cool social site. Humble beginnings -> lots of interesting people -> own little subculture -> lots of interesting content with some impenetrable in-jokes -> existing userbase ages out as they get jobs or have kids -> less interesting content, more in-jokes -> owners sell -> dry husk of a site remains.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
More like: 1. Group #1 joins who care about site 2. Group #1 improves site. Sense of "community" keeps things in check. 3. Site grows in popularity and group #2 joins 4. Site loses sense of community and ability to moderate itself effectively. 5. Group #1 leaves
- ktta 9y ago
  For some reason I think this going to happen to HN too, and I feel it is at 3. And I'm not sure if I'm in group #1 or group #2.
  - supergreg 9y ago
    I think there's more keeping things in check here than at ./ when group #2 joined.
  - nathanm412 9y ago
    I think it's been at step 3 for longer than most sites have last. I know I'm part of group 2, but I've seen a somewhat consistent culture since I arrived over five years ago.

frankwiles 9y ago

Getting something on the front page of Slashdot was one of my proudest moments.

TekMol 9y ago

The notion of “A Blog” was years away, so I wrote my own code. I wish he did so for this blog post. When I visit it, I get a full screen popup first and after closing it, two dickbars that make it hard to read the actual content.

shabbyrobe 9y ago
Medium is shocking for this. I added this to my uBlock custom filters list and now it's not a problem any more: ! medium dickbars and other bullshit: ##.u-clearfix.metabar ##.metabar ##.js-stickyFooter ##.highlightMenu I have not limited it by domain so I can catch all the other Medium-based blogs that use other domains (hackernoon, etc). This raises my risk of false positives but that doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as all the extraneous garbage on their site does. YMMV.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

I once scraped a subset of all Slashdot posts for the month of October. There were some interesting trends. The bulk of posting is by old UIDs in the 100k to 300k range and those are dropping off rapidly, suggesting that it will die around 2022. Some of that is attributable to the rise of mobile and more frequent anon posts but that doesn't balance out the decline from logged in posts. There is also evidence of UID inflation by only issuing odd or even numbers during certain periods.

ciustuc 9y ago

Sharing the audio version of the article for those who'd like to listen to the article: http://bingewith.com/#id694 http://bingewith.com/#id694

wiremine 9y ago

I worked at The Image Group a few years after Rob left, and one of the designers there confirmed the story. > "I took a rejected template from a project at work" The version I heard was he pitched this as the actual website for The Image Group, except it had different colors and the boxes where on the left instead of the right. Crazy to think if ownership had accepted it. Side note: I built sets with Rob in high school: crazy and all around nice guy. Very high energy back then. I'll never forget his rant/love letter for Pascal I heard one day during a break.

crusso 9y ago

I was on slashdot from the very early days until way too recently. In 2011, I joined a startup company of young guys and one of them saw that I had a slashdot page up. He said, "Slashdot is for old people. Let us show you Hacker News".

disease 9y ago

slashdot was one of the few news sites that stayed up during 9/11. I think there was even a follow-up technical article about how they kept it up that day.

digi_owl 9y ago
Could be how i first read about it back then.
jonathankoren 9y ago
Yeah, but that day showed just how weak they were in the journalism department. So many unsubstantiated rumors.
- flukus 9y ago
  But "social media" was were you'd go to for all the unsubstantiated rumors back then. For the most part the news channels that day were sticking with the facts and weren't spending much time with rumors or speculation. I seems like the roles have flipped in the intervening years, for major events news sites are 90% wild speculation and reaction videos and slashdot-esque sites moderate better information to the top.

ocschwar 9y ago

What I miss about Slashdot more than anything was the editors and writers using the comments section to fact check the stories. Ye ghods, do I miss that.

gfodor 9y ago

I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :)) I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. At the the height of it these people were painted as communists by Microsoft (and if they had any real visibility in the media, I'd imagine they'd have gotten the same treatment.) But here I am today sitting at my desk at Mozilla committed to working only on open source software for the rest of my career and never writing another line of proprietary code, after having seen enough good and pure-intentioned closed source projects morph and turn bad after the pointy haired bosses, the "visionaries", and the investor class got enough control over them. I guess those days have always been in the back of my mind. It took a lot of life lessons to really understand how important the things the /. community was always debating back then around software licenses, privacy, and IP really were. Images of "billg" as the borg were fun, but behind those gags were serious conversations that ended up shaping our world, and ensuring to one degree or another there would always be a hedge against corporate control of software. In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web, a community like /. is sorely needed. Here we are on the modern day equivalent, a site owned and operated by a startup incubator. It's fortunate that a community like this exists at all in some form, but how truly times have changed.

