6 ms·

Slashdot hits the 100,000 posts milestone

52 points by philjackson 17y ago

dasht 17y ago
We'll see if this is later confirmed but, I think it pretty funny that (as of this writing) Slashdot appears to be, well, Shashdotted over this post. (Disclaimer: Obviously it won't be quite so funny if it turns out to be a malicious DoS attack or some quite unrelated glitch.)
apowell 17y ago
I remember being Slashdotted in 1999. It was a brutal onslaught of traffic. Fortunately, more sites seem equipped to handle that sort of traffic today. (http://slashdot.org/story/99/12/04/158227 http://slashdot.org/story/99/12/04/158227, if you're curious.)
- vermontdevil 17y ago
  I wonder when's the last time a site got slashdotted now. Doubt it happens much nowadays as it did in the past.
Hates_ 17y ago
Wow. For some reason it feels like such a "low" number. After so many years of browsing /. it feels like there has been so much stuff posted that the number should be so much higher.
- dpcan 17y ago
  This week Digg posted that they've had over 14 Million stories posted to their site after only 5 years. Slashdot is probably talking about front-page stories and not submissions, but, if we consider the editorial process, 100,000 is definitely high. P.S. One of my most exciting geek-memories as a younger man was having one of my submissions hit the front-page of Slashdot.
- andrewbadera 17y ago
  Stories posted, not comments posted to stories.
JCThoughtscream 17y ago
My first response to seeing this over HN's twitter feed was "what, only?"
philwelch 17y ago
Interesting comment: What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the comment quality follows an inverse pattern. Or more simply, as the number of users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan. Digg used to be a decent site for discussion; now you'd be laughed at for even suggesting that the comments might be notable. Reddit is quickly getting there. Slashdot though seems to best this pattern. While I'm well aware that someone will reply to this with "In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!" or something similar in a successful attempt to disprove my point, but I think it still holds true in some respect. Kudos slashdot, keep it up. You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements and we'll still be here to comment without RTFA - and we'll both be thankful for it. http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30408166 http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=304...
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Mathnerd314 17y ago
  The question this brings up is whether /. is turning into Hacker News.
  - bootload 17y ago
    "... whether /. is turning into Hacker News ..." HN is to Startups what /. is/(was) to Linux.
    - andrewbadera 17y ago
      /.'s ownership was part of one of the early, milestone Web 1.0 bubble buyouts and IPOs. HN wouldn't even be here today if it weren't for what Andover, VA Linux & all were doing 10-15 years ago.
- m0th87 17y ago
  I don't think /.'s comments have degraded over time, but I never thought they were particularly revelatory either. While they aren't very trollish, they tend to be pretty biased. That might not be surprising given the community's propensity toward Linux and OSS, but it hardly makes the comment quality high. HN has a bias too, toward startups. But I think the comments here are more centered because opinions on startups don't really become religious, whereas any discussion on operating systems in general and OSS quickly turns into a flamewar. Also, YMMV, but the one-liners get really old, especially since they've hardly changed. I remember the "in soviet russia" crap from over five years ago on /.
chriseppstein 17y ago
I'm always a bit surprised whenever I hear that /. is still running. I'm sure they're still a very successful site, but it's been like, forever. Aren't they bored?
- selven 17y ago
  Google has been around 12 years, you don't see them getting bored.
bootload 17y ago
"... What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. ..." I am surprised /. has survived. The place pretty much as it was back when it started in '97. As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising This is my first post [0] for a couple of years. But there was a time when I lived here. I remember when /. was sold & CmdrTaco said all he wanted to do was run it I'm sure I for one didn't believe he'd still be at it now. The sig/noise is still bad if you trawl below the +2 level. But at +5 it's readable. I think the combination of moderation, ability to filter comments (text, best comments at top), culture and relationships have helped shape the site into something still readable. HackerNews exhibits all of the same sorts of growing pains /. had to go through. [0] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30409194 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30409194
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  story, not comment
diN0bot 17y ago
/.'s comment system is awesome. it is gold. one interesting thing is the inverse relationship between time and the usability and quality of the comment systems. we start with /., which has--after lengthy iteration--a reasonable system of karma and crowd sourced filtering, plus a brilliant comment presentation system (open/close nodes, point threshholds with one-liners visible before google made that cool). then we get digg, reddit, hn, each one providing less and less features. hn is the worst: you can't close discussion branches, there is no summarizing, the points are not capped. actually, these charges are against all the "accumulating-points" set. still, i noticed a real drop in features when i went from reddit to hn, predominantly in the lack of sub-domains or categorizations (/r/scifi, /r/python, etc). anyway....very interesting from a social point of view.
- hackernews 17y ago
  > hn is the worst That is fine with me. I'm here because you guys/gals, not the software. It is the community rather than the features of the sites that gets me to f5 every 15min. I don't want critical mass here. There is something to this, cause I did Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit.... All have gone from my daily reading. Slashdot (staying on topic) more because I don't find anything fresh there because of the story moderation, the comments are where the quality is, but I don't have that attention span and the news seems a day late. There is something to this though - an inverse relationship between quality and popularity.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  I disagree that hn's is the worst. Slashdot has a fancy system because the signal to noise ratio is so low there. Even reading at the maximum post "quality" level of 5 there is a lot of spam, off-topic banter, lame humor, etc. In comparison, I find the S/N here to be orders of magnitude higher. I think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain behaviors which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more of a passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle. In theory I have a slashdot account that's about a decade old, I have forgotten the password and no longer use the email address it's attached to. I haven't bothered going to extreme efforts trying to recover it (e.g. searching out old password lists I have written down somewhere) nor have I bothered creating a new account. Discussion on slashdot is just not worthwhile, at best it's like trying to have a conversation by yelling across a boisterous lunch room, at worst it's just spitting into the wind (which tends to be the average case). There are so many better alternatives out there now it's really not worth the time to visit anymore.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
/. was the first technology aggregation site I started visiting on the web. I don't go back very much. I think the thing that did it for me was the site's redesign. It's much too clever by half. The signal-to-noise ratio dropped over the years as well. Having said that, I thought the categorization system was awesome -- much better than up/down voting. And on good days I really enjoyed the mix of funny and interesting. It was a nice combination of amused peanut gallery and topic expertise. Sort of a joyful love of learning.
nickpp 17y ago
I quit Slashdot when I noticed that my local newspaper's website had the latest IT news FASTER than Slashdot. And more relevant, too. Turns out I do not care at all about the latest SCO vs. Linux lawsuit.

