
A Pre-History of Slashdot - cmdrtaco
https://medium.com/@cmdrtaco/a-pre-history-of-slashdot-6403341dabae
======
gfodor
I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched
a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If
you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all
the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :))

I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /.
and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much
any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. At the the
height of it these people were painted as communists by Microsoft (and if they
had any real visibility in the media, I'd imagine they'd have gotten the same
treatment.)

But here I am today sitting at my desk at Mozilla committed to working only on
open source software for the rest of my career and never writing another line
of proprietary code, after having seen enough good and pure-intentioned closed
source projects morph and turn bad after the pointy haired bosses, the
"visionaries", and the investor class got enough control over them.

I guess those days have always been in the back of my mind. It took a lot of
life lessons to really understand how important the things the /. community
was always debating back then around software licenses, privacy, and IP really
were. Images of "billg" as the borg were fun, but behind those gags were
serious conversations that ended up shaping our world, and ensuring to one
degree or another there would always be a hedge against corporate control of
software.

In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet
infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web, a community
like /. is sorely needed. Here we are on the modern day equivalent, a site
owned and operated by a startup incubator. It's fortunate that a community
like this exists at all in some form, but how truly times have changed.

~~~
samstave
>> __ _In today 's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of
internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web_ __

I am going to have to call you out.

I had a low-digit ID on /.

We (people like me) have been calling this out for FUCKING DECADES.

I feel that we can talk about generational millenials etc.. but we can also
call out DIGITAL millenials; those who thing they know what the fuck is up
just because they "work at facebook"

I have been a whistle against NSA router backdoors since 1997...

So nobody wanted to hear it then - and the giants have surpassed me - and I
concede...

but to think that this is some freaking revelation is bullshit.

We have been talking about it for literally decades. FFS FB threatened to sue
me for that which I revealed even here on HN.

Today's "world" has been here since the 70s.

~~~
serf
same story here. Low number ID, privacy advocate, etc since the 90s.

the part that disgusts me recently is that when these conspiracies are turned
into fact by post-facto released information from official sources, a good
amount of the reaction is "So? Everyone already knew that anyway."

I feel like that reaction is so blasé that it will ultimately be the
deathknell of the personal privacy movement.

Whether or not the propagation of that kind of attitude and reaction to such
things is state-induced is another question, but the damage that such opinions
do to such activism is definetly real. If I were an adversary to a cause, I
would definetly consider those kind of tactics against the ideals of my enemy.

~~~
Natsu
Yeah, it's funny. We all heard about ECHELON a long time ago, only to find out
it was true and that not many people care because they don't really get what
it means.

------
soulskill
I was with Slashdot for 8 years. There are a lot of memories I could share,
but the thing I appreciated most about my time there was just how much Rob
(and the core team of engineers and editors) really _cared_ about the site and
its users. It's rare to see such conviction from tech companies or leaders of
large, user-centric websites.

I'm not sure Slashdot's users ever really understood how much time and energy
Rob expended defending the site from user-hostile changes tossed without
concern from the upper echelons of the org chart.

Thanks Rob.

~~~
chris_wot
They sent pizza to Kuro5hin during a difficult time. That showed real class.

~~~
jrmg
Oh, man, Kuro5hin! That was such a great, diverse, welcoming site for a couple
of years. So sad what it descended into.

~~~
chris_wot
For anyone who wonders why HN mods are overly strict, then note that Kuro5hin
tolerated trolls and they utterly destroyed the site. It doesn't exist any
more.

~~~
dredmorbius
It _had_ limped along until a year or so back when the server finally fell
over.

The domain is parked now.

But yeah, the trolls pretty much ruined it, life lesson. Rusty turned up
running a Mastodon instance, though I haven't seen him for a few months.

~~~
wowtip
The change in direction of content of kuro5hin, is that the trolls you refer
to?

