Thanks For Reading: 15 Years of News For Nerds

http://meta.slashdot.org/story/12/10/01/0631219/thanks-for-reading-15-years-of-news-for-nerds

by thenextcorner • 14 years ago

211 90 14 years ago

meta.slashdot.org

Zenst• 14 years ago

I recall slashdot back in the early days, very shortly afterwards a small company called google was also formed. Even though I'm approaching 50 years myself it is stories like this that makes me feel old.

digitalsushi• 14 years ago

It's easy to allow this 15 year anniversary to shock the system by number alone.

The real testament is to consider how visually similar slashdot is from iteration 1.

http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.or...

How fascinating is it for something to work as well as it has, for so long.

jeza3• 14 years ago

I noticed that as well, though they no longer have the image of Bill Gates with fire (I think?) coming out the side of his face for all Microsoft related stories. E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/19990209091342/http://www.slashdo...

spodek• 14 years ago

I joined Hacker News relatively recently, 514 days ago (not sure when I joined Slashdot, but my ID has five digits). I remember finding it more adult than Slashdot and appreciated its maturity, figuring I would leave Slashdot. Most posts here that mention Slashdot talk about its immaturity, superficiality, or something like that.

After not reading it for a while, I went back to check it out. Upon further review, I don't find Slashdot inferior to Hacker News. Obviously they're different so you can't compare them directly. Still, I find Slashdot, at least reading at +5, which is where I read it, funnier, no less insightful, and less self-important than Hacker News. I don't see evidence supporting the denigration, which I now consider unsupported snobbery. Do the posts below +5 bring Slashdot down?

That said, I post more here, but I read both.

randallsquared2• 14 years ago

I also have a five digit UID over there, but stopped going for the most part five or six years ago. The UI of reddit and then HN was so superior that it almost makes the quality argument moot.

Also, reading at +5 meant, at the time, that I mostly got highly-rated replies to questions or points I didn't see, which meant I then had to do a lot of clicking just to understand what was being said. Combine that with the constant clicking to get more comments or get rid of "helpful" bars that hang out in the middle of the screen, and I gave up, and would have even if I'd had no where else to go.

mhurron2• 14 years ago

> The UI of reddit ... was so superior

You can't be serious. Reddit is horrible to get around and horrible to read. It looks like a mass of disorganized text. Slashdot is far easier to understand how the flow of comments go and what is a new story and what isn't.

I can't find anything on Reddit.

mschaef2• 14 years ago

Same here... 31494, and I completely stopped reading Slashdot right around the time I discovered reddit.

What did it for me was the much higher volume of stories on reddit. So much of the time, I just didn't care about the Slashdot front page. This is still true on reddit, but at least with more stories there's a better chance of a decent hit rate.

That said, even reddit is getting less interesting these days.

dhughes• 14 years ago

It's geek cred to have a low Slashdot user ID too bad I can't remember mine :(

jeza3• 14 years ago

My account there is five digits as well (I probably didn't sign up straight away). The ironic thing is that I was probably about 15 years old myself when I started visiting Slashdot.

crusso3• 14 years ago

How can you compare reading Slashdot at +5 to reading the mostly unfiltered comments here? I think it's also telling that you only feel the desire to participate in discussion (post) here.

While I'd agree that some of the /. +5 comments can be worth reading, the populism, trolling, and general lack of real-world experience of other posters made participating in the discussions pointless and even counter-productive.

ctrlaltesc• 14 years ago

> How can you compare reading Slashdot at +5 to reading the mostly unfiltered comments here?

Because Slashdot actually provides the facilities to do so. If I could browse +5 HN comments then believe me I would.

> the populism, trolling, and general lack of real-world experience of other posters made participating in the discussions pointless and even counter-productive.

I could make the same argument about HN.

incision• 14 years ago

I stopped trying to participate on Slashdot in 2000, but never stopped reading the site entirely.

My issue was that while the place was great for informative posts on fairly objective topics like tech or science, it was pure groupthink for anything social or political. I felt completely unwelcome and alien to the clearly dominant demographic of the place.

ballooney• 14 years ago

If you don't think that's the case on HN, just look for a discussion about something that has anything at all to do with Elon Musk.

