A Pre-History of Slashdot • Hacker News Board

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#211

Post by shabbyrobe » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:18 PM UTC

TekMol wrote: post #88

The notion of “A Blog” was years away, so I wrote my own code. I wish he did so for this blog post. When I visit it, I get a full screen popup first and after closing it, two dickbars that make it hard to read the actual content.

Medium is shocking for this. I added this to my uBlock custom filters list and now it's not a problem any more:

    ! medium dickbars and other bullshit:
    ##.u-clearfix.metabar
    ##.metabar
    ##.js-stickyFooter
    ##.highlightMenu

I have not limited it by domain so I can catch all the other Medium-based blogs that use other domains (hackernoon, etc). This raises my risk of false positives but that doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as all the extraneous garbage on their site does. YMMV.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#212

Post by iamleppert » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:20 PM UTC

Slashdot was truly a part of my youth, it was the site I went to when I was a teenager, in between taking breaks from coding. It made me feel like there were others out there like me and was a great source of inspiration growing up in a less than stellar childhood in Ohio.

It makes me nostalgic for the web of yesteryear, when it was mostly about just a bunch of nerds sharing their passion for technology.

Thanks, CmdrTaco.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#213

Post by isostatic » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

rconti wrote: post #65

jzl wrote: post #64

Is there a way to figure out when you joined? Not seeing a "member since" date. My id # is 7xxxxx (6 digits). I was reading it regularly for quite a few years, maybe 4-5 years IIRC, before finally deciding to sign up. No idea why I waited so long, I guess I was more into the articles than the commenting side of things. Dumb of me!

Ditto. I just logged in to check. Mine is 2xxxxx (also 6 digits) and I, too, regret not signing up when I first started browsing -- was probably more like 2-3 years for me though. I'm guessing 1998-1999? But I really have no idea.

My first account was 1xxxxx, lost that, second account 2xxxxx. I remember reading slashdot on NYE 1999, code red, the Billenium in Sep 01, and of course 9-11 when it was one of a few sites that stayed up.

Back in the day the comments section was full of "famous people" like Wil Wheaton and Bruce Perens, which I found fascinating.

Slashdot inspired me to jump to Debian in 2000, and E17. I didn't stick with e17, but did with Debian until about 07 when I transitioned on to ubuntu. The standard broadcast Linux build (1200+ machines on 6 continents) for a major UK based global broadcaster is ubuntu because of slashdot introducing me to apt after a coupe of years of frustration with rpmfind.net. Funny how these things work out.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#214

Post by jrmg » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:23 PM UTC

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 totally know what you mean.

I’m worried that my kid is not getting a ‘big’ view of the world, and is instead seeing it via YouTube, and anti-Trump playground conversations (which I agree with, to be sure, but it’s not a very deep or diverse understanding of the world).

When I think back to my childhood, my view of what the world, and human society (civic society?) ‘is’ came from TV news my parents happened to be watching - and occasional glances at their newspapers.

Even though I try to consume news from wide ranging sources, my kid sees none of that; it’s all an individual pursuit.

I fear there’s also a lack of ‘coherence’ in society today, and suspect that everyone watching the same news programme was something that provided it. When we think of current events, I don’t think that we’re all even aware of things outside our ‘bubbles’ - adults are sort of aware of this. What must growing up like this be like though?

I’m considering starting to watch evening network news. One problem with that is that we don’t have a TV - just iPads, laptops, and a projector for watching movies.

I’ve also subscribed to a delivery of the newspaper on Sunday (though it’s been a month and it’s never actually been successfully delivered to my home yet...)

Who’d’ve thought we’d be lamenting the decline of TV the same way our parents lamented the decline of newspapers?!

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#215

Post by isostatic » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #51

I learned about 9/11 from the slashdot front page. Wow, 16 years ago.

I did the same when the dupe was posted 3 weeks later

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#216

Post by isostatic » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

Jarwain wrote: post #143

JoshMnem wrote: post #129

I wish that people would stop blogging on Medium, especially about Free software topics. I click the link and get an obnoxiously animated popup shoved in my face that tells me that I've read my two articles for the month and that I should log in for the full experience. Why should people be asked to sign in to follow a blog when there is RSS/Atom? Learning how to use Hugo, Metalsmith, Hexo, Pelican, or Jekyll is not…

For an author, I'd imagine there are discoverability and convenience aspects involved in the decision to post on medium, versus hosting one's own blog.

I wonder if the author has ever hosted his own blog?

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#217

Post by jrmg » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:26 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #164

soulskill wrote: post #73

I was with Slashdot for 8 years. There are a lot of memories I could share, but the thing I appreciated most about my time there was just how much Rob (and the core team of engineers and editors) really cared about the site and its users. It's rare to see such conviction from tech companies or leaders of large, user-centric websites. I'm not sure Slashdot's users ever really understood how much time and energy Rob ex…

They sent pizza to Kuro5hin during a difficult time. That showed real class.

Oh, man, Kuro5hin! That was such a great, diverse, welcoming site for a couple of years. So sad what it descended into.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#218

Post by antod » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:29 PM UTC

shortoncash wrote: post #208

otakucode wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes my heart swell to know there are still those out there thinking of dear Natalie, petrified and with hot grits down her pants...

I don't have time for Natalie; I'm fretting over Netcraft's confirmation that BSD is dying.

Well you didn't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict that.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#219

Post by flukus » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:34 PM UTC

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 made a lot of mistakes (amongst the good parts) for the industry to learn from but it doesn't seem like this one was ever heeded, Digg made the same mistake and it's looking like Reddit is going to follow it (the moment the main site looks like the mobile one and the mobile app is they day I'll leave), many sites and products have been ruined by redesigns and over complicating things.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#220

Post by antod » Thu, Oct 05, 2017, 10:36 PM UTC

jonstokes wrote: post #52

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 :-)

Yeah it was slashdot that sent me to the embryonic Ars to find out all about Pentium2 (or was it 3?) architectures, BeOS, and this new-fangled unstable unixy MacOS in beta etc.