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The old slashdot.org The old digg.com Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? My ealiest memories wer

The old slashdot.org The old digg.com Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? My ealiest memories were pre-net, on Prodigy and AOL, long before they were 'net connected and could email each other. I learned what connectivity was at 2400 baud. I didn't discover BBS's until much later, around 1993-4,and was at 14.4k at that point. I never really understood fidonet, but played some of the BBS games and downloaded some warez from a "31337" BBS with a backdoor whose login was "elite". At least the sysop didn't call himself "Crash Override".

Lammy 7y ago
The old SomethingAwful for me. > Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? They stopped having web pages and started having Xangas/Friendsters/Myspaces that had the networking feature built-in.
- technofiend 7y ago
  Fark/Totalfark was fun for a while but descended into an echo chamber of cliques and in-jokes. It was a good preview of what reddit would eventually become.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    They also had a redesign fiasco.
- pensv0 7y ago
  Photoshop Friday was kinda hit or miss, for for the funny ones they were really funny
- xenihn 7y ago
  2000-2003 Something Awful was my favorite internet community/site ever. It's too bad about what happened with Ozma and Fistgrrl. Oh well.
lukejduncan 7y ago
My earliest memories are CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. I remember AOL had a file share like service where you could search for and download images. I’d spend hours downloading a single Batman logo or Star Wars still. What stands out to me was when I went to work with my dad once and they had internet in a browser without having to connect to something first. My mind was blown. I was in elementary school at the time.
cambalache 7y ago
The old Slashdot was orders of magnitude better than HN -I am not going to even mention Reddit-. For all its lame jokes it was filled with people who actually loved technology and science and the moderation system was very solid.
- mxcrossb 7y ago
  > I am not going to even mention Reddit You mean you don’t enjoy the current - > With Joe Biden’s campaign in freefall amid concerns about his declining mental health and new sexual assault allegations, remember this: it’s a good time to note that Bernie’s on the ballot. - front page news Reddit?
- gorgoiler 7y ago
  +5 Insightful ...is something I still say out loud to myself occasionally. For example if I hear a good point made on the radio.
- j45 7y ago
  Anyone curious should go read Slashdot posts from that time.
  - easytiger 7y ago
    /. From this day 2005 https://web.archive.org/web/20050326092609/http://slashdot.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050326092609/http://slashdot.o...
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  The UI was awful though... and still is, just not as awful as it used to be. Like, come on, what is with the comment UI? Why can't they just, you know, display these comments like every single other site out there and instead they have this weird control panel with partial comments, two(!) sliders, etc. At least now there is a button to load all comments (but you still have to adjust the sliders)... but you have to do it for every single comment, it doesn't remember the setting. And at the past it was even worse, with a floating(!) control panel and many comments were hidden, but you could still see replies to them. Like WTF? What were they thinking?
yumraj 7y ago
old Slashdot had an anti MS and pro Linux bias, but nothing more. It was more free spirited. It was not dominated with startups and VCs and did not go overboard trying to moderate certain kind of discussions. I do love HN, but it is still part of YC and allows some commercial activity and I feel at times goes overboard on flagging certain kind of discussions and comments (I'm not referring to obvious trolling and unsavory language).
- asveikau 7y ago
  I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the desktop. I feel like the Unix enthusiast's shift to the Mac kind of killed some of that. If people think a desktop ui is a "solved problem" (by Apple), there end up fewer people interested in those kind of projects. Now it's pretty common for a free software desktop to be a punchline in a joke, mocked as some infeasible fantasy and inevitable failure.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    What killed the "is this the year of desktop Linux" question was the smartphone. The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011.
    - toyg 7y ago
      By 2011 the Linux desktop was already the butt of jokes. That dream died about 5 years earlier, when Ubuntu spread like wildfire in the geek community and then... failed to make any serious inroad anywhere else.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      > The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011. Where is the data on that? I just googled around, I don't know if this site is reputable but it would indicate mobile didn't overtake PCs until 2016 and even now the gap is not huge: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/#monthly-201101-202004 https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob... I know I've read that PC sales went down pretty severely around the 2011 date you cite, however, it could be that sales of new PCs are down much more than actual usage because PCs need to be replaced less frequently.
inasio 7y ago
The old avclub Dense layout with links to all the new reviews with grades, by section (music, film, etc), no infinite scroll. Quite a few other websites were like that, you could get the gist of all the new things at a glance, now they all feel dumbed down
aaron-lebo 7y ago
I was around for original Digg. 1.0 was better than 2.0. 1.0 had beautiful minimalism, 2.0 turned gaudy and it just got worse and worse. Digg was cool for its time but it was way overly simplistic. The frontpage was dominated by a really narrow set of power users because of how the system worked and the comments were single threaded. It was kind of a hot mess. It is both crazy that K Rose missed out on selling it for $250 million and that's all it was worth. Had he played his cards right, it could have been Twitter and valued at tens of billions of dollars. If you want to get into great sites that I miss, I really miss Reddit from 2005-2010, maybe a little later. Do I get a prize for using Reddit when it had no comments? The programming related discussions were good. HN's too ideological and big for them now, and r/progamming is a clusterfuck of people being assholes to each other and talking about shit we were arguing about 15 years ago. Those early sites had a feel that I can only imagine the pre-Eternal September net had for older people.
- Natsu 7y ago
  Before Eternal September, usenet was great. I only got in at the tail end of things. It's funny what you say about Digg because Reddit is that now, the same few powermods control almost everything. It feels more like reading a bunch of press releases than anything authentic nowadays, though there can be good content in smaller subs that have nothing to do with the front page.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
me551ah 7y ago
Slashdot also has a better moderation system than HN with comments designated as funny , insightful or informative.
- zhte415 7y ago
  https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml And meta moderation. Some of the smartest discussion was at the +5 Troll level. Very liberal and self governing. When getting meta-mod rights, it felt like a civic duty to do my part. Plus friend, friend-of-friend, foe, etc traffic lights. It was way ahead of it's time. Then got sold, many moved out including myself - never liked Digg, old or new - and now with potentially an order of magnitude of technology people (hardware, software, other stuff) compared to 2000, a shadow of it's former self. Also, kuro5hin, which Reddit has captured in theme in niche subs.
rikroots 7y ago
> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? Web Rings! That bought back some memories of adding webring code snippets to my website. I agree they are a fantastic idea and I'm sad they seem to have gone away. Wikipedia claims that they were (effectively) killed by Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring Beyond webring sites, most of my early browsing time was spent on web forums (devoted to poetry and conlanging, my key interests). It's sad-interesting to see that of the various software packages used to run those sites, only phpBB seems to be under active development for its original purpose. We don't talk about Usenet ...
ta1771 7y ago
> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? They're just underground. Now you have to read a project's docs to see who they link to/thank/reference.
hopesthoughts 7y ago
Webrings still exist, somewhat. https://indieweb.org/webring https://indieweb.org/webring

