
Thanks For Reading: 15 Years of News For Nerds - thenextcorner
http://meta.slashdot.org/story/12/10/01/0631219/thanks-for-reading-15-years-of-news-for-nerds
======
spodek
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.

~~~
morsch
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.)

~~~
starpilot
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.

~~~
Evbn
So HN commenters do RTFA but don't comment on TFA?

~~~
chris_wot
That's not necessarily a bad thing. If you read the article and have nothing
to add, then best say nothing. Better than saying something about an article
you haven't read, that's for sure.

------
Alex3917
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.

~~~
tomjen3
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.

~~~
cooldeal
>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...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-drm-revealed-
in-windows-7)

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.

~~~
tomjen3
Tablets may be 70% iPads now, but the future isn't a single, locked down
platform.

The future is the web. And no single company can ever have a monopoly that is
strong enough to stand against the combined work of humanity.

You are too narrowly focused on the app store. As Apple fucks things up more
and more (see e.g maps, which Jobs would never have allowed) and with the new
Nexus 7 coming out the future of computability is only going to go one way --
HTML5 will become more and more powerful, Javascript interpretators is going
to become better, faster and leaner, and Android Tablets are going to be
better and better.

But even if we assume Apple is always going to reign supreme for all eternity
(and honestly, has any company ever done that?), they allow you to install any
'app' of the internet. It is available on the little icon next to the browser
bar and you can develop these apps on a windows PC, if you want. No license,
no control, more freedom than you ever had with MS and much easier to get
started too.

~~~
cooldeal
> ..they allow you to install any 'app' of the internet. It is available on
> the little icon next to the browser bar

Apple's already dragging its feet on things like HTML5. Jobs' memo about
deprecating Flash for HTML5 was 2.5 years ago, and we still see major issues
with HTML5 that are easy in Flash.

Not to mention using patents to put the kibosh on very important things like
touch events.

[http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/12/is-apple-using-patents-
to-h...](http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/12/is-apple-using-patents-to-hurt-open-
standards/)

<http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/12/09/apple-w3c>

------
btilly
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.)

~~~
bernardom
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.

~~~
btilly
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.

------
starpilot
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.

------
parasubvert
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
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
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>

------
cowmix
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.

------
bernardom
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>

~~~
mschaef
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.

------
OldSchool
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.

------
pohl
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
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.

------
LVB
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."

------
brindle
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.

------
five18pm
Happy Birthday Slashdot! It still has some of the best discussions in tech
world.

------
Zenst
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
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.org/)

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

~~~
jeza
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/19990209091342/http://www.slashdot.org/)

~~~
sgift
That is Bill Gates as a Borg - see first image here:
<http://www.startrek.com/database_article/borg>

A pun on the Borg motto "resistance is futile" with regard to Microsofts
dominance in pc space at the time.

~~~
jeza
Ah yeah, that makes sense. Thanks. I remember those days all too clearly.
Everyone assumed that because Microsoft dominated Desktop computing that they
would be able to leverage that into any future platforms. Even then, the
higher usage of Apache over IIS offered some hope.

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

~~~
staunch
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.

~~~
crusso
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.

------
Aardwolf
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.

------
arjn
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.

------
tehwebguy
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!

------
chris_wot
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...

------
lbcadden3
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.

------
bstar77
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.

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

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

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