52 points by philjackson 17y ago

dasht 17y ago

We'll see if this is later confirmed but, I think it pretty funny that (as of this writing) Slashdot appears to be, well, Shashdotted over this post. (Disclaimer: Obviously it won't be quite so funny if it turns out to be a malicious DoS attack or some quite unrelated glitch.)

apowell 17y ago

I remember being Slashdotted in 1999. It was a brutal onslaught of traffic. Fortunately, more sites seem equipped to handle that sort of traffic today. (http://slashdot.org/story/99/12/04/158227 http://slashdot.org/story/99/12/04/158227, if you're curious.)

vermontdevil 17y ago
I wonder when's the last time a site got slashdotted now. Doubt it happens much nowadays as it did in the past.

Hates_ 17y ago

Wow. For some reason it feels like such a "low" number. After so many years of browsing /. it feels like there has been so much stuff posted that the number should be so much higher.

dpcan 17y ago
This week Digg posted that they've had over 14 Million stories posted to their site after only 5 years. Slashdot is probably talking about front-page stories and not submissions, but, if we consider the editorial process, 100,000 is definitely high. P.S. One of my most exciting geek-memories as a younger man was having one of my submissions hit the front-page of Slashdot.
andrewbadera 17y ago
Stories posted, not comments posted to stories.

JCThoughtscream 17y ago

My first response to seeing this over HN's twitter feed was "what, only?"

philwelch 17y ago

Interesting comment: What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the comment quality follows an inverse pattern. Or more simply, as the number of users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan. Digg used to be a decent site for discussion; now you'd be laughed at for even suggesting that the comments might be notable. Reddit is quickly getting there. Slashdot though seems to best this pattern. While I'm well aware that someone will reply to this with "In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!" or something similar in a successful attempt to disprove my point, but I think it still holds true in some respect. Kudos slashdot, keep it up. You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements and we'll still be here to comment without RTFA - and we'll both be thankful for it. http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30408166 http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=304...

