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One thing I don't see mentioned is that Slashdot was a uniquely Michigan success story. They were an example to a lot of Michigan startups that you could be successful and stay in the state. I haven't seen him lately but CmdrTaco used to attend startup related events. One of the early Slashdot crew, Kurt DeMaagd, is now an assistant professor at Michigan State.
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That morning, slashdot was the only news related website that would load for me.
me too, it was a strange time where i think /. was the only place that was taking bursts seriously in hosting
So it's really the opposite: Slashdot was unprepared for bursting of this magnitude, but able to react reasonably quickly to combat the unpreparedness. Other sites were probably more prepared (CNN.com) but once the load exceeded their preparations, it took them a while to, you know, get permission from the big boss to make the site static and otherwise react. CNN and other major sites did get their act together in fairly short order, actually - it's not at all the case that they were down for an extended period - they figured things out pretty quickly, just not quite as quickly as Slashdot.
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> Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was In a lot of interesting varieties! Some even sort of artistic, and some precursors of later SomethingAwful/4chan/internet-meme types of things. I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Slashdot editor Rob Malda resigned from his editorship this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the HN community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy…
Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, covered in hot grits
Slashdot was the source of my now-permanent news habits, and, I believe, the Petri dish in which modern hacker culture was first cultivated. Slashdot had memes before they were called memes, or so it seems; most importantly, it had discussion via threaded comments and community moderation. I first used this handle on Slashdot, and whenever one of my sites goes down due to traffic, I'll say it's been slashdotted. But…
I remember the episode of The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose did a segment about Slashdot - and even hinted at morphing the concept more toward what he created with Digg (giving users more power to source stories - voted up purely on their merits).
/. has definitely had a big impact in the way we obtain our news (more targeted, and with social interaction). But I, like most people here, I imagine, left it long ago in favor of Digg, Reddit, or HN.
I've recently starting reading again after long time away. It's good again!
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…
I think a lot of people have a similar history with slashdot. I still ocationally go back but reading his fairwell and by his partner Hemos (2) 's reply reminded me of the best parts of Slashdot. PS: Ok, I admit it. I found the "you must be new here." reply really funny.
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…
> And since I'm going to have to find a job in a few months, I'm on LinkedIn as well. Well, this is going to be one short CV and cover letter... "I built slashdot" should be plenty enough, really.
Why does he even need a job? Didn't SlashDot earn him enough to live on for rest of his life?
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."
I'm fairly certain it was mentioned by a character in an issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's had reverberations across the geek ethos.
Slashdot was the source of my now-permanent news habits, and, I believe, the Petri dish in which modern hacker culture was first cultivated. Slashdot had memes before they were called memes, or so it seems; most importantly, it had discussion via threaded comments and community moderation. I first used this handle on Slashdot, and whenever one of my sites goes down due to traffic, I'll say it's been slashdotted. But…
Actually, "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene). Although, the meaning in popular culture has morphed from the generic definition (any self propagating idea) to refer to fast spreading cat videos and the like. I remember the episode of The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose did a segment about Slashdot - and even hinted at morphing the concept more toward what he created with Digg (giving users m…