Lammy 7y ago

The old SomethingAwful for me. > Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? They stopped having web pages and started having Xangas/Friendsters/Myspaces that had the networking feature built-in.

technofiend 7y ago
Fark/Totalfark was fun for a while but descended into an echo chamber of cliques and in-jokes. It was a good preview of what reddit would eventually become.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  They also had a redesign fiasco.
pensv0 7y ago
Photoshop Friday was kinda hit or miss, for for the funny ones they were really funny
xenihn 7y ago
2000-2003 Something Awful was my favorite internet community/site ever. It's too bad about what happened with Ozma and Fistgrrl. Oh well.

lukejduncan 7y ago

My earliest memories are CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. I remember AOL had a file share like service where you could search for and download images. I’d spend hours downloading a single Batman logo or Star Wars still. What stands out to me was when I went to work with my dad once and they had internet in a browser without having to connect to something first. My mind was blown. I was in elementary school at the time.

cambalache 7y ago

The old Slashdot was orders of magnitude better than HN -I am not going to even mention Reddit-. For all its lame jokes it was filled with people who actually loved technology and science and the moderation system was very solid.

mxcrossb 7y ago
> I am not going to even mention Reddit You mean you don’t enjoy the current - > With Joe Biden’s campaign in freefall amid concerns about his declining mental health and new sexual assault allegations, remember this: it’s a good time to note that Bernie’s on the ballot. - front page news Reddit?
gorgoiler 7y ago
+5 Insightful ...is something I still say out loud to myself occasionally. For example if I hear a good point made on the radio.
j45 7y ago
Anyone curious should go read Slashdot posts from that time.
- easytiger 7y ago
  /. From this day 2005 https://web.archive.org/web/20050326092609/http://slashdot.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050326092609/http://slashdot.o...
badsectoracula 7y ago
The UI was awful though... and still is, just not as awful as it used to be. Like, come on, what is with the comment UI? Why can't they just, you know, display these comments like every single other site out there and instead they have this weird control panel with partial comments, two(!) sliders, etc. At least now there is a button to load all comments (but you still have to adjust the sliders)... but you have to do it for every single comment, it doesn't remember the setting. And at the past it was even worse, with a floating(!) control panel and many comments were hidden, but you could still see replies to them. Like WTF? What were they thinking?

