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A Pre-History of Slashdot

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Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#331

Post by Flenser »

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…

something like this?

https://imgur.com/a/wRtfp

NB: the icons beside your name are for "model", "traffic", "acquired" and "phd"

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#332

Post by nathanm412 »

stingrae wrote: post #136
ktta wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When a friend first recommended hackernews to me it didn't show up in google searches. So I gave up. I think techcrunch finally led me to finding it. By the time I actually created an account(just 10 days before nathan^), people were already complaining about the deterioration of the community, so I assumed I was in group 2.

That's exactly how I felt.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#333

Post by 6nf »

rdslw wrote: post #146
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #142

I had a four-digit Slashdot UID (just over 4000, I think). I have lots of great memories of technical discussions. As a young man who had managed to install Linux on his computer but still knew little about programming or the mighty Unix tradition, it was amazing to be able to participate there in discussions with so many big names in *nix or Free Software. But some of my fondest memories come from trolling there wit…

goatse.cx trolling under cloak of redirection... ah those early days...

The GNAA and the ascii parrot

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#334

Post by c3833174 »

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…

>Now the concern is that Linux will show up in places it has no business being, collecting data it doesn't need, and connecting to services that aren't necessary

But linux is just a kernel and devices based on it are usually easier to reverse engineer.

> simple, dumb appliances like your refrigerator or washing machine.

Dumb appliances are not going away, you just probably spend too much time on websites that overhype ioT garbage.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#335

Post by lwf »

jedberg wrote: post #42

Thanks Rob for the trip down memory lane. I have two to share: I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes. My second memory was when I was working for Sendmail. Because we were “famous…

Level 3 still has some facilities there; I don't think they ever used the space that Dropbox was in. (And since vacated; it's occupied by Stripe and Lyft now)

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#336

Post by Shivetya »

I really enjoyed the early slashdot but lost interest when politics ran rampant in nearly every part of the site. the vitriol associated with it and more (stuff you could not see) just reduced the value the site had in my eyes. I honestly cannot remember the last time I have visited the site.

tech sites need to keep their purity to stay accessible, politics, direct story posting or the constant indirect type, need to stomped out with a vengeance

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#337

Post by c3833174 »

rwmj wrote: post #316
kibwen wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>could never expand into other areas outside tech

Why would anybody want to?

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#338

Post by jerf »

Nition wrote: post #178
jerf wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the age of your kids, I suggest total YouTube curation. I've only got up to a nine-year-old but I'm thinking it's going to have to go up to at least 13 or 14 before I can have a serious discussion about just what is out there and how people are trying to manipulate them. Five years ago that would have been more to avoid them from stumbling across the various types of adult content that for various reason…

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?

"Are you always there with them when they're on YouTube,"

That one. They currently have no independent access to YouTube. (Well... technically if they knew what buttons to push where they do. I'm not using high-tech to block them. But they don't know and I'm not teaching them yet.)

Even a few years ago I might have considered this a bit much. But since "Elsa-gate" my mind on that has been changed. I know it's not just a weird conspiracy theory or something because I've even seen a couple of them pop up in my "related videos" list myself, and I don't really have a viewing profile that looks like a kids profile. (The reason why Elsa-gate is happening may be conspiracy theory related, but the brute fact that it is a thing is something I've seen first hand in my own feeds.)

The increasingly aggressive targeting behavior across the Internet is I think something not to be taken lightly. Unfortunately we're going to have to raise our children to deal with it, but my considered opinion is that the best solution before the teen age years is to just cut it off entirely. It is not as if we are leaving them adrift, the only ones without tech in an increasingly technical world; my kids play Minecraft, they've seen enough of the current YouTube videos that they can discuss them at school, their school is using technology in a halfway sensible manner so the nine-year old can already type and the six-year-old is on the way. It's only certain segments of the Internet that they are better off just locked away from.

Heck, it's not even terribly hypocritical of me... I lock myself away from those very same segments for the very same reason! I use uBlock origin pretty extensively, and whenever I see one of those bullshit Taboola blocks, I'm actively annoyed that they are so tuned that I find myself wanting to click through myself. (I'll know I've gone senile when I no longer can resist it.) I'm not magically immune to this crap, and I know it, so I avoid it. I rely on my own discipline to do it. But relying on a pre-teen's discipline is probably not a good plan.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#339

Post by housel »

organsnyder wrote: post #163
Isamu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever. LOL Yeah, Transmeta. That whole "stealth mode" startup mystery kept the buzz going. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta Re Microsoft the evil empire: it was deserved at the time. But it's nice to see they have a better reputation these days.

My college laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046) had a Transmeta Crusoe chip, running at 800 mhz. It was slow as molasses, but could easily do 15 hours of battery life (screen on) with the drive-bay and extended batteries, all in a sub-note form factor. It was a perfect note-taking machine (all of my real dev work was done on desktops or via SSH/telnet). Transmeta may have had a short lifespan, but I think they played a b…

I was still using my Transmeta-based Sony Vaio Picturebook as a router running FreeBSD up through January 2016. Before that in the early 2000s it made a great, extremely portable hacking laptop. The attention Transmeta got on Slashdot was probably instrumental in my buying it.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#340

Post by slackfan »

Iv wrote: post #252
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…

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

Prevented what exactly? We are living in the quintessential cyberpunk dystopia at this very moment.
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