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A Pre-History of Slashdot

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Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#111

Post by mercer »

jandrese wrote: post #29
digi_owl wrote: post #22

Earlier 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 Hacker News Enhancement Suite does this, plus other things.

It's not compatible currently with Hacker Smacker, but fixing that takes one line of tweaking.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#112

Post by mercer »

conesus wrote: post #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’…

Oh, that's nice!

It's not currently compatible with Hacker News Enhancement Suite. Quickest solution I found was to change a line in findCurrentUser(), but just FYI. It would've been a deal-breaker for me.

Looking forward to playing around with this :).

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#113

Post by eps »

whathaschanged wrote: post #62

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.

Redesign was a contributing factor to what's been coming for a long time. The main problem was that the community had an extremely limited say in moderation of the content.

Puny 5 mod points once every few months is not a way to instill a sense of belonging. Imagine being able to upvote a post or a comment on HN only once a month, and passively watch random stuff of questionable quality float up the rest of the time. That ruined /. for me and I suspect I wasn't alone in that.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#114

Post by ktta »

nathanm412 wrote: post #109
ktta wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason I think this going to happen to HN too, and I feel it is at 3. And I'm not sure if I'm in group #1 or group #2.

I think it's been at step 3 for longer than most sites have last. I know I'm part of group 2, but I've seen a somewhat consistent culture since I arrived over five years ago.

Looks like you joined about 5 1/2 years ago. I'm surprised you think you're part of Group #2.

Before what date do you think people can be group #1? Or are you ascribing the group number to contributions rather than date of joining?

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#115

Post by brandnewlow »

ktta wrote: post #93
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like: 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

For some reason I think this going to happen to HN too, and I feel it is at 3. And I'm not sure if I'm in group #1 or group #2.

I, along with a lot of people, joined HN in 2008 after Techcrunch wrote about it. That's pretty close to "Group 2 joins" and yet 9 years later HN persists!

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#116

Post by beezle »

Wow.. time flys when you are getting old! To protect the mostly innocent, my uid is just over 64K, so definitely one of the early adopters. /. was definitely the premier place for nerdy/tech news prior to the dot.bomb and it definitely had an outsized influence in the tech world.

Many have spoken of having their websites slashdotted though it was not uncommon to get email months and years later about a story submission. Somehow early netizens believed the submitter must be an authority and would be more than happy to answer their questions lol.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#117

Post by npsimons »

geezerjay wrote: post #69
whathaschanged wrote: post #62

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.

> > 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.

Agreed; I remember the day they started advertising the Apple marketing conventions and thought "who put Apple on my Linux site? This isn't 'news for nerds; stuff that matters'". The influx of microsoft apologists and apple shills soon after is what killed it for me, and I had been there for a long time (not since the beginning, but still user 32752; so close to a power of two!).

Still, I'm eternally grateful to Rob Malda. Great community, great moderation system, and a site that was unique. I'll wager we shall not look upon it's like again soon.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#120

Post by aembleton »

gm-conspiracy wrote: post #104
MattGrommes wrote: post #45

Slashdot 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…

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