81–90 of 366 posts
Slashdot 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 :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/00/07/26/1217248/inside-echel...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/05/25/1312239/the-eu-repor...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/04/10/1626236/aclu-takes-o...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/02/12/051200/australia-sp...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/99/07/16/1025259/britain-tapp...
I remember the early days of slashdot fondly, although I didn't actually make an account until a few years later. It was such an interesting mix of serious discussion, in-jokes, and amusing trolls (even the infamous goatsx troll that I fell for more than once.) I still think that the moderation and meta-moderation was one of the most interesting experiments in a self-governing commenting system, even though it was cl…
1. Group #1 joins who care about site
2. Group #1 improves site. Sense of "community" keeps things in check.
3. Site grows in popularity and group #2 joins
4. Site loses sense of community and ability to moderate itself effectively.
5. Group #1 leaves
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’…
Hey - it's a little hard to see the splits like foe of a friend (I'm red/green color blind), what's an easy way to tweak the colors?
EDIT: I unpacked it and tweaked the CSS. Wooo!
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’…
I read the Slashdot FAQ on the Friend/Foe system, but I still don't understand it. Is the idea just that it lets you filter a comment thread to emphasize comments written by people you're interested in (friends)? Does it hide the comments of foes?
Also based on the 2nd degree information, friends of friends and such.
I would use it behind the scenes to look for bad accounts too. Someone with lots of foes would be a candidate for some silent moderation.
Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. It would be the equivalent of HN forcing autoplay videos and animated banner ads on each page. A lesson to reflect upon--monetizing is ok when it doesn't kill your userbase. My ID is under 5000 (cue the older ID replies) and I refuse to give them pageviews now.
> Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it real dead.
The notion of “A Blog” was years away, so I wrote my own code.
There is also evidence of UID inflation by only issuing odd or even numbers during certain periods.
I was always proud of having a slashdot userid < 262000 :) Definitely spent too much time on slashdot in the university computer lab.
You need to be less than or equal to 203094 to be one of the cool kids.
I always found it funny how the ranking of user by the order they joined encourages people to join. I guess its the same as not being a "green" user here.