Nition 9y ago
> The anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. Just a side comment, I feel like Hacker News is going this way with Facebook a little. Posts that tangentially mention Facebook, there's usually a high-rated comment about how Facebook is evil and since the user left Facebook their life has improved. Those "I don't even own a TV"-like posts are a bit grating as the top comment on every thread, but hey maybe like you say, it's really pushing towards a better future in the end.

beezle 9y ago

Wow.. time flys when you are getting old! To protect the mostly innocent, my uid is just over 64K, so definitely one of the early adopters. /. was definitely the premier place for nerdy/tech news prior to the dot.bomb and it definitely had an outsized influence in the tech world. Many have spoken of having their websites slashdotted though it was not uncommon to get email months and years later about a story submission. Somehow early netizens believed the submitter must be an authority and would be more than happy to answer their questions lol.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

trollied 9y ago

No mention of Natalie Portman or Hot Grits in the Post. Colour me disappointed.

fancyfacebook 9y ago

How convenient he left out the parts about how people used to trade pirated software and kiddie porn regularly in the comment section in the early days. They made a lot of money off of that, I can see how he'd want to forget about that unfortunate truth. Sure the internet was a much different place in the 90s, but still, it was practically encouraged by the admins.

akeck 9y ago

I learned about Slashdot from a screenshot demoing the Enlightenment VM.

fak3r 9y ago

In case the site is down, here's a mirror http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg

JoshMnem 9y ago

I wish that people would stop blogging on Medium, especially about Free software topics. I click the link and get an obnoxiously animated popup shoved in my face that tells me that I've read my two articles for the month and that I should log in for the full experience. Why should people be asked to sign in to follow a blog when there is RSS/Atom? Learning how to use Hugo, Metalsmith, Hexo, Pelican, or Jekyll is not difficult.

Jarwain 9y ago
For an author, I'd imagine there are discoverability and convenience aspects involved in the decision to post on medium, versus hosting one's own blog.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  Free software issues are more important than "convenience". Passively consuming TV shows from a couch is more convenient than developing technical skills and building things online, but one is objectively more useful to society than the other.
- isostatic 9y ago
  I wonder if the author has ever hosted his own blog?
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
Works fine with NoScript. Never knew Medium had a page view limit.
- pwg 9y ago
  Same here, NoScript, and never knew they had some kind of page limit on views. I do, however, have to run my "dickbars be gone" bookmarklet every time I view a page. But since dickbars seem to be spreading everywhere, that bookmarklet gets a lot of usage now.

fak3r 9y ago

Fact: Slashdot is dying It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when CmdrTaco confirmed that he is resigning from Slashdot, now that Slashdot market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all geek news outlets. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive geek news reading test. You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Slashdot YRO is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core contributors. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot contributors only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. Slashdot leader CmdrTaco states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Ask Slashdot stories are there? Let's see. The number of Ask Slashdot stories versus Slashdot posts is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ask Slashdot stories users. Slashdot book reviews (or, 'Slashvertisements') are about half of the volume of Ask Slashdot stories. Therefore there are about 700 Slashvertisments. A recent article put Slashdot Security posts at about 80 percent of the Slashdot market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts. Due to the troubles of OSNews, abysmal sales and so on, OSNews went out of business and was taken over by Digg, another troubled geek news site. Now Digg is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geek news dilettante dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead. Fact: Slashdot is dying (source from Thursday August 25, 2011 @12:39PM: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054 also notice I got a n00b to respond to me... oh, such simpler times ;) )

snapetom 9y ago

Fond memories, as many others have pointed out. I still check it out every few days. I find the stories there almost as interesting as the ones that make it to HN and a lot more interesting and educational than those making it to the top of reddit. Shot in the dark and off topic, but for years I've been trying to find a comment posted on /. during the Columbia disaster. A poster mentioned how he was part of some high school science program and got to visit the Columbia before her maiden voyage. When it was lost, he was driving across remote Texas on the way back from a client visit when he saw the debris across the sky. It was quite a sad and moving story, and I'd love to re-read it.

bluedino 9y ago

Perl Monks was my favorite thing that came from the Slashdot guys. I never got Perl, but did a few projects with it over the years and I was always amazed at how cool the community on that site was. www.perlmonks.org

jimjimjim 9y ago

so much nostalgia. big big thank you to rob and the rest of the team.