Gravityloss• 14 years ago

On scientific topics it's filled with totally clueless groupthinkers as well.

morsch• 14 years ago

The Slashdot moderation system is still fantastic. One thing I noticed recently:

As a popular story gets more and more comments, it gets more useful on Slashdot and less useful on Hacker News.

This is due to the overall UI and the moderation system. Slashdot had to implement functionality to deal with low S/N. Browsing on +5 lets you quickly get shallow overview of the interesting discussion in a short time even for stories with hundreds or thousands of comments. At the same time, you can easily burrow down on threads that seem interesting to you, e.g. see a +5's post (grand-) parent, its siblings and rebuttals. The moderation also makes it more feasible to find new ideas for a story you read in the past, and of course you can easily sort by date.

On Hacker News, when I visit a popular story, I usually read the first couple of screen pages, depending on my interest, that is the most highly ranked posts and their replies, which are sorted inline with them. I'm sure I miss a lot of content further down the page, not to mention on the other pages, which I never read.

And when I revisit a story that seemed interesting to me -- something I often did on Slashdot --, I am completely lost on HN. Finding posts that are both high-quality and new is way too much work. Sometimes I still do it, but I spend a lot of time seeing posts I had already read. Really, the only way I end up keeping up with previous discussion is when I keep track of replies to my own posts (which works better on HN than it does on Slashdot).

As HN's S/N is going down, finding good posts will continue to be an increasing problem. I know there are user scripts that both enable collapsing threads and hiding/marking read posts on Hacker News. I guess I should look into those. But for a truly effective solution, you'd need to know how the posts score. (I think Slashdot's system of capping comment score at 5 is also much superior to HN's solution of hiding the score.)

terhechte• 14 years ago

I agree, the Slashdot comment system really excels at high amounts of comments.

starpilot2• 14 years ago

I've noticed that top comments on HN are frequently meta (about the article's writing or author, not the article content) or flat-out disagree with it more often than on Slashdot. Readers here also tend to actually RTFA much more often before commenting.

undantag• 14 years ago

I recall pg initiating a discussion highlighting the declining quality (S/N) of comments at HN, and struggling to find a scalable approach of tackling it. Afaik slashdots approach has been published and works for them, so maybe that would be a good place to start looking?

See http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml and http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

YouWontSeeThis• 14 years ago

I'm surprised your account hasn't been shadow banned. HN usually doesn't allow meta-HN conversations. I suppose it's on topic here, but watch what you say.

guelo• 14 years ago

Before HN hid the comment scores it was possible to skim popular threads by looking for the well ranked comments, basically doing the +5 thing mentally. Now, popular stories becoming daunting with no clue if a particular long subthread has anything insightful.

redcircle2• 14 years ago

I stopped reading /. long ago due to the embellished story descriptions tacked onto the submissions. They are very judgemental, trollish, and became too trite for me to read any longer. As others here have mentioned, /. has some serious groupthink, and it is visible via the predictable submission summaries.

ubernostrum• 14 years ago

/. has some serious groupthink

Did you intend the irony here?

tedunangst• 14 years ago

The story descriptions, and multiple links, are the best part about slashdot. Instead of twenty submissions completely filling the front page with the latest "what it means to program" and its 19 blog replies, there's one story. With one comment thread, instead of twenty threads all starting off with the same "not this again" comment.

codex• 14 years ago

I find the content and focus different between Slashdot and HN--probably driven by the underlying demographics.

Slashdot tends to focus on stories that low-level IT workers and geeks care about: you see alot of sysadmin stuff, political activism from a geek-liberal point of view, oddball stories, etc. Basically, the IT equivalent of cat pictures. I believe the demographics skew to high schoolers and bearded gnomes.

HN, on the other hand, has more entrepreneurial, business, and hardcore science and technology stuff. The content tends to be more high-level and more useful to those in the know. The demographics are Y Combinator types (mainly naive recent college grads) with a mix of Googlers, VCs, other high-powered industry players.