I just visited sporadically and noticed focus drifted from tech related and
interesting to political and sometimes into conspiracy theory areas around the
time when I stopped visiting.

~~~
dredmorbius
Not OP, but that was a significant part of it, yes.

Both the quality / topic of posts, and of discussion, faded quickly.

------
jedberg
Thanks Rob for the trip down memory lane. I have two to share:

I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update
the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built
small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification
reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes.

My second memory was when I was working for Sendmail. Because we were “famous”
and appeared on Slashdot for every Sendmail release, one of my first jobs was
helping the senior admins set up a new web server for Sendmail.org. I was told
by the creators of Sendmail “this server must be able to handle getting
Slashdotted.”

So we bought the biggest Dell server we could find, put it in Level 3 in San
Francisco (back when they still hosted things — that datacenter is now
Dropbox’s HQ), and then I asked the creator of Bind if he could secondary my
DNS on a.root-servers.net. When he actually replied and said yes I felt huge
pressure to get that entry right and was a bit starstruck.

I was also awestruck as I was doing tail -f on the logs and we hit Slashdot
for the first time after setting up the server. I couldn’t believe one site
could send _that_ much traffic.

If it weren’t for you none of that would have happened, so thanks Rob!

~~~
fred_is_fred
> I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to
> update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes,
> so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a
> notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes.

I did something similar but then at some point I ended up blocking
slashdot.org in my hosts file because it was killing my ability to focus or
get work done. I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work.

~~~
smacktoward
_> I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work._

I used to have one of those! Sadly, Natalie Portman filled it with hot grits.

~~~
otakucode
It makes my heart swell to know there are still those out there thinking of
dear Natalie, petrified and with hot grits down her pants...

~~~
shortoncash
I don't have time for Natalie; I'm fretting over Netcraft's confirmation that
BSD is dying.

~~~
smacktoward
We need a poll to determine what CowboyNeal says on the matter.

~~~
mixmax
CowboyNeal is busy waiting for DukeNukem 3D to come out

------
conesus
I never publicly announced this but I loved Slashdot’s friend/foe system so
much that I built it as a cross browser extension for Hacker News. It’s called
Hacker Smacker and it’s on GitHub.

[https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker](https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker)

Supports not only friends and foes but also friends of friends and foes of
friends. Makes it easy to scan the HN homepage and comment threads and see
what’s good. Much like how Slashdot’s friend foe system highlighted the good
stuff in threads.

~~~
KGIII
I have wanted HN to have a friend/foe system since I first found the site. I'd
also like it to have the ability to make notes, like 'farkies' from Fark.

On Slashdot, you simply add them to a friend or for list. On Fark, you get to
flag them in certai colors and then leave yourself a note (other people can't
see it but admins probably can) that I use to remind me of why I put them on
the list.

I'd like a combination of those two things. A simple friend/foe list with
comments that show next to their name. I'd have no use for ignore
functionality. Also, I usually use said note to write polite things that help
me remember the user.

I think it encourages getting to know the other people and humanizes the
pixels on the screen. Both sites have led to my meeting people in real life
and making real life friendships. That's easier, for me at least, when I can
more easily identify them as individuals and remember them.

~~~
themaninthedark
Slashdot is where I first read your comments, then you didn't post for a while
and I found HN and you post here too!

I didn't create an account on /. since AC was easy and I mostly lurk anyway
but I always enjoyed the insights that everyone brought.

I remember either around the time of the revelation of the NSA phone closets
there was a guy who used to do SIGINT and he posted a bunch on how to avoid
surveillance. I think he had moved to the Philippines, sometimes what happened
to him.

Just wanted to say hi and that you seem like an interesting guy!

~~~
KGIII
Thanks! I took the karma hit to say hi to taco, in the thread. Worth it!

------
AndrewStephens
I remember the early days of slashdot fondly, although I didn't actually make
an account until a few years later. It was such an interesting mix of serious
discussion, in-jokes, and amusing trolls (even the infamous goatsx troll that
I fell for more than once.)

I still think that the moderation and meta-moderation was one of the most
interesting experiments in a self-governing commenting system, even though it
was clear that it was mostly a failure in the long run. My conclusion is that
a site needs hands-on human moderation to maintain quality.

Slashdot is also a perfect example of the general life-cycle of cool social
site. Humble beginnings -> lots of interesting people -> own little subculture
-> lots of interesting content with some impenetrable in-jokes -> existing
userbase ages out as they get jobs or have kids -> less interesting content,
more in-jokes -> owners sell -> dry husk of a site remains.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
More like:

1\. Group #1 joins who care about site

2\. Group #1 improves site. Sense of "community" keeps things in check.

3\. Site grows in popularity and group #2 joins

4\. Site loses sense of community and ability to moderate itself effectively.

5\. Group #1 leaves

~~~
ktta
For some reason I think this going to happen to HN too, and I feel it is at 3.
And I'm not sure if I'm in group #1 or group #2.

