10 ms·

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

784 points by SandB0x 15y ago

code_duck 15y ago
I thrived on Slashdot for years - definitely the first large, tech oriented news forum I was into. Really, one of the first blogs - but you rarely hear Malda quite take credit for his unique place in internet history. He's refreshingly humble.
gallamine 15y ago
It's a shame that Steve Job's leaving overshadows this. Slashdot has been a rock of the internet for 14 years, and I still regularly visit it. This paragraph is good: In the last 14 years, Slashdot has covered so many amazing events: The explosion of Linux. The rise of Google. The return of Apple. The Dot Com Bubble. The DMCA. 9/11. Wars. Elections. Numerous successful Shuttle Launches and one Disaster. Scientific Breakthroughs galore. Cool toys. Web2.0! Social Networking. Blogging! Podcasting! Micro-Blogging! The Lord of the Rings being filmed and an entire trilogy of new Star Wars. OMG Ponies!! So many moments that I could run this paragraph for hours with moments where we shared something important, meaningful, or just stupid. But the most important to me was my marriage proposal to Kathleen. Slashdot has posted Over 114,000 stories so far. And there will be many more to come. I just won't be the one picking them.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  I think the span between the Columbine shooting and 9/11 was probably their peak. So many of my memories of /. involve national disasters.
  - hollerith 15y ago
    /. is how I found out of the 9/11 attacks.
    - swilliams 15y ago
      That morning, slashdot was the only news related website that would load for me.
      - th0ma5 15y ago
        me too, it was a strange time where i think /. was the only place that was taking bursts seriously in hosting
        jellicle 15y ago
        There was a tremendous amount of work done that morning to keep the site up. Basically the site went static for long periods, which was the only way to save the poor database servers that were screaming and bleeding from their eyes under the load. If I recall correctly there was an after-action report posted later about the technical aspects of keeping the site working that day. Slashdot had nothing near the infrastructure that many "medium-sized" websites have today, which was bad: didn't have enough hardware to survive, but also good: the bosses were close enough to the metal to make immediate programming changes to reduce the site loading. So it's really the opposite: Slashdot was unprepared for bursting of this magnitude, but able to react reasonably quickly to combat the unpreparedness. Other sites were probably more prepared (CNN.com) but once the load exceeded their preparations, it took them a while to, you know, get permission from the big boss to make the site static and otherwise react. CNN and other major sites did get their act together in fairly short order, actually - it's not at all the case that they were down for an extended period - they figured things out pretty quickly, just not quite as quickly as Slashdot.
    - hitechnomad 15y ago
      Me too! I was trying to get a router working, and was pinging slashdot to find out if I was routing to the net. No response from slashdot - hmmmm, must have a network problem at my end. A bit later and I realised the net was up, but slashdot was down. It took me another few hours to realise that the reason slashdot was overwhelmed was because a major world-changing event was happening!
  - icebraining 15y ago
    The most commented story was "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" (with 5687 comments), followed by "Strike on Iraq".
    - shrikant 15y ago
      Interestingly, the most commented story on Reddit was (is?) "Obama beats McCain to become president" as well.
_delirium 15y ago
Interesting decision. In practice I don't think this will change a lot, because it's been years since Slashdot was primarily the personal project of Malda; from what I can tell, he's been "just another editor" and a bit withdrawn from the decision-making for a few years now. But I can see wanting to do something else. For all its downsides, Slashdot is a quite interesting experiment imo. In terms of form: It was one of the first (the first?) widely read tech blogs, in the sense of something that posted about technology in reverse chronological order, with a comments section below it (the comments section was even threaded). The idea of having users submit stories and write blurbs was also fairly novel, and has led to several different directions. Kuro5hin and MetaFilter took it in one direction, expanding from blurbs to more general kinds of article submissions (and Kuro5hin switched to voting rather than editorial curation), while Reddit/Digg/HN took it in the opposite direction, paring it down to link submissions with no blurb (again with voting). In terms of content, imo it was a main way, especially in the late 90s, that a generation of tech people were introduced to things like the EFF, free software, problems of software patents, driver support for Linux, hardware hackability, and other such techno-liberty type things. Those predated Slashdot, of course, but it sort of crystallized a community on the web, alongside those that had previously been organized mainly around mailing lists, Usenet, etc. It also gained considerable mindshare for those ideas from a broader set of readers who weren't necessarily "activists".
- sjs382 15y ago
  God, I miss K5...
  - kahawe 15y ago
    Me too... they had some of the strangest and freaked-out submissions there. I don't know any substitute for it on today's internet. Last time I went to the website I was surprised it was still online and I felt really sad when I realized the frontpage submissions were weeks old. I feel old now, missing the 90s pre-bubble internet and I am sad I was just a few years too late to that party back then. sigh
    - 15y ago
kabdib 15y ago
It's made its way into near-future SF. Some character in a novel by Ken Macleod, faced with a Plot Device disaster, says to a friend "I can't even get to Slashdot."
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  The verb "slashdotted" is even more common. I recall seeing it at least once in a Charles Stross novel or two, and in numerous other near-future SF.
  - goatforce5 15y ago
    I once submitted a friend's blog entry to slashdot. It was picked for the front page. I can't remember exactly how it works, but you get an email or a notice on the site saying your story will appear shortly. I was in my friend's living room at the time, sitting near the laptop on the end of an ADSL connection that served his blog. "Ummmm.... I think i've done a baaaaad thing." That lil' ol' laptop was absolutely hammered for the next day, even after moving the images, etc., on to 'proper' servers and making the site static.