That said, I suspect some Slashdot users have migrated to HN, which would explain a lot of recent changes at HN.

jff2• 14 years ago

What a delightfully condescending description!

g8oz• 14 years ago

I find HN has a noticeable air of self-important smugness and your post could well be exhibit A.

_delirium• 14 years ago

One thing I appreciate about Slashdot versus HN is more people with expertise in a broader range of science and engineering fields. HN is very good in certain areas of technology and business, but has relatively few civil engineers, physicists, climate scientists, chemical engineers, astronomers, etc., so the comments on those kinds of stories end up drifting more into speculation. On Slashdot, there are usually at least a few really good comments on the story from people with expertise in those areas.

twsted• 14 years ago

Exactly my thoughts

proex• 14 years ago

Almost the same here, I like Slashdot as much as HN for the content they bring to me and yes, the maturity (something very important on the web).

However, i can't get myself around their interface, i don't understand it/don't like it, i feel like their lacking a designer or something... in comparison with HN.

So, I spend less time on it, and didn't create an account or anything, eventhough i'd like to...their UI just doesn't feel right.

0xABADC0DA• 14 years ago

- Slashdot has the best moderation to show you the best posts.

- Reddit has best conversation because the red envelope tells you of replies.

- Hacker News has the best audience.

If these were combined into one site it would be hella cool, but unless HN evolves the tech I can tell you what site I won't expect to be around many years from now. Blacklisting unsavory contributors and deleting posts is only going to work to maintain standards for so long.

ImprovedSilence• 14 years ago

The biggest difference between Slashdot and Hacker News is that I find Slashdot to be much more accepting of humor. There is plenty of good discussion there, but there are also plenty of quality one liners and inside jokes, both of which seem to be lacking on hacker news. It's like two newspapers, but one has a comics section. That said, I think /. is an older crowd, and I got there late to the party, Hacker News is more my generation I suppose.

cmccabe• 14 years ago

I find Slashdot to be completely lacking in humor. It used to be different back before they cracked down on the trolls, but these days it's about as bland and humorless as you can get.

mkelley• 14 years ago

I don't remember when I first started reading slashdot, if I had to wager, I'd say 1999 or so. For many years it was my goto website. The first one I perused in the morning, and the last one in the evening. Hell, it was open all day long!

Alas, I think it's past it's prime by a few years now and it is sad to see it's decline. But time does its thing. With the advent of Hacker News (and yes reddit too!), and arguablly a new generation of developers who used to read /. in high school and college have grown up a bit, and a much more relevant "News for Nerds" website has evolved. Not to mention the high-caliber of people and personalities who actively participate in the HN forums. But I wonder if HN would exist today if not for slashdot?

So hat's off to you Rob Malda aka CmdrTaco (Important note: In Soviet Russia, the hat takes off you!). You did a fine thing and planted a seed 15 years ago that not only informed, inspired, and shaped a generation of nerds but also the internet as a whole.

Happy 15th Anniversary /.!

EDIT: grammar and stuff

dholowiski• 14 years ago

Sadly, my account was banned long ago for posting decss code (anyone remember that debacle?) and I never went back.

five18pm• 14 years ago

Happy Birthday Slashdot! It still has some of the best discussions in tech world.

etfb• 14 years ago

Wow - it's now older than most of the people who were commenting on it the last time I went there.

jacques_chester• 14 years ago

It's weird to realise that site you were on as a teenager has been around for literally half your life time.

staunch• 14 years ago

Seriously. I was ~13 when I created my /. account, reading about Linux and running my first servers. Now I'm almost 30 and doing the same kind of stuff and loving it just as much.

crusso3• 14 years ago

That's one of the great things about this industry.

What other everyday profession is so interesting to pick up as a teenager and so amenable to learning professional-level skills without ever leaving your house?

Sure, you could start studying medicine or the law at an early age, but no one will let you practice those things without a degree. You can't get experience operating on a cadaver when you're 12 like you can putting together some arduino circuits or a Node.js web site.