~~~
nathanm412
I think it's been at step 3 for longer than most sites have last. I know I'm
part of group 2, but I've seen a somewhat consistent culture since I arrived
over five years ago.

~~~
ktta
Looks like you joined about 5 1/2 years ago. I'm surprised you think you're
part of Group #2.

Before what date do you think people can be group #1? Or are you ascribing the
group number to contributions rather than date of joining?

~~~
stingrae
When a friend first recommended hackernews to me it didn't show up in google
searches. So I gave up. I think techcrunch finally led me to finding it. By
the time I actually created an account(just 10 days before nathan^), people
were already complaining about the deterioration of the community, so I
assumed I was in group 2.

~~~
Jaruzel
I am most definitely Group #2. I wish I was Group #1, but I was too loyal to
/. (and a few other sites), and after /. got DICEd along with the 'f*ck beta'
stuff I jumped ship to Soylentnews.org which had an okay community but a
rather fascist set of admins (despite what their manifesto says).

So after a few months of lurking, I registered here, and now it's my daily[1]
go-to site.

\---

[1] Hourly. :)

------
MattGrommes
Slashdot user #578 here. :) Besides pre-web stuff like Usenet and BBS boards
/. was the first place I really felt like part of a community. I still
remember fondly the times that stuff I submitted made it to the front page
(like the story announcing the title of Star Wars Episode 1), like I was now
"famous" with a bunch of people I really wanted to impress. Like most of us, I
drifted away a long time ago but I'm always happy to see people in new
communities who were around back then. Happy Birthday /. and thanks for all
the grits!

~~~
jasongill
User #527 here. I sold my username (iota) on eBay for $150, back when your
slashdot user number still meant something. I've always wondered what the
buyer was up to, it was funny at the time to think of "selling" something that
didn't exist. I guess it's commonplace now

~~~
flachsechs
came here looking for a story like this. i had a 2-digit id that i
coincidentally sold for exactly $150 on ebay also. college beer money. don't
regret it at all.

cmdrtaco announced his site on irc and i happened to see it in the first few
days.

~~~
hyperbovine
I remember /. before user reg even existed. There was some buildup to it
finally being released, I recall. I signed on within an hour of it going live
and though it was all pointless. Guess that's why I wound up with a 4-digit
uid instead of a 2-digit one :)

------
jonstokes
Slashdot was a major inspiration to us as we grew Ars Technica, not to mention
a major source of critical traffic and growth in those early years.

Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)

~~~
qmarchi
Frequent reader of Ars, I don't comment/post much on Civis but enjoy reading
the deep dives into updates like Oreo and iOS 11.

~~~
digi_owl
Sadly these "deep dives" feels more and more shallow these days. More and more
they are about "look and feel" or pixel counting rather than the meat and
potatoes.

Frankly these days Ars Technica could just as well be relabeled Apple
Technica. The site scuttled their coverage of FOSS and similar under prominent
sections, while the Apple stuff keep leaking out from their "infinite loop"
section.

These days if it is not Apple related, it gets binned under their generic
"gadgets" section.

And this from the site that got me interested in Linux in the first place back
when it was black and orange, and housed a multipage introduction to Linux
internals.

------
chrissnell
User #5825 here. Here are a few of my favorites:

The whole anti-Microsoft movement on /. Thy were the evil empire and Google
was saintly. It’s funny how times change.

The weather station we sent you in hopes of doing a promotion for our weather
equipment site, weathertools.com.

OOG THE CAVEMAN. He was DevOpsBorat at least a decade before Twitter.

The launch of Mac OS X and the launch of the first titanium PowerBook.

That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever.
LOL

~~~
Isamu
> That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever.
> LOL

Yeah, Transmeta. That whole "stealth mode" startup mystery kept the buzz
going.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta)

Re Microsoft the evil empire: it was deserved at the time. But it's nice to
see they have a better reputation these days.

~~~
organsnyder
My college laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046) had a Transmeta Crusoe chip,
running at 800 mhz. It was slow as molasses, but could easily do 15 hours of
battery life (screen on) with the drive-bay and extended batteries, all in a
sub-note form factor. It was a perfect note-taking machine (all of my real dev
work was done on desktops or via SSH/telnet). Transmeta may have had a short
lifespan, but I think they played a big part in jumpstarting Intel's movement
to focus on power consumption (remember, this was the Pentium 4 era).

~~~
housel
I was still using my Transmeta-based Sony Vaio Picturebook as a router running
FreeBSD up through January 2016. Before that in the early 2000s it made a
great, extremely portable hacking laptop. The attention Transmeta got on
Slashdot was probably instrumental in my buying it.