    - jseliger 15y ago
      I submitted my review of of the Unicomp Customizer (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/05/29/1334258/Review-of-the-Model-M-Inspired-Unicomp-Customizer-Keyboard http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/05/29/1334258/Review-o...) years ago, and I think that day remains the most traffic I've ever gotten. Granted, it's a generic Wordpress.com blog and thus not susceptible to Slashdotting, but I still remember looking at the traffic spike and going, "Wow."
- phillmv 15y ago
  I'm fairly certain it was mentioned by a character in an issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's had reverberations across the geek ethos.
  - hemos 15y ago
nicpottier 15y ago
I don't visit /. anymore, but definitely grew up on it. I don't think you can understate the impact it had on a generation of geeks. Especially when it comes to Open Source, I think /. was incredibly important in educating people on a concept, history and philosophy many of us take for granted now. And hot grits aside, it really did set the bar for intelligent discussion. /. was the first site where the comments were always more valuable than the articles. RTFA's were common, sure, but so was incredible insight and inside knowledge. That's what made it all so addictive. I remember hitting refresh constantly on /. during 911. Personally, I found it the best source of information anywhere, though you had to have your own sanity filter on as well. Thanks cmdrtaco, and congratulations on a real legacy. For me at least, /. is mostly replaced now, but that doesn't diminish what it was.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  I think a lot of people have a similar history with slashdot. I still ocationally go back but reading his fairwell and by his partner Hemos (2)'s reply reminded me of the best parts of Slashdot. PS: Ok, I admit it. I found the "you must be new here." reply really funny.
  - hemos 15y ago
    Hell, it was targeted at me, and I found it hilarious.
    - nosequel 15y ago
      Thanks for all that you have done as well Hemos. Slashdot was my home from about '98 to '03 and I have more cherished memories from it, than any site since.
- matthavener 15y ago
  One of my favorite memories from /. was refreshing to see a new version of the kernel was available. You'd spend a few hours downloading it, compiling, and reboot. Usually there were no new features you wanted, no bugs fixed, just the idea of being on the bleeding edge was "cool" enough.
kahawe 15y ago
> And since I'm going to have to find a job in a few months, I'm on LinkedIn as well. Well, this is going to be one short CV and cover letter... "I built slashdot" should be plenty enough, really.
- Hisoka 15y ago
  Why does he even need a job? Didn't SlashDot earn him enough to live on for rest of his life?
  - allwein 15y ago
    Rob doesn't strike me as the sort of person who'd enjoy just kicking back and relaxing forever. He's comfortably well-off, but is looking for a change. 14 years is a lot of time to dedicate to one project, especially when it's mature and stable like Slashdot is. I imagine he's going to take a well-deserved break and then like a lot of tech entrepreneur's, come back for round two and start another company.
    - cdibona 15y ago
      You're spot on. Rob is not good at being Idle.
      - dredmorbius 15y ago
        That, sir, is truth spoken.
  - hemos 15y ago
    Hahaha. If only; no, Rob and I will be working.
    - phuff 15y ago
      Welcome to the party, Hemos :)
whazzmaster 15y ago
I've been down on Slashdot for the last few years, even going so far as to remove it from my RSS reader and bookmarks bar. I check back sometimes here and there but devote most of my time to HN/reddit now. Taco's farewell (and Hemos' reply in comments) really brought to me back why I liked Slashdot in the first place back in 1998- an editorial voice curating interesting tech stories. That editorial voice was important to me in 1998, as I was in college for CS and was really uninformed about things like (as _delirium notes in this thread) the EFF, the RIAA, open source software, The Many Uses of Linux, etc. I compare that to today when I just scan lists of links on reddit or HN and pick out the items that interest me. The editorial voice was a good starting point for me- it directed me to interesting things that I couldn't have fathomed. As I grew into my techy career and interests, I needed it less and less. I hope it's not viewed as complaining or whatnot, but I do wonder if anyone else avoids Slashdot in 2011 almost purely because of the commenters' obnoxiousness. I always get a picture of sysadmin-like greybeards pounding away furiously at their keyboards the moment anyone suggests that some software, somewhere be written in something other than C or perl. Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was (and "-5, Troll"? shudder.) And for that I thank you.
- _delirium 15y ago
  > Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was In a lot of interesting varieties! Some even sort of artistic, and some precursors of later SomethingAwful/4chan/internet-meme types of things. I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Slashdot editor Rob Malda resigned from his editorship this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the HN community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to geek culture. Truly an internet icon.
  - zavulon 15y ago
    Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, covered in hot grits
    - spiffworks 15y ago
      Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past. If we cannot scorn ourselves, we run the risk of taking ourselves to seriously.
jacques_chester 15y ago
Slashdot was my first true time-wasting site. During free periods in high school I'd read Slashdot compulsively -- as nicpottier observed, it was probably the first site where the comments were often more valuable than the story. Slashdot was a blog before the word 'blog' was coined. A universal shared experience, in my case for literally half a lifetime.
- dasil003 15y ago
  It's not enough to call Slashdot an early blog, because there were many proto-blogs at the time. Slashdot was actually social news before the era of user-generated content.
5hoom 15y ago
What the hell is going on today? Thats two influential tech personalities resigning from their signature positions in 24 hours. Im starting to get worried here. Whats next, John Carmack resigns from id?(heaven forbid!) My world view has been shaken. Best of luck & thanks for the good times CmdrTaco. I wore out F5 keys on that site :)