I always found it amusing how much emphasis recruiters placed on where I went to school in my first couple of jobs after college when so little of what I felt I brought to the job I actually learned at the University level.

lmm2• 14 years ago

To me /. feels like it's been around forever. Partly that's because I was on it when I was a kid, but it felt old even then, I think possibly because its great rival (adequacy) had already died (since when K5 and Plastic are also basically dead).

I get a weird feeling when I think that it's less than twice the age of 4chan, which still feels new and exciting (possibly because I was there in its first year and have watched it grow).

cowmix• 14 years ago

Number 10566 speakin' here.

/. to me is like a bad marriage. I can't stand it in general, constantly I complain about it, but for some reason I can't leave it.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

I find it bizarre that Slashdot still exists. It was essentially founded on the principles that:

- Technology can make society a better place

- Open source is the best way to make good technology

Yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia? It's been almost ten years.

And to the extent that most people are optimistic about technology in general today, it's a very cynical sort of optimism. I think these things are probably cyclical, but at least for right now how many people would actually want to live in a world where every morning the latest Eric S. Raymond essay was splashed across their homepage?

Slashdot was great in the late 90s, and pretty good in the early 2000s. But right now it just seems like an anachronistic holdout from a different time, a place where people still define their lives by the Columbine shooting and the year of Linux on the desktop is forever just around the corner.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

Obviously Linux on the desktop will never happen for mainstream people, but I can imagine a future where people use tablets to such a degree that the average person never interacts with a Windows PC (except, ironically enough, for iCloud).

As for belief that technology can make society a better place, that was never universual on /. (or the YRO section wouldn't exist) and I for one absolutely still believe it.

In many ways hn is a much more grown up version of /. we recognize that communism isn't a workable philosophy, that money can be pretty sweet and there is nothing wrong with making them so long that you provide real value for it.

Oh, and that AB tests are like printing money, once you have users.

But in the end, and even considering that my /. user id is much more than a few digits, I am pretty happy that it exist. The teenage me would not have been so into tech if it hadn't been for /.

So a happy birthday from me.

cooldeal2• 14 years ago

>I can imagine a future where people use tablets to such a degree that the average person never interacts with a Windows PC (except, ironically enough, for iCloud).

How does replacing the Windows PC with an iPad(70% of tablets sold are iPads) lead to a better future? If anything, it makes it a lot worse, locked down single hardware vendor, 30% cut of app price, 30% cut of in-app purchases etc.

This reflects the problem with many on Slashdot and even HN to some extent, the unhealthy fixation on beating MS (see Ubuntu bug #1) rather than promoting better and open software. MS is always seen dying by the next quarter from the 15 years that Slashdot has been in existence.

The amount of misinformation,knee jerk FUD, slanted coverage and story selection just gets annoying and repulsive after a while. For a small example see the summary and comments on this story from 2009 about Windows 7.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-dr...

The lesser said about the DRM FUD spread about Windows Vista, the better. And I see much of the same on HN too, articles not negative about Windows 8 are flagged off the front page quickly even if they ever reach it and all we ever seem to see are the negative ones.

This kind of insularity causes broadminded folks to leave the site(s) and makes the problem worse with the echo chamber.

FlukeATX• 14 years ago

> Yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia?

Android?

mongol• 14 years ago

I think Android is the "exciting" open source project at the moment.

pbhjpbhj2• 14 years ago

>last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia? It's been almost ten years. //

Like other's said, Android. Along similar lines - and sometimes called "open source" - there's Khan Academy.

Makerbot (! http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57520633-1/pulling-back-... and RaspberryPi are open[ish] projects but perhaps still too geek to be public interest.

Maybe "Course Builder" is public enough, or perhaps too restricted to educational space: http://www.itproportal.com/2012/09/13/open-source-education-....

Perhaps someone could answer "yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some [closed source] software project?" to give us an idea about what is meant.

Do the "general public" get excited about software as opposed to full products.

parasubvert• 14 years ago

I was an early Slashdot guy (# 1311), haven't posted in a year, but it was my top-3 tech news/opinion place for over 12 years. I still remember the (pointless) KDE vs. Gnome wars, the Microsoft Halloween memo, etc. I held the Toronto area Slashdot 10th anniversary party back in 2007 at a pub near U of T.