~~~
organsnyder
Slashdot was definitely instrumental to me buying mine. I never would have
heard of Transmeta otherwise, and I found out about the Fujitsu through
Transmeta's site.

------
rmason
Whether they know it or not Slashdot inspired a lot of Michigan startup
founders. They proved that you didn't have to be in Silicon Valley to found a
notable company.

I well remember after reading Slashdot for a few months and then finding out
that they were in West Michigan and being absolutely floored.

Fun fact one of Rob's friends who helped found the company is now a professor
at Michigan State University:

[https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html](https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html)

~~~
DocWoodside
Kurt is also involved with Sight Machine:
[http://sightmachine.com/company/#leadership](http://sightmachine.com/company/#leadership)

------
drallison
Slashdot has been a major influence. Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot.
Sergey Brin, for example, was a great fan. To be mentioned on slashdot was a
meant instant saturation for a website. Personally, I miss CmdrTaco's wry take
on the new of the moment.

~~~
cmdrtaco
Thanks!

~~~
blakesterz
Wow, just realized something totally crazy.. Honestly, I ended up where I am
today because of Slashdot. In 1999 I wanted to build a Slashdot site but had
no idea what I was doing. So I sat down and just learned how all that stuff
worked, ran phpSlash for a while, then Slashcode, then Drupal. All the while I
kept learning to code and run servers because of my little site. All the while
new doors opened, and I kept working and learning... and now 18 years later
I'm doing what I do because of your site. I've had a great little career, so
many thanks for helping me get here :-)

~~~
cmdrtaco
That makes two of us!

------
clutchdude
Thanks cmdrtaco!

Throughout the years, I'd turn to /. to keep up to date on latest shakings and
goings ons. I first heard about MythTV there back in the heady days before the
home media landscape was bought up and "civilized". I got to see a constant
reminders of the failings for the RIAA and so....many....patent troll cases. I
remember the crap packt publishing reviews too - basically getting someone to
pimp their book. Tons of discussions on cell phones and where the technology
was going before Apple did put out the 3g phone and created the walled gardens
we have today...then reading about the jailbreaking and what not that was
created.

I owe a lot to /. for helping shape me into the slightly jaded but functional
developer I am today.

One of my fondest memories was the time we did an Oktoberfest party on the
10th anniversary of /. We were the only party in the state I think.

~~~
visarga
I remember the endless IBM vs. SCO lawsuit discussions.

~~~
digi_owl
heh, now i remind myself that i still have User Friendly in the RSS reader.
Anyone know what Illiad is up to these days?

~~~
syntheticnature
Still posting comics?
[http://www.userfriendly.org/](http://www.userfriendly.org/)

~~~
digi_owl
My impression is that the page has been doing reruns for years now, ever since
he posted that he would be taking time off.

I notice that they have since stopped labeling reruns with a original post
date in the upper right corner.

------
hprotagonist
I have some real fond memories of reading slashdot before classes in high
school. I think my favorite was the day Rob proposed, and I was late to AP
chemistry because I was frantically reloading the page to see what happened..

Through it i discovered the EFF, the jargon file, the FSF, and much else (hot
grits, anyone?), and I miss that community. I haven't spent any serious time
there in about 8 years.

~~~
digi_owl
I check the comments from time to time, but i fear the place is crawling with
paid shills these days.

~~~
lightedman
You can pretty much safely ignore most things coming from 7-digit UIDs and not
have to worry about the shills so much.

------
raphlinus
Slashdot was one of the main inspirations for Advogato. One clue in support of
this is that the codebase was called "mod_virgule". The trust metrics were
designed to be a more sophisticated moderation system than what Slashdot did,
but in retrospect I'm not sure it actually worked that much better; Advogato
never reached a mass audience and to the extent it had higher quality posts it
was probably due to a smaller and more focused community.

I still have my slashdot account (number 3148), but rarely use it. I can well
imagine the "complicated feelings" that Rob has, and wanted to add my voice to
the many saying that Slashdot was an important Internet space.

------
whathaschanged
Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on
everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. It would be the
equivalent of HN forcing autoplay videos and animated banner ads on each page.