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  Retiring the same day as Apple's CEO just seems like Rob Malda's style to me, in the best possible way. I doubt he made a snap decision to do it, but if he was already planning on doing it and saw the opportunity... :)
  - raphman 15y ago
    As someone on /. noted, Slashdot was also founded in September 1997, the same month that Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Maybe this coincidence influenced Rob's decision.
    - rikthevik 15y ago
      Wait, has anyone ever seen cmdrtaco and Steve Jobs in the same place? Maybe they're the same person! :)
      - Sixing 15y ago
        Yeah, good script
zobzu 15y ago
Slashdot still has the best comment moderation system, even if none is perfect. When the story gets crowded by zillion of comments you still get the best ones in a single page without having to read literally 10 or 15 pages of comments.
- abcd_f 15y ago
  > Slashdot still has the best comment moderation system I disagree. It has a fundamental problem of earlier posts having far more chances to go +5 than those posted later. Something that is handled far better on HN that starts newer posts at the top of the comment page and lets them sink down.
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    Limited granularity, too. K5 improved on that, while HN's factoring in of time since posting seems to help to my mind as well. Yet, for all its failings, it was an impressive starting point that led the way for a lot of others, and was massively influential in a way no single site seems to have become since.
napierzaza 15y ago
This will overshadow Steve Jobs' resignation.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  It certainly has for me. Hardware is all nice and fine, but the informational content of slashdot has had far more profound effect on myself. I don't think I would recognize a version of me that grew up in a universe without slashdot. Unlike the hardware maker, I think I almost feel a tinge of emotion here.. think I'll go troll on slashdot a bit today, seems like the right thing to do.
  - sgt 15y ago
    I think he was being utterly sarcastic. :-)
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      I suspected that, but is correct within the context of many communities.
smudgy 15y ago
I still read Slashdot but not as much as I did "back in the day" - it's my chicken soup site, where I go to feel comfortable surrounded by like minded folks. While Jobs' resignation is big corporate news, CmdrTaco's might be bigger community news - the guy was "one of us." His site was one of the first online communities and their slanted (according to some) point of view was what spun off other hacker/nerd sites. I will admit that I'll miss Rob Malda at Slashdot - his name there on the posts made me feel at home, someplace familiar. So long and thanks for all the fun.
greyish_water 15y ago
And he'll resign again in a few hours.
chico_dusty 15y ago
Sad news ... Rob Malda, dead at 54 I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Nerd/Ponies website proprietor Rob Malda was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Hacker News community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
steveb 15y ago
To me slashdot was critical in galvanizing the geek community and bringing free software to the mainstream in the late 90's. The comments added incredible value and created a community that I had not come across anywhere else. I think the high point of that period was the announcement of the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base. Nowadays, itt is hard to imagine the need for all the stories on how to convince your boss to use this software some dude in Finland wrote. Slashdot also championed everything2.com, kind of a proto-wiki. The low point was all the trolling in the article about death of W. Richard Stevens, which lead to much of the moderation code that needed to be put in place. Rob's run at slashdot was pioneering and hugely influential. I look forward to his next project.
Uchikoma 15y ago
He waited till Steve resigned.
imroot 15y ago
If you've followed the lifespan of VA Software, OSDN, OSTG, GeekNet...I don't think this will come as a surprise to anyone. http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=r&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=slashdot.org&&u=reddit.com&#38 http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...; Slashdot built the community that a lot of people still have close ties to. I'll always remember reading my first few Bruce Perens posts, and adding him (and a few others) to my 'Friends' List. I'll also never forget listening to their marketing person talk about how they could 'bitchslap' negative comments (about the advertiser) to -2 so that nobody could see them. Slashdot is a great place for the folks who have been in the industry for any amount of time. It was always a trusted and stable source of news, reposts, and April Fool's Pranks. I will continue to think that this is something that he did on his own free will and volition, and not something that was forced upon him by the powers that be at GeekNet. Ann Arbor, MI isn't the Linux Hot-Spot -- nor is it a mecca for new and exciting technology jobs. I hope he enjoys his time off and finds something that gives him the love and satisfaction that slashdot gave him over the last decade.
- jellicle 15y ago
  > I'll also never forget listening to their marketing person talk about how they could 'bitchslap' negative comments (about the advertiser) to -2 so that nobody could see them. Citation, please? Rob Malda's oft-cited bitchslap comment was about a script he had written to deal with Slashdot's most annoying commenters (people who used their own scripts to submit thousands of duplicate comments simultaneously), and had nothing to do with advertisers or marketing or denigrating products. In fact at the time the comment was written, I don't believe Slashdot had a marketing person outside of Jeff Bates.
  - imroot 15y ago
    This was during a call I was on with their Marketing team when the company that I was working for planned to do a mini sub-site within slashdot to extol and display the features of their newest product line. I don't believe it is public record, otherwise I would cite it.
ac-slater 15y ago
I went to go see CmdrTaco speak in 2005. Someone asked him how to make a website as popular as Slashdot. Malda said to start it in 1997. Of course in the next year the meteoric rise of both digg and reddit began. I think there is a moral here about not resting on your laurels and never thinking no one can catch up with you.