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Mathnerd314 17y ago
The question this brings up is whether /. is turning into Hacker News.
- bootload 17y ago
  "... whether /. is turning into Hacker News ..." HN is to Startups what /. is/(was) to Linux.
  - andrewbadera 17y ago
    /.'s ownership was part of one of the early, milestone Web 1.0 bubble buyouts and IPOs. HN wouldn't even be here today if it weren't for what Andover, VA Linux & all were doing 10-15 years ago.
m0th87 17y ago
I don't think /.'s comments have degraded over time, but I never thought they were particularly revelatory either. While they aren't very trollish, they tend to be pretty biased. That might not be surprising given the community's propensity toward Linux and OSS, but it hardly makes the comment quality high. HN has a bias too, toward startups. But I think the comments here are more centered because opinions on startups don't really become religious, whereas any discussion on operating systems in general and OSS quickly turns into a flamewar. Also, YMMV, but the one-liners get really old, especially since they've hardly changed. I remember the "in soviet russia" crap from over five years ago on /.

chriseppstein 17y ago

I'm always a bit surprised whenever I hear that /. is still running. I'm sure they're still a very successful site, but it's been like, forever. Aren't they bored?

selven 17y ago
Google has been around 12 years, you don't see them getting bored.

bootload 17y ago

"... What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. ..." I am surprised /. has survived. The place pretty much as it was back when it started in '97. As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising This is my first post [0] for a couple of years. But there was a time when I lived here. I remember when /. was sold & CmdrTaco said all he wanted to do was run it I'm sure I for one didn't believe he'd still be at it now. The sig/noise is still bad if you trawl below the +2 level. But at +5 it's readable. I think the combination of moderation, ability to filter comments (text, best comments at top), culture and relationships have helped shape the site into something still readable. HackerNews exhibits all of the same sorts of growing pains /. had to go through. [0] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30409194 http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30409194

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

aaronblohowiak 17y ago
story, not comment

diN0bot 17y ago

/.'s comment system is awesome. it is gold. one interesting thing is the inverse relationship between time and the usability and quality of the comment systems. we start with /., which has--after lengthy iteration--a reasonable system of karma and crowd sourced filtering, plus a brilliant comment presentation system (open/close nodes, point threshholds with one-liners visible before google made that cool). then we get digg, reddit, hn, each one providing less and less features. hn is the worst: you can't close discussion branches, there is no summarizing, the points are not capped. actually, these charges are against all the "accumulating-points" set. still, i noticed a real drop in features when i went from reddit to hn, predominantly in the lack of sub-domains or categorizations (/r/scifi, /r/python, etc). anyway....very interesting from a social point of view.

hackernews 17y ago
> hn is the worst That is fine with me. I'm here because you guys/gals, not the software. It is the community rather than the features of the sites that gets me to f5 every 15min. I don't want critical mass here. There is something to this, cause I did Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit.... All have gone from my daily reading. Slashdot (staying on topic) more because I don't find anything fresh there because of the story moderation, the comments are where the quality is, but I don't have that attention span and the news seems a day late. There is something to this though - an inverse relationship between quality and popularity.
InclinedPlane 17y ago
I disagree that hn's is the worst. Slashdot has a fancy system because the signal to noise ratio is so low there. Even reading at the maximum post "quality" level of 5 there is a lot of spam, off-topic banter, lame humor, etc. In comparison, I find the S/N here to be orders of magnitude higher. I think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain behaviors which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more of a passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle. In theory I have a slashdot account that's about a decade old, I have forgotten the password and no longer use the email address it's attached to. I haven't bothered going to extreme efforts trying to recover it (e.g. searching out old password lists I have written down somewhere) nor have I bothered creating a new account. Discussion on slashdot is just not worthwhile, at best it's like trying to have a conversation by yelling across a boisterous lunch room, at worst it's just spitting into the wind (which tends to be the average case). There are so many better alternatives out there now it's really not worth the time to visit anymore.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

/. was the first technology aggregation site I started visiting on the web. I don't go back very much. I think the thing that did it for me was the site's redesign. It's much too clever by half. The signal-to-noise ratio dropped over the years as well. Having said that, I thought the categorization system was awesome -- much better than up/down voting. And on good days I really enjoyed the mix of funny and interesting. It was a nice combination of amused peanut gallery and topic expertise. Sort of a joyful love of learning.

nickpp 17y ago

I quit Slashdot when I noticed that my local newspaper's website had the latest IT news FASTER than Slashdot. And more relevant, too. Turns out I do not care at all about the latest SCO vs. Linux lawsuit.