yumraj 7y ago

old Slashdot had an anti MS and pro Linux bias, but nothing more. It was more free spirited. It was not dominated with startups and VCs and did not go overboard trying to moderate certain kind of discussions. I do love HN, but it is still part of YC and allows some commercial activity and I feel at times goes overboard on flagging certain kind of discussions and comments (I'm not referring to obvious trolling and unsavory language).

asveikau 7y ago
I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the desktop. I feel like the Unix enthusiast's shift to the Mac kind of killed some of that. If people think a desktop ui is a "solved problem" (by Apple), there end up fewer people interested in those kind of projects. Now it's pretty common for a free software desktop to be a punchline in a joke, mocked as some infeasible fantasy and inevitable failure.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  What killed the "is this the year of desktop Linux" question was the smartphone. The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011.
  - toyg 7y ago
    By 2011 the Linux desktop was already the butt of jokes. That dream died about 5 years earlier, when Ubuntu spread like wildfire in the geek community and then... failed to make any serious inroad anywhere else.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    > The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011. Where is the data on that? I just googled around, I don't know if this site is reputable but it would indicate mobile didn't overtake PCs until 2016 and even now the gap is not huge: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/#monthly-201101-202004 https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob... I know I've read that PC sales went down pretty severely around the 2011 date you cite, however, it could be that sales of new PCs are down much more than actual usage because PCs need to be replaced less frequently.

inasio 7y ago

The old avclub Dense layout with links to all the new reviews with grades, by section (music, film, etc), no infinite scroll. Quite a few other websites were like that, you could get the gist of all the new things at a glance, now they all feel dumbed down

aaron-lebo 7y ago

I was around for original Digg. 1.0 was better than 2.0. 1.0 had beautiful minimalism, 2.0 turned gaudy and it just got worse and worse. Digg was cool for its time but it was way overly simplistic. The frontpage was dominated by a really narrow set of power users because of how the system worked and the comments were single threaded. It was kind of a hot mess. It is both crazy that K Rose missed out on selling it for $250 million and that's all it was worth. Had he played his cards right, it could have been Twitter and valued at tens of billions of dollars. If you want to get into great sites that I miss, I really miss Reddit from 2005-2010, maybe a little later. Do I get a prize for using Reddit when it had no comments? The programming related discussions were good. HN's too ideological and big for them now, and r/progamming is a clusterfuck of people being assholes to each other and talking about shit we were arguing about 15 years ago. Those early sites had a feel that I can only imagine the pre-Eternal September net had for older people.

Natsu 7y ago
Before Eternal September, usenet was great. I only got in at the tail end of things. It's funny what you say about Digg because Reddit is that now, the same few powermods control almost everything. It feels more like reading a bunch of press releases than anything authentic nowadays, though there can be good content in smaller subs that have nothing to do with the front page.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

me551ah 7y ago

Slashdot also has a better moderation system than HN with comments designated as funny , insightful or informative.

zhte415 7y ago
https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml And meta moderation. Some of the smartest discussion was at the +5 Troll level. Very liberal and self governing. When getting meta-mod rights, it felt like a civic duty to do my part. Plus friend, friend-of-friend, foe, etc traffic lights. It was way ahead of it's time. Then got sold, many moved out including myself - never liked Digg, old or new - and now with potentially an order of magnitude of technology people (hardware, software, other stuff) compared to 2000, a shadow of it's former self. Also, kuro5hin, which Reddit has captured in theme in niche subs.

rikroots 7y ago

> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? Web Rings! That bought back some memories of adding webring code snippets to my website. I agree they are a fantastic idea and I'm sad they seem to have gone away. Wikipedia claims that they were (effectively) killed by Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring Beyond webring sites, most of my early browsing time was spent on web forums (devoted to poetry and conlanging, my key interests). It's sad-interesting to see that of the various software packages used to run those sites, only phpBB seems to be under active development for its original purpose. We don't talk about Usenet ...

ta1771 7y ago

> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? They're just underground. Now you have to read a project's docs to see who they link to/thank/reference.

hopesthoughts 7y ago

Webrings still exist, somewhat. https://indieweb.org/webring https://indieweb.org/webring