- icebraining 15y ago
  >thinking no one can catch up with you. Did he actually do that, or just told the only way he personally knew how to do it?
  - hemos 15y ago
    The latter. I can testify to that. And if you look back at when Kevin Rose was doing the G4 stuff, there's an interview with Rob where Kevin asks Rob what he would do different. Rob outlines basically Slashdot + user voting. A few months later, Digg comes out. True story.
    - ktsmith 15y ago
      http://www.g4tv.com/videos/8892/interview-with-cmdrtaco-slashdot-founder/ http://www.g4tv.com/videos/8892/interview-with-cmdrtaco-slas... October 2004 for the interview and Digg launched in December.
wollongong 15y ago
slashdot was the first digg/reddit, they missed the social boat and kept strict editorial control, or else they'd have grown rather than floundered
- r00fus 15y ago
  And where is digg today? At least Slashdot is still somewhat relevant.
sunchild 15y ago
To this day, I log into nyt.com with: user: cowboyneal pass: cowboyneal Anyone else?
- idonthack 15y ago
  sssshhhhh.
  - sunchild 15y ago
    I enjoy the idea that this account wreaks havoc on nyt.com's internal metrics.
    - mbreese 15y ago
      And that they certainly know about it, and still let it go on... you have to think that they are in on the joke.
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - sunchild 15y ago
        Or, possibly not. Either way, it's a minor victory on all sides!
- wyclif 15y ago
  Yep.
jpdoctor 15y ago
ZOMG. Steve Jobs and Cmdr Taco are the same guy.
RobIsIT 15y ago
The answer that I've always wanted to hear Rob give would come from these questions: What are the underlying linchpins of the SlashDot community? How would you rebuild it? What steps would you take, what processes would you put in place, what technology would you use? I would never want to create a SlashDot clone, nor would I expect anyone could clone SlashDot. However, there are very important lessons in community building, management and infrastructure planning that Rob is an expert at.
rmason 15y ago
One thing I don't see mentioned is that Slashdot was a uniquely Michigan success story. They were an example to a lot of Michigan startups that you could be successful and stay in the state. I haven't seen him lately but CmdrTaco used to attend startup related events. One of the early Slashdot crew, Kurt DeMaagd, is now an assistant professor at Michigan State.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
the_topper 15y ago
I was always impressed with the story selection on Slashdot. There was a certain mindset that they were pandering to, but it flat-out worked. I was a voracious reader of Slashdot in the early years until I had an epiphany when reading the They Might Be Giants interview in 2000. I realized that the collective geek mindset was rooted more in fantasy than reality. Posters were so desperately wanting the TMBG guys to be off-the-wall wacky and absurdist, but really it was more that the two John's were just doing their own thing, and that thing was outside the realm of normal music. Yet no one picked up on it. I couldn't read Slashdot after that. The geek fantasy fog was too thick and pervasive and self-referential.
presidentender 15y ago
Slashdot was the source of my now-permanent news habits, and, I believe, the Petri dish in which modern hacker culture was first cultivated. Slashdot had memes before they were called memes, or so it seems; most importantly, it had discussion via threaded comments and community moderation. I first used this handle on Slashdot, and whenever one of my sites goes down due to traffic, I'll say it's been slashdotted. But the relevance of Slashdot as a site has been eclipsed, first by Digg, then by Reddit and HN. The network effect is part of it. The technology is part of it. There's some je ne sais quoi about these newer sites; maybe they'll be replaced by some other, more minimalist social news platform in the future.
- mckoss 15y ago
  Actually, "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene). Although, the meaning in popular culture has morphed from the generic definition (any self propagating idea) to refer to fast spreading cat videos and the like. I remember the episode of The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose did a segment about Slashdot - and even hinted at morphing the concept more toward what he created with Digg (giving users more power to source stories - voted up purely on their merits). /. has definitely had a big impact in the way we obtain our news (more targeted, and with social interaction). But I, like most people here, I imagine, left it long ago in favor of Digg, Reddit, or HN.
  - hemos 15y ago
    What's been interesting to see is the gradual migration back from Digg & Reddit; not so much HN. But the issue tends to happen when sites begin to try and cover "everything" that you end up driving out the original and central audience.
    - mckoss 15y ago
      Digg really shot themselves in the foot when they tried to make the site "personalized" - most in their audience wanted there to be just "one" primary home page. Reddit seems to have been able to create many successful smaller communities around sub-reddits. It's another lesson that trying to be all things to all people usually satisfies no one.
cpeterso 15y ago
I wonder how he feels about getting stuck with the "CmdrTaco" handle. :)
njharman 15y ago
trying to steal the limelight from steve, eh? I've recently starting reading again after long time away. It's good again!
quinndupont 15y ago
It was a great 14 years! Huzzah!
nl 15y ago
I feel really old now. All the things I remember most about Slashdot seem to have been forgotten. Things I remember (most of these are pre-2000): Netscape being open sourced (and the role Slashdot played in that) Oracle shipping on Linux The hidden Slashdot threads (wah_is_cool anyone?) Discovering a input validation hole that let me post a "Powered by Windows NT" image in the middle of a thread about the original CERT XSS attack warning (http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html) Signal11 vs CmdrTaco (http://www.kuro5hin.org/images/kuro5hin_Sig11_vs_Taco.html http://www.kuro5hin.org/images/kuro5hin_Sig11_vs_Taco.html) The K5 split
enthalpyx 15y ago
I love that this is on the front page of HN -- which is to me, what Slashdot was 10 years ago.
AlexC04 15y ago
Think he and Steve Jobs are heading out to launch a stealth startup?
stmartin 15y ago
I used to be a /. regular too... sort of stopped going to it after a while. Hope you come up with something new/inspirational, CmdrTaco.

