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Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

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Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#41

Post by hollerith »

Alex3917 wrote: post #34
gallamine wrote: post #2

It's a shame that Steve Job's leaving overshadows this. Slashdot has been a rock of the internet for 14 years, and I still regularly visit it. This paragraph is good: In the last 14 years, Slashdot has covered so many amazing events: The explosion of Linux. The rise of Google. The return of Apple. The Dot Com Bubble. The DMCA. 9/11. Wars. Elections. Numerous successful Shuttle Launches and one Disaster. Scientific Br…

I think the span between the Columbine shooting and 9/11 was probably their peak. So many of my memories of /. involve national disasters.

/. is how I found out of the 9/11 attacks.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#42

Post by sgt »

burgerbrain wrote: post #19
napierzaza wrote: post #17

This will overshadow Steve Jobs' resignation.

It certainly has for me. Hardware is all nice and fine, but the informational content of slashdot has had far more profound effect on myself. I don't think I would recognize a version of me that grew up in a universe without slashdot. Unlike the hardware maker, I think I almost feel a tinge of emotion here.. think I'll go troll on slashdot a bit today, seems like the right thing to do.

I think he was being utterly sarcastic. :-)

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#43

Post by _delirium »

jcurbo wrote: post #31
whazzmaster wrote: post #9

I've been down on Slashdot for the last few years, even going so far as to remove it from my RSS reader and bookmarks bar. I check back sometimes here and there but devote most of my time to HN/reddit now. 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 importan…

Indeed, I entered college for CS in 1998 and Slashdot was my main source of tech news for many years. (userid #132!) The comments would actually have more info on the story, or even someone related to the story itself posting (e.g. Carmack) I still have /. in my RSS reader but don't really read the comments anymore... however one of the main reasons I come to HN is for the comments, just like /. years ago.

Re: Carmack, someone's collected all his Slashdot posts (1999-2008): http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/slashdot.html

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#44

Post by ac-slater »

I went to go see CmdrTaco speak in 2005. Someone asked him how to make a website as popular as Slashdot. Malda said to start it in 1997. Of course in the next year the meteoric rise of both digg and reddit began.

I think there is a moral here about not resting on your laurels and never thinking no one can catch up with you.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#45

Post by simmons »

kabdib wrote: post #4

It's made its way into near-future SF. Some character in a novel by Ken Macleod, faced with a Plot Device disaster, says to a friend "I can't even get to Slashdot."

In less-than-near-future SF, the antagonists in Alastair Reynolds' _Century Rain_, the "Slashers", were supposed to be the intellectual descendants of Slashdotters. From Wikipedia: ``...they trace their existence back to "an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the first computer networks", whose symbol was a slash and a dot.''

I had to groan a bit at this gratuitous reference in an otherwise tight novel. :)

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#46

Post by dasil003 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #10

Slashdot was my first true time-wasting site. During free periods in high school I'd read Slashdot compulsively -- as nicpottier observed, it was probably the first site where the comments were often more valuable than the story. Slashdot was a blog before the word 'blog' was coined. A universal shared experience, in my case for literally half a lifetime.

It's not enough to call Slashdot an early blog, because there were many proto-blogs at the time. Slashdot was actually social news before the era of user-generated content.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#47

Post by jellicle »

imroot wrote: post #40

If you've followed the lifespan of VA Software, OSDN, OSTG, GeekNet...I don't think this will come as a surprise to anyone. http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&... ; Slashdot built the community that a lot of people still have close ties to. I'll always remember reading my first few Bruce Perens posts, and adding him (and a few others) to my 'Friends' List. I'll also never forget listening to their market…

> I'll also never forget listening to their marketing person talk about how they could 'bitchslap' negative comments (about the advertiser) to -2 so that nobody could see them.

Citation, please?

Rob Malda's oft-cited bitchslap comment was about a script he had written to deal with Slashdot's most annoying commenters (people who used their own scripts to submit thousands of duplicate comments simultaneously), and had nothing to do with advertisers or marketing or denigrating products. In fact at the time the comment was written, I don't believe Slashdot had a marketing person outside of Jeff Bates.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#48

Post by burgerbrain »

sgt wrote: post #42
burgerbrain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly has for me. Hardware is all nice and fine, but the informational content of slashdot has had far more profound effect on myself. I don't think I would recognize a version of me that grew up in a universe without slashdot. Unlike the hardware maker, I think I almost feel a tinge of emotion here.. think I'll go troll on slashdot a bit today, seems like the right thing to do.

I think he was being utterly sarcastic. :-)

I suspected that, but is correct within the context of many communities.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#49

Post by arethuza »

nicpottier wrote: post #5

I don't visit /. anymore, but definitely grew up on it. I don't think you can understate the impact it had on a generation of geeks. Especially when it comes to Open Source, I think /. was incredibly important in educating people on a concept, history and philosophy many of us take for granted now. And hot grits aside, it really did set the bar for intelligent discussion. /. was the first site where the comments were…

Although it's been a while since I read /. regularly I did find myself being impressed by all the low UIDs in that discussion.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#50

Post by morsch »

_delirium wrote: post #3

Interesting decision. In practice I don't think this will change a lot, because it's been years since Slashdot was primarily the personal project of Malda; from what I can tell, he's been "just another editor" and a bit withdrawn from the decision-making for a few years now. But I can see wanting to do something else. For all its downsides, Slashdot is a quite interesting experiment imo. In terms of form: It was one…

Not only were the comments threaded, they also had an elaborate moderation and karma system in-place that still works very well. (With meta-moderation, to boot.) I often browse Slashdot at +5 to get a quick overview of the discussion. If there something interesting going on, it's easy to drill down and see the less popular posts and counterpoints related to the +5 post.

I think it's a great compromise: Get karma, you get a slight, but not overpowering, visibility boost. Lose karma or post anonymous, and you get a slight, but not overpowering, visibility malus. Capping the range of post ratings at -1 and 5 ensures that nothing ever truly gets voted into oblivion. Oh yes, and you can post anonymous -- even when logged in! How cool is that.

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