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He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it. IMHO it failed for 2 reasons, too many politi
by iblaine 13y ago
He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it.
IMHO it failed for 2 reasons, too many political articles & social news is better than news aggregators. In the end most articles were about Microsoft & SCO being evil. Plus the rise of social news (twitter, reddit) have killed the need for news aggregators like slashdot & digg...slashdot was awesome, it unfortunately didn't evolve.
[edit] Forgot to add the /. comment system. It has too many features. Even today it's hard/annoying to use.
- rhizome 13y agoAdd the v2 (2006) redesign to the reasons people like me (uid ~100000) left. It simply became terrible to use, terrible to comment on ("slow down, cowboy!"), terrible to moderate. It is the "retailer with PDF-only catalog" of news sites.
- roc 13y agoI think you can generalize that to just one reason: the crowd became too large. It grew to the point that most articles were about things that any given reader wasn't deeply informed on. So the deep technical discussions produced far less chatter than the more general-interest/less-technical discussions and faded out of view. You also saw a bevy of those less-technical people offering their less-technical opinions on technical articles, whenever those things contained some keyword that registered. And, because there were so many more of them, this caused thread quality to suffer. So politics floated to the top, technical discussions became mired in less-technical opinion and technical folks left. Reddit isn't much different. It just attempts to duck the growth problem by enabling splintering into sub-reddits, which in turn splinter, on and on. And instead of "leaving reddit" the way people just stopped reading /., people just leave various sub-reddits. Which, as far as discussion goes, is effectively the same thing. The old forums becomes noisy, generalized, politicized and hollows out. People leave to find new ones. People may not be leaving the reddit platform but that's a distinction that really only matters to the people running reddit. (and maybe someone who's really attached to their profile/karma/whatever)
- pohl 13y agoHe seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it. What makes you think so? Why would someone convinced of such things say the following: "Hacker News is awesome. It is probably my number one RSS feed right now." -Rob Malda (Taken from TFA.)
- iblaine 13y agoRead the entire article. In it he praises hackernews then says it needs to filter to top 10 items, as slashdot did. He says twitter is fundamentally broken. He says reddit is too big.
- pohl 13y agoI did read that, I agree with him on those points, I think HN is a great success in tech news, and I don't think these views are contradictory.
- donjigweed 13y agoHN just needs a buffer/digest, so you only see posts that spend some time on the front page. http://eplenum.com/news?days=.1 http://eplenum.com/news?days=.1 posts that have been on the front page in the last 2.5 hours http://eplenum.com/news?days=1 http://eplenum.com/news?days=1 posts that have been on the front page in the last day .... http://eplenum.com/news?q=slashdot&sort=lastUpdate,desc http://eplenum.com/news?q=slashdot&sort=lastUpdate,desc