784 points by SandB0x 15y ago

I thrived on Slashdot for years - definitely the first large, tech oriented news forum I was into. Really, one of the first blogs - but you rarely hear Malda quite take credit for his unique place in internet history. He's refreshingly humble.

gallamine 15y ago

It's a shame that Steve Job's leaving overshadows this. Slashdot has been a rock of the internet for 14 years, and I still regularly visit it. This paragraph is good: In the last 14 years, Slashdot has covered so many amazing events: The explosion of Linux. The rise of Google. The return of Apple. The Dot Com Bubble. The DMCA. 9/11. Wars. Elections. Numerous successful Shuttle Launches and one Disaster. Scientific Breakthroughs galore. Cool toys. Web2.0! Social Networking. Blogging! Podcasting! Micro-Blogging! The Lord of the Rings being filmed and an entire trilogy of new Star Wars. OMG Ponies!! So many moments that I could run this paragraph for hours with moments where we shared something important, meaningful, or just stupid. But the most important to me was my marriage proposal to Kathleen. Slashdot has posted Over 114,000 stories so far. And there will be many more to come. I just won't be the one picking them.

Alex3917 15y ago
I think the span between the Columbine shooting and 9/11 was probably their peak. So many of my memories of /. involve national disasters.
- hollerith 15y ago
  /. is how I found out of the 9/11 attacks.
  - swilliams 15y ago
    That morning, slashdot was the only news related website that would load for me.
    - th0ma5 15y ago
      me too, it was a strange time where i think /. was the only place that was taking bursts seriously in hosting
      - jellicle 15y ago
        There was a tremendous amount of work done that morning to keep the site up. Basically the site went static for long periods, which was the only way to save the poor database servers that were screaming and bleeding from their eyes under the load. If I recall correctly there was an after-action report posted later about the technical aspects of keeping the site working that day. Slashdot had nothing near the infrastructure that many "medium-sized" websites have today, which was bad: didn't have enough hardware to survive, but also good: the bosses were close enough to the metal to make immediate programming changes to reduce the site loading. So it's really the opposite: Slashdot was unprepared for bursting of this magnitude, but able to react reasonably quickly to combat the unpreparedness. Other sites were probably more prepared (CNN.com) but once the load exceeded their preparations, it took them a while to, you know, get permission from the big boss to make the site static and otherwise react. CNN and other major sites did get their act together in fairly short order, actually - it's not at all the case that they were down for an extended period - they figured things out pretty quickly, just not quite as quickly as Slashdot.
  - hitechnomad 15y ago
    Me too! I was trying to get a router working, and was pinging slashdot to find out if I was routing to the net. No response from slashdot - hmmmm, must have a network problem at my end. A bit later and I realised the net was up, but slashdot was down. It took me another few hours to realise that the reason slashdot was overwhelmed was because a major world-changing event was happening!
- icebraining 15y ago
  The most commented story was "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" (with 5687 comments), followed by "Strike on Iraq".
  - shrikant 15y ago
    Interestingly, the most commented story on Reddit was (is?) "Obama beats McCain to become president" as well.

_delirium 15y ago

Interesting decision. In practice I don't think this will change a lot, because it's been years since Slashdot was primarily the personal project of Malda; from what I can tell, he's been "just another editor" and a bit withdrawn from the decision-making for a few years now. But I can see wanting to do something else. For all its downsides, Slashdot is a quite interesting experiment imo. In terms of form: It was one of the first (the first?) widely read tech blogs, in the sense of something that posted about technology in reverse chronological order, with a comments section below it (the comments section was even threaded). The idea of having users submit stories and write blurbs was also fairly novel, and has led to several different directions. Kuro5hin and MetaFilter took it in one direction, expanding from blurbs to more general kinds of article submissions (and Kuro5hin switched to voting rather than editorial curation), while Reddit/Digg/HN took it in the opposite direction, paring it down to link submissions with no blurb (again with voting). In terms of content, imo it was a main way, especially in the late 90s, that a generation of tech people were introduced to things like the EFF, free software, problems of software patents, driver support for Linux, hardware hackability, and other such techno-liberty type things. Those predated Slashdot, of course, but it sort of crystallized a community on the web, alongside those that had previously been organized mainly around mailing lists, Usenet, etc. It also gained considerable mindshare for those ideas from a broader set of readers who weren't necessarily "activists".

sjs382 15y ago
God, I miss K5...
- kahawe 15y ago
  Me too... they had some of the strangest and freaked-out submissions there. I don't know any substitute for it on today's internet. Last time I went to the website I was surprised it was still online and I felt really sad when I realized the frontpage submissions were weeks old. I feel old now, missing the 90s pre-bubble internet and I am sad I was just a few years too late to that party back then. sigh
  - 15y ago

kabdib 15y ago

It's made its way into near-future SF. Some character in a novel by Ken Macleod, faced with a Plot Device disaster, says to a friend "I can't even get to Slashdot."