TailorJones 9y ago

Great. Yet another non-closable pop-up window.

Mediterraneo10 9y ago

I had a four-digit Slashdot UID (just over 4000, I think). I have lots of great memories of technical discussions. As a young man who had managed to install Linux on his computer but still knew little about programming or the mighty Unix tradition, it was amazing to be able to participate there in discussions with so many big names in *nix or Free Software. But some of my fondest memories come from trolling there with another account. Trolling Slashdot often wasn't like how trolling works on other news sites, where some user tries to make some controversial point or racist remark related to the submitted story in order to spark arguments and take the conversation off course. Instead, troll posts on Slashdot were usually completely unrelated to the submitted story. They consisted of themes that were sometimes coarse and tasteless, but which fascinatingly evolved over time as each troll adapted the copy/paste to new circumstances or his own personal whims. The million variations on "BSD is dying" is a good example, but my personal favourite was "X touched my junk". And while I was never so cruel to link to Last Measure, I was grimly impressed by the work that had gone into it, completely with having an autoplay audio file "I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORN!!!!" which must have cost a least one or two cubicle dwellers their jobs.

rdslw 9y ago
goatse.cx trolling under cloak of redirection... ah those early days...
- bdamm 9y ago
  Even now I can see it, still burned into my amygdala. Ugh. However, the result was browsers starting showing you the link URL with a text in the info-box at the window base (remember those?) so I guess that was some positive result. Who knew this would be the wax-off training of the future?
- 6nf 9y ago
  The GNAA and the ascii parrot

barkingtoad 9y ago

User #333 here. Back in the day, someone offered me oral sex for the low user number. What a perfect metaphor for the dot-com era: offering to wildly overpay for a social media asset that would eventually turn out to be useless.

dotancohen 9y ago
But if course you wouldn't have taken the offer, /.ers never have sex. That would require leaving mom's basement!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- devrandomguy 9y ago
  They could do it in ASCII, on IRC.
cisanti 9y ago
How do you know the proposal was real!? :)

ipunchghosts 9y ago

Does anyone else remember kerneltrap?

threeio 9y ago

I remember registering wwwslashdot.org in my young days of being a typo-domain advertiser (had to eat in college, I've repented) and CmdrTaco posted a message indicating that they "Must have made it because someone registered our typo domain." My mailserver crashed about an hour later from the flood. Lesson learned :)

ipunchghosts 9y ago

What's the story behind Anonymous Coward, the most popular slashdot user?!

hesk 9y ago

Can't wait to read the same post 10 years from now.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

wslh 9y ago

I enjoyed Slashdot every single day as a passive reader but not as an user. I never received feedback from the founders when I pointed them to incorrect facts in their news and the never corrected the posts there. I specially rember an important security issue discovered by the company where I worked (Core Security Technologies) that was mistakenly reported as if was found by CERT. You can say that this is very common but at that time Slashdot was the top influential place in the community and security wise.

attawahid 9y ago

I remember Chips&Dips and got confused one day when I couldn't find it. Started searching and found it again under Slashdot and have been a fan and loyal visitor ever since. Thanks a lot for this awesome write-up of Internet History :-)

qu4z-2 9y ago

Hey cmdrtaco. This isn't entirely related, but I just wanted to say thanks for the chili recipe from your blog. I've been using it for years and it's great. (I also miss the Slashdot that was).

jbgreer 9y ago

Slashdot user #4245 here, with comments dating to April of 1999, 2 friends and 1 fan, no foes or freaks. I also had the pleasure of meeting Cmdr Taco at an early LinuxWorld (1998?) in California. I admit it fed a lot of my biases at the time, but also provided a lot of useful information.

lazyjones 9y ago

User 8xxx here... Slashdot was great while it provided the best daily overview of IT stories. I wonder what changed - I can vaguely recall switching to heise.de and later HN. Perhaps the way it presented the stories worked better for a few major pieces per day and everyone tries to read "all" interesting stories every day now, so pages with just headlines and broader coverage took over? I miss the quieter "online life" of the late 90's...