A lesson to reflect upon--monetizing is ok when it doesn't kill your userbase.
My ID is under 5000 (cue the older ID replies) and I refuse to give them
pageviews now.

~~~
geezerjay
> Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign
> on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great.

The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I
assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it
real dead.

~~~
rhizome
No, the redesign made it unusable, with an inscrutable learning curve. The
astroturfers then took over once the organic traffic dropped off a cliff.

~~~
geezerjay
I recall that the redesign might have been very ugly but didn't increased the
learning curve. Yet, the userbase stuck around and pushed for at least a way
to get their old slashdot back. Complaining about slashdot's lack of unicode
support was a in-joke.

But then the astroturfing problem blew up and in no time killed slashdot. The
community tolerated trolls, even the infamous GNAA, but slashdot's industrial-
level astroturfing campaigns in what I believe to be collulsion with site
maintainers was something that was massively abhorrent.

~~~
rhizome
The redesign changed the filtering and visibility settings and the way they
worked. It was virtually impossible to read the way I did prior to the
redesign.

------
ChuckMcM
Hah, my daughter was in Voorhees freshman year (hmm, it might have been Van
Vleck (sp?) the first year but there was a year she was in Voorhees). And all
this time she had no idea she was living and studying in a place of historical
interest :-)

The great thing this shares with a lot of stories about that time is that Rob
didn't say "What can I build that will make me a million bucks?" instead he
was just providing a service that was interesting and useful to him and people
who shared his interests (which turned out to be a lot of people).

Congrats Rob.

------
wainstead
I recall the incredible hype on Slashdot surrounding the release of Phantom
Menace. Lucasfilm released few details and Slashdot seized on every little
thing leading up to the release.

I worked at the New York Times then (just a web programmer) and lucked into an
advance screening two weeks before the film's release. I came right back to
the office and wrote a review (in plain text!) and submitted it to Slashdot
but it never got posted.

Rob, if I spoiled the film for ya, sorry about that! It seemed in the last two
weeks before Phantom Menace was finally released you were a lot less
enthusiastic, and I wondered if my early review put a damper on it.

I grepped my ISP account and found the original file:

[http://www.panix.com/~swain/review.txt](http://www.panix.com/~swain/review.txt)

------
Mediterraneo10
I had a four-digit Slashdot UID (just over 4000, I think). I have lots of
great memories of technical discussions. As a young man who had managed to
install Linux on his computer but still knew little about programming or the
mighty Unix tradition, it was amazing to be able to participate there in
discussions with so many big names in *nix or Free Software.

But some of my fondest memories come from trolling there with another account.
Trolling Slashdot often wasn't like how trolling works on other news sites,
where some user tries to make some controversial point or racist remark
related to the submitted story in order to spark arguments and take the
conversation off course.

Instead, troll posts on Slashdot were usually completely unrelated to the
submitted story. They consisted of themes that were sometimes coarse and
tasteless, but which fascinatingly evolved over time as each troll adapted the
copy/paste to new circumstances or his own personal whims. The million
variations on "BSD is dying" is a good example, but my personal favourite was
"X touched my junk". And while I was never so cruel to link to Last Measure, I
was grimly impressed by the work that had gone into it, completely with having
an autoplay audio file "I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORN!!!!" which must have cost a
least one or two cubicle dwellers their jobs.

~~~
rdslw
goatse.cx trolling under cloak of redirection...

ah those early days...

~~~
bdamm
Even now I can see it, still burned into my amygdala. Ugh.

However, the result was browsers starting showing you the link URL with a text
in the info-box at the window base (remember those?) so I guess that was some
positive result. Who knew this would be the wax-off training of the future?

------
blakesterz
Feels like the Slashdot guys chased the wrong end of blogging. Rather than
seeing what Drupal/Wordpress saw (building the site is the real money) the
Slashodt folks chased the advertising/traffic side to their site. It seems
really obvious now, 20 years later, that they should've spent time on
Slashcode and made that better for a larger audience and they could've maybe
turned out to be something like Drupal or WordPress now.

I totally love slashdot still, tried like hell to run Slashcode many years
ago, but it always feel like they were focused on Slashdot.org rather than
making slashcode work for many other sites.

(really not meant as a criticisms at all, just thinking about the good old
days and what its like looking back now)

~~~
cmdrtaco
Our shoestring budget probably prevented us from chasing that rabbit like it
deserved. And Frankly there were far more seismic shifts that rocked us more.