burgerbrain 15y ago
The verb "slashdotted" is even more common. I recall seeing it at least once in a Charles Stross novel or two, and in numerous other near-future SF.
- goatforce5 15y ago
  I once submitted a friend's blog entry to slashdot. It was picked for the front page. I can't remember exactly how it works, but you get an email or a notice on the site saying your story will appear shortly. I was in my friend's living room at the time, sitting near the laptop on the end of an ADSL connection that served his blog. "Ummmm.... I think i've done a baaaaad thing." That lil' ol' laptop was absolutely hammered for the next day, even after moving the images, etc., on to 'proper' servers and making the site static.
  - jseliger 15y ago
    I submitted my review of of the Unicomp Customizer (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/05/29/1334258/Review-of-the-Model-M-Inspired-Unicomp-Customizer-Keyboard http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/05/29/1334258/Review-o...) years ago, and I think that day remains the most traffic I've ever gotten. Granted, it's a generic Wordpress.com blog and thus not susceptible to Slashdotting, but I still remember looking at the traffic spike and going, "Wow."
phillmv 15y ago
I'm fairly certain it was mentioned by a character in an issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's had reverberations across the geek ethos.
- hemos 15y ago

nicpottier 15y ago

I don't visit /. anymore, but definitely grew up on it. I don't think you can understate the impact it had on a generation of geeks. Especially when it comes to Open Source, I think /. was incredibly important in educating people on a concept, history and philosophy many of us take for granted now. And hot grits aside, it really did set the bar for intelligent discussion. /. was the first site where the comments were always more valuable than the articles. RTFA's were common, sure, but so was incredible insight and inside knowledge. That's what made it all so addictive. I remember hitting refresh constantly on /. during 911. Personally, I found it the best source of information anywhere, though you had to have your own sanity filter on as well. Thanks cmdrtaco, and congratulations on a real legacy. For me at least, /. is mostly replaced now, but that doesn't diminish what it was.

onemoreact 15y ago
I think a lot of people have a similar history with slashdot. I still ocationally go back but reading his fairwell and by his partner Hemos (2)'s reply reminded me of the best parts of Slashdot. PS: Ok, I admit it. I found the "you must be new here." reply really funny.
- hemos 15y ago
  Hell, it was targeted at me, and I found it hilarious.
  - nosequel 15y ago
    Thanks for all that you have done as well Hemos. Slashdot was my home from about '98 to '03 and I have more cherished memories from it, than any site since.
matthavener 15y ago
One of my favorite memories from /. was refreshing to see a new version of the kernel was available. You'd spend a few hours downloading it, compiling, and reboot. Usually there were no new features you wanted, no bugs fixed, just the idea of being on the bleeding edge was "cool" enough.

kahawe 15y ago

> And since I'm going to have to find a job in a few months, I'm on LinkedIn as well. Well, this is going to be one short CV and cover letter... "I built slashdot" should be plenty enough, really.

Hisoka 15y ago
Why does he even need a job? Didn't SlashDot earn him enough to live on for rest of his life?
- allwein 15y ago
  Rob doesn't strike me as the sort of person who'd enjoy just kicking back and relaxing forever. He's comfortably well-off, but is looking for a change. 14 years is a lot of time to dedicate to one project, especially when it's mature and stable like Slashdot is. I imagine he's going to take a well-deserved break and then like a lot of tech entrepreneur's, come back for round two and start another company.
  - cdibona 15y ago
    You're spot on. Rob is not good at being Idle.
    - dredmorbius 15y ago
      That, sir, is truth spoken.
- hemos 15y ago
  Hahaha. If only; no, Rob and I will be working.
  - phuff 15y ago
    Welcome to the party, Hemos :)

whazzmaster 15y ago

I've been down on Slashdot for the last few years, even going so far as to remove it from my RSS reader and bookmarks bar. I check back sometimes here and there but devote most of my time to HN/reddit now. Taco's farewell (and Hemos' reply in comments) really brought to me back why I liked Slashdot in the first place back in 1998- an editorial voice curating interesting tech stories. That editorial voice was important to me in 1998, as I was in college for CS and was really uninformed about things like (as _delirium notes in this thread) the EFF, the RIAA, open source software, The Many Uses of Linux, etc. I compare that to today when I just scan lists of links on reddit or HN and pick out the items that interest me. The editorial voice was a good starting point for me- it directed me to interesting things that I couldn't have fathomed. As I grew into my techy career and interests, I needed it less and less. I hope it's not viewed as complaining or whatnot, but I do wonder if anyone else avoids Slashdot in 2011 almost purely because of the commenters' obnoxiousness. I always get a picture of sysadmin-like greybeards pounding away furiously at their keyboards the moment anyone suggests that some software, somewhere be written in something other than C or perl. Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was (and "-5, Troll"? shudder.) And for that I thank you.

_delirium 15y ago
> Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was In a lot of interesting varieties! Some even sort of artistic, and some precursors of later SomethingAwful/4chan/internet-meme types of things. I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Slashdot editor Rob Malda resigned from his editorship this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the HN community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to geek culture. Truly an internet icon.
- zavulon 15y ago
  Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, covered in hot grits
  - spiffworks 15y ago
    Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past. If we cannot scorn ourselves, we run the risk of taking ourselves to seriously.

jacques_chester 15y ago

Slashdot was my first true time-wasting site. During free periods in high school I'd read Slashdot compulsively -- as nicpottier observed, it was probably the first site where the comments were often more valuable than the story. Slashdot was a blog before the word 'blog' was coined. A universal shared experience, in my case for literally half a lifetime.

dasil003 15y ago
It's not enough to call Slashdot an early blog, because there were many proto-blogs at the time. Slashdot was actually social news before the era of user-generated content.

