Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot
meta.slashdot.org

For all its downsides, Slashdot is a quite interesting experiment imo.

In terms of form: It was one of the first (the first?) widely read tech blogs, in the sense of something that posted about technology in reverse chronological order, with a comments section below it (the comments section was even threaded). The idea of having users submit stories and write blurbs was also fairly novel, and has led to several different directions. Kuro5hin and MetaFilter took it in one direction, expanding from blurbs to more general kinds of article submissions (and Kuro5hin switched to voting rather than editorial curation), while Reddit/Digg/HN took it in the opposite direction, paring it down to link submissions with no blurb (again with voting).

In terms of content, imo it was a main way, especially in the late 90s, that a generation of tech people were introduced to things like the EFF, free software, problems of software patents, driver support for Linux, hardware hackability, and other such techno-liberty type things. Those predated Slashdot, of course, but it sort of crystallized a community on the web, alongside those that had previously been organized mainly around mailing lists, Usenet, etc. It also gained considerable mindshare for those ideas from a broader set of readers who weren't necessarily "activists".

And hot grits aside, it really did set the bar for intelligent discussion. /. was the first site where the comments were always more valuable than the articles. RTFA's were common, sure, but so was incredible insight and inside knowledge. That's what made it all so addictive.

I remember hitting refresh constantly on /. during 911. Personally, I found it the best source of information anywhere, though you had to have your own sanity filter on as well.

Thanks cmdrtaco, and congratulations on a real legacy. For me at least, /. is mostly replaced now, but that doesn't diminish what it was.

Last time I went to the website I was surprised it was still online and I felt really sad when I realized the frontpage submissions were weeks old.

I feel old now, missing the 90s pre-bubble internet and I am sad I was just a few years too late to that party back then. sigh

Taco's farewell (and Hemos' reply in comments) really brought to me back why I liked Slashdot in the first place back in 1998- an editorial voice curating interesting tech stories.

That editorial voice was important to me in 1998, as I was in college for CS and was really uninformed about things like (as _delirium notes in this thread) the EFF, the RIAA, open source software, The Many Uses of Linux, etc. I compare that to today when I just scan lists of links on reddit or HN and pick out the items that interest me. The editorial voice was a good starting point for me- it directed me to interesting things that I couldn't have fathomed. As I grew into my techy career and interests, I needed it less and less.

I hope it's not viewed as complaining or whatnot, but I do wonder if anyone else avoids Slashdot in 2011 almost purely because of the commenters' obnoxiousness. I always get a picture of sysadmin-like greybeards pounding away furiously at their keyboards the moment anyone suggests that some software, somewhere be written in something other than C or perl. Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was (and "-5, Troll"? shudder.) And for that I thank you.