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A Pre-History of Slashdot

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Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#11
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

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.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#12
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?

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#13
post #6

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.

Thanks!

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 :-)

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#14
post #4

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.

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.

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...

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#15

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 WordPr…

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.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#16
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks!

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 wor…

That makes two of us!

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#17
post #6

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.

Thanks!

I vaguely remember you posting a link to Chips & Dips on a Linux-related EFNet channel more than 20 years ago. I gave it a look, and it was sort of interesting, but I didn't bookmark it and forgot about it. Then later you announced Slashdot and the new design must have made it stick in my head or something, because I read it multiple times a day for the next 10 or so years. Slashdot was an important source of news and hosted a valuable community during those early days.

My only regret is that I missed out on a two-digit user ID when you added registration, because I figured it probably wouldn't catch on (boy, was I wrong!) and I didn't comment much anyway.

Thanks Rob, and best of luck!

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#18

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 WordPr…

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.

Can you divulge any of those seismic shifts? Would be interesting to hear.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#19

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.

> To be mentioned on slashdot was a meant instant saturation for a website.

For quite a while, that was even referred to as being 'slashdotted'...

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#20
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.

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