dbg31415 9y ago

I remember, about 20 years ago, having an argument with someone on Slashdot. Then realizing, about 10 messages in, that I actually knew the person I was arguing with. Being able to connect with friends online, being able to make friends through dialogue online... the site was easily the best online community at the time. Bonus: Even 20 years ago it had better design than Hacker News! (= (Couldn't resist.)

mljoe 9y ago

I can trace almost everything that helped me professionally and even many of my tech opinions to something I read on Slashdot. Really the site that influenced me the most.

20721 9y ago

My favourite part of Slashdot was the trolling. Some classic trolls there like "egg troll", "The Turd Report", etc. with their quite absurd yet entertaining posts. Then there was the rather ruder trolling, like not knowing if the link you were about to follow was yet another Goatse Man. Or the more helpful trolls, such as ones taking music requests to spam as the first post. There was even a 'hidden SID' forum, trolltalk, which was rather amusing (and somewhat disturbing) until it was overrun by some Markov chain bot. And spinoff trolling sites like http://adequacy.org http://adequacy.org - satire to rile uptight nerds and amuse the rest. I think the bizarre trolling subculture, amidst the righteous frothing of Linux fanaticism, was what really made Slashdot. Anyway, good times.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
shaklee3 9y ago
Eggtroll was, and still is, possibly the best troll I've ever seen. He carried it over to the newsgroups with elaborate multi-page trolls and crossposts. Whoever you are eggtroll, thank you for providing so much entertainment. Here's one of the archives: http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html

iamleppert 9y ago

Slashdot was truly a part of my youth, it was the site I went to when I was a teenager, in between taking breaks from coding. It made me feel like there were others out there like me and was a great source of inspiration growing up in a less than stellar childhood in Ohio. It makes me nostalgic for the web of yesteryear, when it was mostly about just a bunch of nerds sharing their passion for technology. Thanks, CmdrTaco.

fleeno 9y ago

We were one of their first advertisers! If I recall, we traded them some RAM and maybe a server case as part of the deal.

dghughes 9y ago

+5 funny

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wainstead 9y ago

I recall the incredible hype on Slashdot surrounding the release of Phantom Menace. Lucasfilm released few details and Slashdot seized on every little thing leading up to the release. I worked at the New York Times then (just a web programmer) and lucked into an advance screening two weeks before the film's release. I came right back to the office and wrote a review (in plain text!) and submitted it to Slashdot but it never got posted. Rob, if I spoiled the film for ya, sorry about that! It seemed in the last two weeks before Phantom Menace was finally released you were a lot less enthusiastic, and I wondered if my early review put a damper on it. I grepped my ISP account and found the original file: http://www.panix.com/~swain/review.txt http://www.panix.com/~swain/review.txt

nl 9y ago

I had a 5 figure uid, but I read it for a long time before I registered. First started before the '97 Green redesign. I found a comment parser attack on '98 or so which let me post a "Powered by WindowsNT" on a FreeBSD thread. The ten minutes it survived was a highlight. I actually used an image from the Microsoft site because there wasn't anywhere else you could host images back then. One things I haven't seen mentioned is the hidden sids (remember sid=wahiscool?)

avenius 9y ago

I started reading slashdot around 2000-2001, being about 14 years old at the time. I would venture to say that slashdot and its community has been as educational (or even more) as school, and played a large part in my deciding to work in IT. Since I never signed up for an account there (I was a kid and knew I had nothing to bring to the table), I never experienced the friend/foe system or participated in moderation. Still, the site has had an amazing impact on my life and given me an insight into topics I never would have learned about otherwise. Nowadays it feels HN has taken over, but I still feel a need to express my gratitude for both the site and the community.

jackgavigan 9y ago

First post!!!

Shivetya 9y ago

I really enjoyed the early slashdot but lost interest when politics ran rampant in nearly every part of the site. the vitriol associated with it and more (stuff you could not see) just reduced the value the site had in my eyes. I honestly cannot remember the last time I have visited the site. tech sites need to keep their purity to stay accessible, politics, direct story posting or the constant indirect type, need to stomped out with a vengeance