~~~
alex_hitchins
Can you divulge any of those seismic shifts? Would be interesting to hear.

------
KGIII
I lost access to my first account because I lost access to the email address.
This was quite a while back and it was a moniker less able to be tied to me.
So, I eventually stopped posting as AC and signed up with my 'real' moniker.

Same username as here.

Anyhow, I seldom post there, as of late at least, but I've met a bunch of them
in real life. Mostly, they're good people.

Lately, I've found the HN conversation to be more stimulating. I should try to
visit Slashdot later and see who dropped by.

What I like best about sites like Slashdot is the vast amount of intelligence
there. You will need to wade through some troll posts, but it is worth it to
find the gems. Reading at -1 is not for the faint of heart nor for the easily
offended. Still, I find it worth the effort.

The new owners have done away with the hidden trolltalk board. They have
disallowed the n-word, so people found a workaround using the few Unicode
characters they do allow. Still, no sign of the promised UTF-8 support - which
is funny because Soylent News got that figured out pretty quickly.

I do like to point out that Slashdot was never good. No, no it wasn't. I read
it before they allowed comments and, as mentioned, even had a five digit UID.
(I lost it and now have a six digit UID.) Slashdot was never good.

When people on Slashdot like to talk about how it was so much better in the
past, about how the level of comments was so much better, I like to link them
to the announcement of VMWare releasing their first VM software.

The comments are mostly people insisting that it can't work, won't work, and
that VMs are a bad idea - because they are quite happy dual booting Win95 and
Linux. The comments range from mockery to disbelief that such a product could
even exist - even though virtualization wasn't _really_ new.

So, no... Slashdot was never really great. I'm not even sure it was ever
really good.

And that was part of its charm - and still is. From GNAA to Yoda-in-your-ass
guy, Slashdot is just Slashdot. The racism is rampant, the puns are still bad,
and mobile is still broken, but not as bad as beta. Slashdot is like your
drunk college buddy that you really hope doesn't show up at your wedding. And
that's okay.

Yeah, I'm going to have to visit later. If you do visit, I'd suggest reading
at -1, just so you get the full experience.

------
20721
My favourite part of Slashdot was the trolling.

Some classic trolls there like "egg troll", "The Turd Report", etc. with their
quite absurd yet entertaining posts.

Then there was the rather ruder trolling, like not knowing if the link you
were about to follow was yet another Goatse Man. Or the more helpful trolls,
such as ones taking music requests to spam as the first post.

There was even a 'hidden SID' forum, trolltalk, which was rather amusing (and
somewhat disturbing) until it was overrun by some Markov chain bot.

And spinoff trolling sites like [http://adequacy.org](http://adequacy.org) \-
satire to rile uptight nerds and amuse the rest.

I think the bizarre trolling subculture, amidst the righteous frothing of
Linux fanaticism, was what really made Slashdot.

Anyway, good times.

~~~
shaklee3
Eggtroll was, and still is, possibly the best troll I've ever seen. He carried
it over to the newsgroups with elaborate multi-page trolls and crossposts.
Whoever you are eggtroll, thank you for providing so much entertainment.
Here's one of the archives:

[http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html](http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.5.10.153857.142.html)

------
snapetom
Fond memories, as many others have pointed out. I still check it out every few
days. I find the stories there almost as interesting as the ones that make it
to HN and a lot more interesting and educational than those making it to the
top of reddit.

Shot in the dark and off topic, but for years I've been trying to find a
comment posted on /. during the Columbia disaster. A poster mentioned how he
was part of some high school science program and got to visit the Columbia
before her maiden voyage. When it was lost, he was driving across remote Texas
on the way back from a client visit when he saw the debris across the sky. It
was quite a sad and moving story, and I'd love to re-read it.

------
TekMol

        The notion of “A Blog” was years away, so I wrote my own code. 
    

I wish he did so for this blog post. When I visit it, I get a full screen
popup first and after closing it, _two_ dickbars that make it hard to read the
actual content.

~~~
shabbyrobe
Medium is shocking for this. I added this to my uBlock custom filters list and
now it's not a problem any more:

    
    
        ! medium dickbars and other bullshit:
        ##.u-clearfix.metabar
        ##.metabar
        ##.js-stickyFooter
        ##.highlightMenu
    

I have not limited it by domain so I can catch all the other Medium-based
blogs that use other domains (hackernoon, etc). This raises my risk of false
positives but that doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as all the
extraneous garbage on their site does. YMMV.