After Rob left last year, though, I felt the community shrunk a lot, and it doesn't quite have the character it used to have.

Hacker news does have a similar vibe to 1998-2002 Slashdot... instead of Microsoft vs. Linux being the dominant meme, it's Apple vs. Android. Though there are way more Apple supporters hanging here than MS supporters in the late 90's. Generally HN is more adult due to the moderation approach, but lots of posts degenerate into slug fests anyway.

joeyo• 14 years ago

Another similarity between Hacker News and early Slashdot (I'm user #173) is that both, despite being link aggregators, felt like primary sources due to the commentators. For a time Slashdot was read and commented on by all of the primary Open Source figures and and Linux contributors (Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, ESR, Miguel de Icaza, to name a few) and a lot of other random technical people (I seem to recall John Carmack would occasionally post). For pretty much any technical story there would be someone relevant on-hand to comment.

Of course, at the time there was not really a well-developed online technology press and there was minimal blogging, so that degree of centralization can probably never be recreated. Still, Hacker Hews has a bit of this--certainly for anything relevant to startups or Silicon Valley. To some extent reddit does too vis-a-vis their IAmA threads.

erik• 14 years ago

John Carmack did post there somewhat regularly.

http://slashdot.org/~John+Carmack/firehose

Paul Graham used to be a regular user as well.

http://slashdot.org/~bugbear/firehose

bootload• 14 years ago

"... For a time Slashdot was read and commented on by all of the primary Open Source figures and and Linux contributors (Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, ESR, Miguel de Icaza, to name a few) and a lot of other random technical people (I seem to recall John Carmack would occasionally post). For pretty much any technical story there would be someone relevant on-hand to comment. ..."

#2774 here, I remember this well and it had a great effect. Every comment I was ask myself to think real hard, "is that worth posting". As for /. this is what I wrote about 6/7 years ago, sound familiar?

/. gone to seed

Since 1996 I`ve been making crappy comments and observations on slashdot. And I must say while I still like to frequently check the stories. I find them less interesting. The comments are less informative. Innovation less than inspiring. Its not just the dilution of smart readers that is a problem. ~ http://slashdot.org/journal/123931/-gone-2-seed-37

bernardom2• 14 years ago

For everyone trying to figure out when they signed up: a poster named MyLongNickName linked to some research he did showing which UIDs correlate to which years.

http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year

mschaef2• 14 years ago

To take it back a bit further than he goes, I'm 31494 and registered sometime in late 97, early 98.

What's interesting about the numbers he presents is that there's a definite increase in growth rate (~2x) around 2008-2009.

pohl• 14 years ago

Happy 15th birthday from user #872. Back when Rob Malda started you, it was such a thrill to read the posts of far-flung techies whose interests went beyond what the real "tech news" press was covering. It's almost painful to go back now and read what has become of you. There are only so many racist trolls one can encounter before it ruins the whole experience.

kyrra• 14 years ago

That can be said about any public forum. Once a group gets large enough you start to get noise that needs to be filtered out. As long as you browse comments at +4 or +5 its not bad. If you play the moderator roll you have to expect crap. Immature people will fill and forum they can find with crap. It's just something we have to deal with as users of the Internet.

bstar77• 14 years ago

I have found that I have outgrown the cranky, uncompromising userbase of that site. HN users (despite being extremely divisive at times), seem to be much more accepting of disruptive technological changes.

tehwebguy• 14 years ago

There has been a place in my heart for Slashdot since maybe 2004 or 2005, when I started reading it.

Over time I completely stopped reading the comments, but the front page has been a decent indicator of medium to big tech news, plus lots of niche stuff that I likely would never have known about otherwise!

Aardwolf• 14 years ago

I only recently started visiting hacker news more often than slashdot. I love slashdot because of the interesting discussions. I think the comments on slashdot are still the best. But the problem that started to annoy me more and more is the articles themselves, which are often 3 days late, often too political, often plain advertising, and sometimes have a summary including something everyone knows like "WWW, which means World Wide Web", baffling the commentators.

