Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Pre-History of Slashdot

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 366 posts

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#311

Post by Jaruzel »

KGIII wrote: post #31
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’…

I have wanted HN to have a friend/foe system since I first found the site. I'd also like it to have the ability to make notes, like 'farkies' from Fark. On Slashdot, you simply add them to a friend or for list. On Fark, you get to flag them in certai colors and then leave yourself a note (other people can't see it but admins probably can) that I use to remind me of why I put them on the list. I'd like a combination o…

I second this. At the very least. some way 'favourite' a HN user, and their name on their posts appears in a different colour. There are so many good commentators here, that keeping track of people is hard.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#312

Post by int_19h »

isostatic wrote: post #209
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.

There were several changes over the years, but beta was when I left, but that was really just the straw. The politics was getting too much for me, it was always a factor (remember Katz and the buried commodore64 in Afghanistan) Sadly nothing really recaptured the spirit of the first few years, and it can't. The internet isn't the Wild West any more, you're not using it over dial up from a box room staring down a CRT,…

For me it was the politics as well. And not even the amount of it, but rather the toxicity of discussions. Not that things were polite in elder days... but they were not so actively hateful.

I still wonder sometimes if it's a shift in the Slashdot audience specifically - seeing how movements like neo-reaction have been springing up in the tech community in the past few years - or it just mirrors the increased polarization in American society (I know Slashdot has international audience - heck, I was a part of it for a long time - but it's definitely US-centric).

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#313

Post by nvarsj »

astrodust wrote: post #306
Iv wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is the main thing that prevented cyberpunk dystopias that many authors imagined. This community deserves some love.

Let's be honest: It prevented some and created others. We got a wealth of free tools that allowed us to create things like Slashdot without crippling license fees and we got a wealth of cheap IoT and poorly programmed devices that can DDOS and bring down GitHub. In the 1990s the fear was that Microsoft would take over everything . Now the concern is that Linux will show up in places it has no business being, collecti…

It's a bit of a stretch to attribute opensource with the rise of IoT. Those devices have plenty of proprietary software as well.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#314

Post by nvarsj »

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…

> FFS FB threatened to sue me for that which I revealed even here on HN.

Can you talk more about this? My curiosity is piqued!

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#315

Post by intended »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #272
flukus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The steam roller is still there from quite a few companies, make something popular and Google, MS, Facebook will clone it and force it on people. No luck about it though, these companies are only interested in mass market stuff, the long tail has only gotten longer.

First they offer to buy it. If you aren’t insane you sell it. If you think you can beat the big three you probably deserve to be crushed.

>If you think you can beat the big three you probably deserve to be crushed.

vs

> If you think you can beat the big three I cheer you on.

Its funny, that on HN of all places, your statement is not challenged. The major point of HN over /. was the startup/incubatorish habits of Ycombinator.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#316

Post by rwmj »

kibwen wrote: post #297
rwmj wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

When I was younger I thought that Slashdot's moderation was brilliant, and every time that I tried to think up something better I invariably came back to that model. When I first stumbled across Reddit I thought to myself that it couldn't possibly work: too simple, too accessible, too easy to game. And yet over the years I kept reading Reddit and stopped reading Slashdot, and it dawned on me that Reddit's comment rat…

The "fall of Slashdot" had nothing to do with moderation and everything to do with the fact that articles are chosen centrally. That meant that Slashdot could never expand into other areas outside tech or dynamically follow its users' tastes.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#317

Post by mseebach »

cjbprime wrote: post #286
heroprotagonist wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried it, but it should be possible to MITM SSL for your own machines since you have control over trusted certificate authorities. There might be a better article if you search deeper than I did to come up with a quick link, but here: https://blog.heckel.xyz/2013/07/01/how-to-use-mitmproxy-to-r...

I haven't tried it either, but many big name sites use certificate pinning to avoid the attacking form of this MITM.

A manually trusted cert overrides pinning, it's only protecting against certs signed by another of the default installed certs (otherwise Google and others simply wouldn't work in many corporate environments).

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#318

Post by mseebach »

smacktoward wrote: post #225
shortoncash wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We need a poll to determine what CowboyNeal says on the matter.

HN doesn't support polls, you insensitive clod.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#319

Post by taneq »

jtmcmc wrote: post #293
taneq wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons This sounds like it was written by an angsty 14-year-old who has no idea what actually goes into building and maintaining public infrastructure. Not, of course, that telecoms are always good citizens, but still.

Also this indicated quite a good understanding of 'hacker' culture at the time. It's from http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

Oh, definitely. I'm just intrigued by how my perception of that culture has altered over time, especially as I've become more involved with the world 'behind the curtain', and the true magnitude of the industry required to produce all our modern amenities.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#320

Post by titzer »

cisanti wrote: post #243
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 we need to call out people who do the job for these spy machines. Developers working for Google & Facebook should be ashamed of themselves. Money talks, I guess.

I work for Google. I am not going to be "ashamed of myself," but I am also not into drinking the Koolaid.

It's an oversimplification to demonize groups in this way. What is more troubling is the (non)reaction of society to the vast encroachment on privacy and rights from all sides, not the least of which are governments, telecommunication companies, and advertisers.

Post reply on HN