Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot • Hacker News Board

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#101

Post by ktsmith » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 8:45 PM UTC

hemos wrote: post #91

icebraining wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>thinking no one can catch up with you. Did he actually do that, or just told the only way he personally knew how to do it?

The latter. I can testify to that. And if you look back at when Kevin Rose was doing the G4 stuff, there's an interview with Rob where Kevin asks Rob what he would do different. Rob outlines basically Slashdot + user voting. A few months later, Digg comes out. True story.

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/8892/interview-with-cmdrtaco-slas...

October 2004 for the interview and Digg launched in December.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#102

Post by mindcrime » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 8:50 PM UTC

spiffworks wrote: post #83

zavulon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, covered in hot grits

Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past. If we cannot scorn ourselves, we run the risk of taking ourselves to seriously.

Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past.

I do as well, but I also keep reminding myself "This is Hacker News, not Slashdot." And so I down-vote people who post memes and the typical /. off-topic crap. I just always take comfort in knowing that, when I want that stuff, Slashdot is still around.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#103

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 9:13 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #71

sunchild wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy the idea that this account wreaks havoc on nyt.com's internal metrics.

And that they certainly know about it, and still let it go on... you have to think that they are in on the joke.

[deleted]

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#104

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 9:19 PM UTC

imroot wrote: post #59

jellicle wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This was during a call I was on with their Marketing team when the company that I was working for planned to do a mini sub-site within slashdot to extol and display the features of their newest product line. I don't believe it is public record, otherwise I would cite it.

[deleted]

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#105

Post by mckoss » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 9:50 PM UTC

hemos wrote: post #90

mckoss wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's been interesting to see is the gradual migration back from Digg & Reddit; not so much HN. But the issue tends to happen when sites begin to try and cover "everything" that you end up driving out the original and central audience.

Digg really shot themselves in the foot when they tried to make the site "personalized" - most in their audience wanted there to be just "one" primary home page.

Reddit seems to have been able to create many successful smaller communities around sub-reddits.

It's another lesson that trying to be all things to all people usually satisfies no one.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#106

Post by trafficlight » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 9:51 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #102

spiffworks wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past. If we cannot scorn ourselves, we run the risk of taking ourselves to seriously.

Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past. I do as well, but I also keep reminding myself "This is Hacker News, not Slashdot." And so I down-vote people who post memes and the typical /. off-topic crap. I just always take comfort in knowing that, when I want that stuff, Slashdot is still around.

I get my meme fix on Reddit these days.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#107

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 10:04 PM UTC

trafficlight wrote: post #106

mindcrime wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past. I do as well, but I also keep reminding myself "This is Hacker News, not Slashdot." And so I down-vote people who post memes and the typical /. off-topic crap. I just always take comfort in knowing that, when I want that stuff, Slashdot is still around.

I get my meme fix on Reddit these days.

[deleted]

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#108

Post by possibilistic » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 10:08 PM UTC

hemos wrote: post #87

morsch wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The moderation system is one of the things Rob and I are most proud of. We set out to make a system that would allow for anonymous postings while avoiding it turning into Usenet. I think, with some hiccups, we largely succeeded. We also took careful steps to make sure that we get anonymized all the data; all the IPs and subnets are hashed, so even we can't go back and find the real IP while still having something to…

You guys did great! Nothing in the world even comes close to /. moderation.

Reddit is a prime example of a simple karma system going off the deep end. Instead of reinforcing good behavior, the trend is now that a substantial majority of the community competes for karma score. The noise level has increased sharply over the previous years such that the "popular reddits" are now in the same domain as Digg or 4chan. (Thankfully subreddits such as proggit are still an excellent source of information.)

I think karma works here at HN because it is a hidden score (to avoid the Reddit scenario) and the community heavily discourages low-quality posts. In a sense it relies directly on the userbase mentality and could easily be negated by a change in demographics. (Hopefully we maintain a high signal:noise ratio...)

/. meta moderation rewards users for moderating "correctly" and it doesn't consider the sum input of all users. It's not something that every community could or should adopt, but it certainly seems to have prevented a large fluctuation in community quality for well over a decade. It's also really awesome that comments are not just quantitatively scored, but also have qualitative tags.

Both you and Rob have effected the evolution of the Web as well as how we consume our news in more ways than we'll ever know.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#109

Post by prawn » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 10:54 PM UTC

bcl wrote: post #21

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…

I quit reading /. when the comments became too difficult to wade through, even when reading only +5's the system became overloaded with noise so I stopped visiting. HN is now my go-to site for news, due to the high quality of the comments (read 'em first to see if the link is worth the time) and the generally high value of articles.

I quit years ago when the obvious meme-jokes heavily outweighed any interesting discussion. Even knocking down Funny posts didn't always help.

On the very few occasions when I've returned, I've also really, really disliked the adjustments to the comment filtering and viewing - looks ugly and seems quite confusing. Like others, I do think they had an excellent moderation system that no one else seems to have matched since.

With you on the switch to HN as well. I deleted /. from my bookmarks a few years back and have probably visited twice in the last year just to see if it's still alive.

Re: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

#110

Post by zem » Thu, Aug 25, 2011, 11:03 PM UTC

mrcapers wrote: post #51

matthavener wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite memories from /. was refreshing to see a new version of the kernel was available. You'd spend a few hours downloading it, compiling, and reboot. Usually there were no new features you wanted, no bugs fixed, just the idea of being on the bleeding edge was "cool" enough.

+1 this. remember doing this when i was 12 or 13 in late 90s/early 00s. /. made it exciting to be a geek.

being on a rolling release distro means you still get the thrill of running a bleeding-edge kernel :) and no, i never really outgrew that.