And that's why I like hacker news now: more technical, less political.

mdlthree• 14 years ago

Thats was a great Q/A article on fusion. That one deserves sticky.

starpilot2• 14 years ago

Slashdot has stayed much more consistently tech than HN. That's partly by design; HN is meant for stories "deeply insightful" and apparently "good hackers aren't just interested in tech." pg submitted a story about his favorite restaurant, that's just a community aspect here (something Slashdot really lacks, especially since it's more anonymous than HN). On the other hand, a lot of it is due to their story selection relying on approval by a handful of editors, versus the anyone can upvote on most social news sites. This really anchored their content in tech. Digg rose and fell as a tech news site as its userbase drifted into shallow entertainment news, taking the top ten stories with them. Same with the Reddit frontpage, though many subreddits are still good. Slashdot has outlasted both of them, and even one-ups HN a bit at avoiding unimportant but drama-filled stories (SV journalists writing about each other, tweet wars, allegations of plagiarism etc.). If anything, the selective greenlighting of stories (versus redlighting through moderation) helps avoid gossipy "news" that evokes strong emotions in readers but are of little to no importance.

OldSchool• 14 years ago

I've only ever lurked on slashdot for many years. For me it's gotten too much political/legal and mega-corporation love/hate content.

HN is very new to me, but I like the content since it's mostly technical and without much if any religious argument over various platforms, languages, and technologies.

If I had to call out HN on something it's the somewhat naive "startup" vibe I get. There are many shades of success in business between cratering and being the next Facebook and they're the most likely place we all end up.

btilly2• 14 years ago

Wow. I remember Slashdot. I was very active there before they had accounts. When they first introduced community moderation, I was one of the people chosen to be moderators. Then after the volume increased it lost all possibility for extended discussion, so I burned out on it. Years later they had a password compromise. So I changed my password, lost the new one, and of course it is tied to a no longer exising email address so I can't get my account back.

If anyone is curious, I was once http://slashdot.org/~Tilly there. My last comment there was a dozen years ago. (I've commented as AC a few times since, but not much.)

bernardom2• 14 years ago

Tilly, if it helps, the same thing happened to me. I contacted them a few months ago and they were kind enough to reset me based on knowing some information such as the old email.

btilly2• 14 years ago

That is good to know, but /. seems sufficiently dead for conversation that I see no point in going back.

If there was a point, I'd not have left in the first place, or else I'd have created another account.

brindle• 14 years ago

Slashdot was one of the first weblog frameworks, written in Perl, and was very similar in the beginning to the vibe I get from Hacker News. It (slashcode) was also Open Source. These days I feel Hacker New has more of an edge and, like Slashdot used to be, is "right there" when it comes to technology.

Slashdot was one of the few sites that could handle the load when 911 went down and it was my main source of information that day. About a week later they posted a detailed report on how they handled the load - It was excellent.

Things have changed for them, they were bought out and the founders have moved on, but its still a decent site and I find it easier to use than HN.

arjn• 14 years ago

I've been following Slashdot for a long long time now, probably 12 years or more. Was an avid, daily reader. Recently of course its been proggit and HN and newer sites. Nostalgia ! I hope they stay around for a long long time. One complaint is that the rate of new articles/stories is slow when compared to the newer sites.

LVB• 14 years ago

The hook for me 15 years ago: seeing a Slashdot poll asking how many screws were actually screwed in on my computer case. I thought, "Wow... now these people are really on my wavelength."

Evbn3• 14 years ago

Glad to see the 15th anniversary announcement has the sort of typo that made the editors famous &mdash they've still got it.

lbcadden3• 14 years ago

My biggest complaint about /. is through a combination of other sites it takes a half a day or more for stories I'm interested in to hit it, so by the time they are there I have already read them. The comments there add very little to the conversation imo.

chris_wot2• 14 years ago

I'd have to say I migrated from slashdot to Kuro5hin (first place I made a name for myself), then on to Wikipedia where I really made a name for myself, then after being booted off Wikipedia I guess I found this place :-)

I seem to have bypassed Reddit completely. Don't know how that happened...

Thanks For Reading: 15 Years of News For Nerds

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