5hoom 15y ago

What the hell is going on today? Thats two influential tech personalities resigning from their signature positions in 24 hours. Im starting to get worried here. Whats next, John Carmack resigns from id?(heaven forbid!) My world view has been shaken. Best of luck & thanks for the good times CmdrTaco. I wore out F5 keys on that site :)

burgerbrain 15y ago
Retiring the same day as Apple's CEO just seems like Rob Malda's style to me, in the best possible way. I doubt he made a snap decision to do it, but if he was already planning on doing it and saw the opportunity... :)
- raphman 15y ago
  As someone on /. noted, Slashdot was also founded in September 1997, the same month that Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Maybe this coincidence influenced Rob's decision.
  - rikthevik 15y ago
    Wait, has anyone ever seen cmdrtaco and Steve Jobs in the same place? Maybe they're the same person! :)
    - Sixing 15y ago
      Yeah, good script

zobzu 15y ago

Slashdot still has the best comment moderation system, even if none is perfect. When the story gets crowded by zillion of comments you still get the best ones in a single page without having to read literally 10 or 15 pages of comments.

abcd_f 15y ago
> Slashdot still has the best comment moderation system I disagree. It has a fundamental problem of earlier posts having far more chances to go +5 than those posted later. Something that is handled far better on HN that starts newer posts at the top of the comment page and lets them sink down.
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  Limited granularity, too. K5 improved on that, while HN's factoring in of time since posting seems to help to my mind as well. Yet, for all its failings, it was an impressive starting point that led the way for a lot of others, and was massively influential in a way no single site seems to have become since.

napierzaza 15y ago

This will overshadow Steve Jobs' resignation.

burgerbrain 15y ago
It certainly has for me. Hardware is all nice and fine, but the informational content of slashdot has had far more profound effect on myself. I don't think I would recognize a version of me that grew up in a universe without slashdot. Unlike the hardware maker, I think I almost feel a tinge of emotion here.. think I'll go troll on slashdot a bit today, seems like the right thing to do.
- sgt 15y ago
  I think he was being utterly sarcastic. :-)
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    I suspected that, but is correct within the context of many communities.

smudgy 15y ago

I still read Slashdot but not as much as I did "back in the day" - it's my chicken soup site, where I go to feel comfortable surrounded by like minded folks. While Jobs' resignation is big corporate news, CmdrTaco's might be bigger community news - the guy was "one of us." His site was one of the first online communities and their slanted (according to some) point of view was what spun off other hacker/nerd sites. I will admit that I'll miss Rob Malda at Slashdot - his name there on the posts made me feel at home, someplace familiar. So long and thanks for all the fun.

greyish_water 15y ago

And he'll resign again in a few hours.

chico_dusty 15y ago

Sad news ... Rob Malda, dead at 54 I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Nerd/Ponies website proprietor Rob Malda was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Hacker News community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

steveb 15y ago

To me slashdot was critical in galvanizing the geek community and bringing free software to the mainstream in the late 90's. The comments added incredible value and created a community that I had not come across anywhere else. I think the high point of that period was the announcement of the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base. Nowadays, itt is hard to imagine the need for all the stories on how to convince your boss to use this software some dude in Finland wrote. Slashdot also championed everything2.com, kind of a proto-wiki. The low point was all the trolling in the article about death of W. Richard Stevens, which lead to much of the moderation code that needed to be put in place. Rob's run at slashdot was pioneering and hugely influential. I look forward to his next project.

Uchikoma 15y ago

He waited till Steve resigned.

imroot 15y ago

If you've followed the lifespan of VA Software, OSDN, OSTG, GeekNet...I don't think this will come as a surprise to anyone. http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=r&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=slashdot.org&&u=reddit.com&#38 http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...; Slashdot built the community that a lot of people still have close ties to. I'll always remember reading my first few Bruce Perens posts, and adding him (and a few others) to my 'Friends' List. I'll also never forget listening to their marketing person talk about how they could 'bitchslap' negative comments (about the advertiser) to -2 so that nobody could see them. Slashdot is a great place for the folks who have been in the industry for any amount of time. It was always a trusted and stable source of news, reposts, and April Fool's Pranks. I will continue to think that this is something that he did on his own free will and volition, and not something that was forced upon him by the powers that be at GeekNet. Ann Arbor, MI isn't the Linux Hot-Spot -- nor is it a mecca for new and exciting technology jobs. I hope he enjoys his time off and finds something that gives him the love and satisfaction that slashdot gave him over the last decade.

jellicle 15y ago
> I'll also never forget listening to their marketing person talk about how they could 'bitchslap' negative comments (about the advertiser) to -2 so that nobody could see them. Citation, please? Rob Malda's oft-cited bitchslap comment was about a script he had written to deal with Slashdot's most annoying commenters (people who used their own scripts to submit thousands of duplicate comments simultaneously), and had nothing to do with advertisers or marketing or denigrating products. In fact at the time the comment was written, I don't believe Slashdot had a marketing person outside of Jeff Bates.
- imroot 15y ago
  This was during a call I was on with their Marketing team when the company that I was working for planned to do a mini sub-site within slashdot to extol and display the features of their newest product line. I don't believe it is public record, otherwise I would cite it.

ac-slater 15y ago

I went to go see CmdrTaco speak in 2005. Someone asked him how to make a website as popular as Slashdot. Malda said to start it in 1997. Of course in the next year the meteoric rise of both digg and reddit began. I think there is a moral here about not resting on your laurels and never thinking no one can catch up with you.

