I learned about 9/11 from the slashdot front page. Wow, 16 years ago.
A Pre-History of Slashdot
51–60 of 366 posts
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#52Slashdot was a major inspiration to us as we grew Ars Technica, not to mention a major source of critical traffic and growth in those early years.
Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#53cmdrtaco, thanks for all the grits, inventing the blog and the watering hole that helped facilitate the discourse and creation of the open source movement.
#1794
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#54I 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?
I love(d) /. article summaries, even if the quality of editing was a running joke. Also the fact that it was simple sequential list and not constantly changing and living front page was a nice aspect. On HN you might miss a good story either because of bad title or because not checking the front page often enough. On the other hand aggressively refreshing HN and optimistically clicking more links leads to massive overload. Personally I think the middle road of /. hits a very good balance.
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#55Slashdot 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.
> Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot. ... as well as some of those that would eventually become someone. Like Mark Zuckerberg [0] who co-built an MP3 player that learns your taste [1] in 2003: > "It looks like they're both college freshmen now. But last year, Adam D'Angelo went to Korea for the IOI contest. Apparently, the other one is a smart guy too. A friend at Exeter said Mark Zuckerberg was a bigshot in ma…
> I may be paranoid, but I'd prefer not to have anyone, even my own computer, perform data mining on me. - 2003 about MZ mp3AI player
if the guy knew...
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#56Slashdot 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.
> Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot
Yeah, they had good concentration of people "who were someone". HN had similar thing going on too; I wonder what's the next one is going to be...
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Been looking for something like this, as i have been using RES over at Reddit for a similar purpose.
The one thing that the friend/foe system missed IMHO was the ability to tag posters with comments like "suspected oil shill" or "actual Intel chip designer" or stuff like that. That's often more useful than some vague idea that a poster had some especially good or poor posting in the past.
The RES browser extension does this for Reddit (which I suspect you might already know, but others might not). It also sort of does automatic friend/foe for you, as it displays the net number of votes that you've given to each user next to their username, turning bright green for positive numbers and bright red for negative.
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#58Slashdot 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.
> Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot Yeah, they had good concentration of people "who were someone". HN had similar thing going on too; I wonder what's the next one is going to be...
There's not going to be a next one, there's going to be 10.
20 years ago the web was a much smaller place, and a few billion people currently online weren't even aware that the place existed.
Now, the population has exploded and there will be lots of different sites, all good in different ways, to "nurture the next generation of nerds". In different languages, too.
Growth, evolution -- all good.
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#59Slashdot was one of the main inspirations for Advogato. One clue in support of this is that the codebase was called "mod_virgule". The trust metrics were designed to be a more sophisticated moderation system than what Slashdot did, but in retrospect I'm not sure it actually worked that much better; Advogato never reached a mass audience and to the extent it had higher quality posts it was probably due to a smaller and more focused community.
I still have my slashdot account (number 3148), but rarely use it. I can well imagine the "complicated feelings" that Rob has, and wanted to add my voice to the many saying that Slashdot was an important Internet space.
Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot
#60Slashdot user #578 here. :) Besides pre-web stuff like Usenet and BBS boards /. was the first place I really felt like part of a community. I still remember fondly the times that stuff I submitted made it to the front page (like the story announcing the title of Star Wars Episode 1), like I was now "famous" with a bunch of people I really wanted to impress. Like most of us, I drifted away a long time ago but I'm alwa…
Yeah, I recall reading stuff there 'back in the day' and it was pretty cool. I tried to find my old account, but couldn't :-/ I did find a few stories I sent in in 1998.