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A Pre-History of Slashdot

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Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#191

Post by rwmj »

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’…

Slashdot got a surprisingly large amount of stuff right, amazing considering it was one of the pioneering web-based discussion systems.

- You cannot both moderate and comment on the same article.

- Limited moderation points (too limited on Slashdot arguably, but better than infinite up/down votes).

- They didn't have up/down, but a system of "Interesting", "Informative", "Off-Topic" and a few others. These are the same as up/down votes in the end, but make you classify postings.

- Set threshold to (say) 3 and quickly see only the +3 interesting comments on an article.

- Meta-moderation didn't work well, but was an interesting idea.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#192

Post by ethbro »

donavanm wrote: post #167
samstave wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web I am going to have to call you out. I had a low-digit ID on /. We (people like me) have been calling this out for FUCKING DECADES. I feel that we can talk about generational millenials etc.. but we can also call out DIGITAL millenials; those who thing they know what the fuck i…

Indeed. I remember the evolution of ECHELON in the 90s having the same impact in some circles. And then Carnivore coming out a decade later. If someone doesnt (at least) know of SHAMROCK and MINARET they really have no context.

Also Clipper/Skipjack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#193

Post by t3f »

mercer wrote: post #112
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 :).

@mercer - There a PR or Fork for that?

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#194

Post by chris_wot »

MartinCron wrote: post #186
gcb0 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

context is everything. you were lucky to be doing an online gig. the rest of /. audience was probably in desktop software. most of the people there were ruthlessly crushed by Microsoft business tactics. they mostly had a very good reason to attack Microsoft.

most of the people there were ruthlessly crushed by Microsoft business tactics That has to be hyperbole. Even at the height of Microsoft's aggression, there were many professional software devs left uncrushed.

Microsoft deliberately went out of their way to make life incredibly difficult for anyone who competed with them. To the point of corrupting standards bodies. Just look at their document format, and we are still dealing with that bullshit years later.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#195

Post by peatmoss »

chrissnell wrote: post #68

User #5825 here. Here are a few of my favorites: The whole anti-Microsoft movement on /. Thy were the evil empire and Google was saintly. It’s funny how times change. The weather station we sent you in hopes of doing a promotion for our weather equipment site, weathertools.com. OOG THE CAVEMAN. He was DevOpsBorat at least a decade before Twitter. The launch of Mac OS X and the launch of the first titanium PowerBook.…

#5648 - We probably signed up the same month!

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#196

Post by geezerjay »

Nition wrote: post #153
gfodor wrote: post #107

I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :)) I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that…

> The anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. Just a side comment, I feel like Hacker News is going this way with Facebook a little. Posts that tangentially mention Facebook, there's usually a high-rated comment about how Facebook is evil and since the user left Facebook their life has improved. Those "I don't even own a T…

> Just a side comment, I feel like Hacker News is going this way with Facebook a little.

In slashdot, PR companies working for Microsoft were operating dozens of sock puppet accounts to post copy-paste messages extolling the company for its perfection, and praising each and every single product they were announcing. Slashdotters became aware of the problem, and what appeared to be a deep collusion between those PR companies and slashdot itself to keep pushing that propaganda while persecuting vocal critics who raised attention to the problem, and started to nurture a profound dislike for the whole affair.

Some people may not like Facebook, but HN is far from the path that slashdot was driven into.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#197

Post by serf »

samstave wrote: post #158
gfodor wrote: post #107

I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :)) I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that…

>> In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web I am going to have to call you out. I had a low-digit ID on /. We (people like me) have been calling this out for FUCKING DECADES. I feel that we can talk about generational millenials etc.. but we can also call out DIGITAL millenials; those who thing they know what the fuck i…

same story here. Low number ID, privacy advocate, etc since the 90s.

the part that disgusts me recently is that when these conspiracies are turned into fact by post-facto released information from official sources, a good amount of the reaction is "So? Everyone already knew that anyway."

I feel like that reaction is so blasé that it will ultimately be the deathknell of the personal privacy movement.

Whether or not the propagation of that kind of attitude and reaction to such things is state-induced is another question, but the damage that such opinions do to such activism is definetly real. If I were an adversary to a cause, I would definetly consider those kind of tactics against the ideals of my enemy.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#198

Post by j_s »

bdamm wrote: post #160
Nition wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. Just a side comment, I feel like Hacker News is going this way with Facebook a little. Posts that tangentially mention Facebook, there's usually a high-rated comment about how Facebook is evil and since the user left Facebook their life has improved. Those "I don't even own a T…

Not owning a TV is pushing my kid to watch a lot of YouTube. I'm seriously considering buying a TV, after living for 30 years without one, just so that I can have a quality entertainment feed that doesn't bend to the new media's idea of what my kid should watch, because what that ends up being is endless advertisements ("open this egg! What's inside? A Ken doll!! Wow!!") and videos of pandas killing each other with c…

I've limited it to Netflix on the big screen. I don't want the constant jumping from video to video either, pick one and then be stuck with it 'til it's done (or turn it off).

I am considering Amazon FreeTime Unlimited as well, I would recommend trying that before a TV though I would appreciate any anecdata on it.

Also, a shout out to https://dnslearning.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913547 (Aug 2017) > utefan001: This is how my 11 year old daughter uses YouTube now... After 30 min, DNS no longer works for entertainment sites.

(Pricing was 1 free, $10/month but I don't see any info now... boo!)

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#199

Post by kazinator »

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…

#1483 here, yo. :) I logged in recently to poke around a bit.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#200

Post by j_s »

zo1 wrote: post #182
Nition wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you managing "total curation"? Are you always there with them when they're on YouTube, or are you whitelisting specific channels in some way?

Not the OP, but there is no way that I'm aware of to whitelist (or blacklist!) specific channels on youtube. And thanks to HTTPS, I can't even intercept + modify youtube pages at the network level. Thank you, privacy folks, hope you're happy! Alternatively, there is always kids.youtube.com which is weirdly just an app for Ios/Android. I haven't tried it, and myself have actively disabled/removed all Youtube from bein…

Does YouTube app/whatever not honor device-trusted root certs? I know Google pins some stuff, and some YouTube players are embedded in appliances.

If it were possible to mitm HTTPS specifically for YouTube that would still be a lot of work, maybe a good Raspberry Pi project.

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