icebraining 15y ago
>thinking no one can catch up with you. Did he actually do that, or just told the only way he personally knew how to do it?
- hemos 15y ago
  The latter. I can testify to that. And if you look back at when Kevin Rose was doing the G4 stuff, there's an interview with Rob where Kevin asks Rob what he would do different. Rob outlines basically Slashdot + user voting. A few months later, Digg comes out. True story.
  - ktsmith 15y ago
    http://www.g4tv.com/videos/8892/interview-with-cmdrtaco-slashdot-founder/ http://www.g4tv.com/videos/8892/interview-with-cmdrtaco-slas... October 2004 for the interview and Digg launched in December.

wollongong 15y ago

slashdot was the first digg/reddit, they missed the social boat and kept strict editorial control, or else they'd have grown rather than floundered

r00fus 15y ago
And where is digg today? At least Slashdot is still somewhat relevant.

sunchild 15y ago

To this day, I log into nyt.com with: user: cowboyneal pass: cowboyneal Anyone else?

idonthack 15y ago
sssshhhhh.
- sunchild 15y ago
  I enjoy the idea that this account wreaks havoc on nyt.com's internal metrics.
  - mbreese 15y ago
    And that they certainly know about it, and still let it go on... you have to think that they are in on the joke.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - sunchild 15y ago
      Or, possibly not. Either way, it's a minor victory on all sides!
wyclif 15y ago
Yep.

jpdoctor 15y ago

ZOMG. Steve Jobs and Cmdr Taco are the same guy.

RobIsIT 15y ago

The answer that I've always wanted to hear Rob give would come from these questions: What are the underlying linchpins of the SlashDot community? How would you rebuild it? What steps would you take, what processes would you put in place, what technology would you use? I would never want to create a SlashDot clone, nor would I expect anyone could clone SlashDot. However, there are very important lessons in community building, management and infrastructure planning that Rob is an expert at.

rmason 15y ago

One thing I don't see mentioned is that Slashdot was a uniquely Michigan success story. They were an example to a lot of Michigan startups that you could be successful and stay in the state. I haven't seen him lately but CmdrTaco used to attend startup related events. One of the early Slashdot crew, Kurt DeMaagd, is now an assistant professor at Michigan State.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

the_topper 15y ago

I was always impressed with the story selection on Slashdot. There was a certain mindset that they were pandering to, but it flat-out worked. I was a voracious reader of Slashdot in the early years until I had an epiphany when reading the They Might Be Giants interview in 2000. I realized that the collective geek mindset was rooted more in fantasy than reality. Posters were so desperately wanting the TMBG guys to be off-the-wall wacky and absurdist, but really it was more that the two John's were just doing their own thing, and that thing was outside the realm of normal music. Yet no one picked up on it. I couldn't read Slashdot after that. The geek fantasy fog was too thick and pervasive and self-referential.

presidentender 15y ago

Slashdot was the source of my now-permanent news habits, and, I believe, the Petri dish in which modern hacker culture was first cultivated. Slashdot had memes before they were called memes, or so it seems; most importantly, it had discussion via threaded comments and community moderation. I first used this handle on Slashdot, and whenever one of my sites goes down due to traffic, I'll say it's been slashdotted. But the relevance of Slashdot as a site has been eclipsed, first by Digg, then by Reddit and HN. The network effect is part of it. The technology is part of it. There's some je ne sais quoi about these newer sites; maybe they'll be replaced by some other, more minimalist social news platform in the future.

mckoss 15y ago
Actually, "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene). Although, the meaning in popular culture has morphed from the generic definition (any self propagating idea) to refer to fast spreading cat videos and the like. I remember the episode of The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose did a segment about Slashdot - and even hinted at morphing the concept more toward what he created with Digg (giving users more power to source stories - voted up purely on their merits). /. has definitely had a big impact in the way we obtain our news (more targeted, and with social interaction). But I, like most people here, I imagine, left it long ago in favor of Digg, Reddit, or HN.
- hemos 15y ago
  What's been interesting to see is the gradual migration back from Digg & Reddit; not so much HN. But the issue tends to happen when sites begin to try and cover "everything" that you end up driving out the original and central audience.
  - mckoss 15y ago
    Digg really shot themselves in the foot when they tried to make the site "personalized" - most in their audience wanted there to be just "one" primary home page. Reddit seems to have been able to create many successful smaller communities around sub-reddits. It's another lesson that trying to be all things to all people usually satisfies no one.

cpeterso 15y ago

I wonder how he feels about getting stuck with the "CmdrTaco" handle. :)

njharman 15y ago

trying to steal the limelight from steve, eh? I've recently starting reading again after long time away. It's good again!

quinndupont 15y ago

It was a great 14 years! Huzzah!

nl 15y ago

I feel really old now. All the things I remember most about Slashdot seem to have been forgotten. Things I remember (most of these are pre-2000): Netscape being open sourced (and the role Slashdot played in that) Oracle shipping on Linux The hidden Slashdot threads (wah_is_cool anyone?) Discovering a input validation hole that let me post a "Powered by Windows NT" image in the middle of a thread about the original CERT XSS attack warning (http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html) Signal11 vs CmdrTaco (http://www.kuro5hin.org/images/kuro5hin_Sig11_vs_Taco.html http://www.kuro5hin.org/images/kuro5hin_Sig11_vs_Taco.html) The K5 split

enthalpyx 15y ago

I love that this is on the front page of HN -- which is to me, what Slashdot was 10 years ago.

AlexC04 15y ago

Think he and Steve Jobs are heading out to launch a stealth startup?

stmartin 15y ago

I used to be a /. regular too... sort of stopped going to it after a while. Hope you come up with something new/inspirational, CmdrTaco.