------
crusso
I was on slashdot from the very early days until way too recently. In 2011, I
joined a startup company of young guys and one of them saw that I had a
slashdot page up. He said, "Slashdot is for old people. Let us show you Hacker
News".

------
wiremine
I worked at The Image Group a few years after Rob left, and one of the
designers there confirmed the story.

> "I took a rejected template from a project at work"

The version I heard was he pitched this as the actual website for The Image
Group, except it had different colors and the boxes where on the left instead
of the right. Crazy to think if ownership had accepted it.

Side note: I built sets with Rob in high school: crazy and all around nice
guy. Very high energy back then. I'll never forget his rant/love letter for
Pascal I heard one day during a break.

------
wslh
I enjoyed Slashdot every single day as a passive reader but not as an user. I
never received feedback from the founders when I pointed them to incorrect
facts in their news and the never corrected the posts there. I specially
rember an important security issue discovered by the company where I worked
(Core Security Technologies) that was mistakenly reported as if was found by
CERT. You can say that this is very common but at that time Slashdot was the
top influential place in the community and security wise.

------
garyrichardson
For me, Slashdot was the first big internet community. I wasn't materially
involved in news groups before that.

It's a little weird to think I wasn't 20 when I started using /. I was also a
little surprised to see there's still a website at the URL. And I can still
log in with my old username.

And, for the record, my autoincrement user id was 6533. During the height of
their popularity having a 4 digit id give me a bit of geek cred :)

------
barkingtoad
User #333 here. Back in the day, someone offered me oral sex for the low user
number. What a perfect metaphor for the dot-com era: offering to wildly
overpay for a social media asset that would eventually turn out to be useless.

~~~
dotancohen
But if course you wouldn't have taken the offer, /.ers never have sex. That
would require leaving mom's basement!

~~~
devrandomguy
They could do it in ASCII, on IRC.

------
bluedino
Perl Monks was my favorite thing that came from the Slashdot guys. I never
_got_ Perl, but did a few projects with it over the years and I was always
amazed at how cool the community on that site was.

www.perlmonks.org

------
qu4z-2
Hey cmdrtaco. This isn't entirely related, but I just wanted to say thanks for
the chili recipe from your blog. I've been using it for years and it's great.

(I also miss the Slashdot that was).

------
threeio
I remember registering wwwslashdot.org in my young days of being a typo-domain
advertiser (had to eat in college, I've repented) and CmdrTaco posted a
message indicating that they "Must have made it because someone registered our
typo domain."

My mailserver crashed about an hour later from the flood. Lesson learned :)

------
fak3r
In case the site is down, here's a mirror
[http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg](http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg)

------
disease
slashdot was one of the few news sites that stayed up during 9/11\. I think
there was even a follow-up technical article about how they kept it up that
day.

~~~
jonathankoren
Yeah, but that day showed just how weak they were in the journalism
department. So many unsubstantiated rumors.

~~~
flukus
But "social media" was were you'd go to for all the unsubstantiated rumors
back then. For the most part the news channels that day were sticking with the
facts and weren't spending much time with rumors or speculation. I seems like
the roles have flipped in the intervening years, for major events news sites
are 90% wild speculation and reaction videos and slashdot-esque sites moderate
better information to the top.

------
kevin_thibedeau
I once scraped a subset of all Slashdot posts for the month of October. There
were some interesting trends. The bulk of posting is by old UIDs in the 100k
to 300k range and those are dropping off rapidly, suggesting that it will die
around 2022. Some of that is attributable to the rise of mobile and more
frequent anon posts but that doesn't balance out the decline from logged in
posts.

There is also evidence of UID inflation by only issuing odd or even numbers
during certain periods.

------
jasonwmiller
cmdrtaco, thanks for all the grits, inventing the blog and the watering hole
that helped facilitate the discourse and creation of the open source movement.

#1794

~~~
taftster
Actually this is a great comment. I wonder how many ideas grew out of
Slashdot? What was its influence on the world? The "watering hole of the open
source movement." +1 Insightful

Slashdot shaped the minds, ideas and opinions of many people, and definitely
changed the world. It helped get people into the internet, software
development, perl, etc.

Would HackerNews exist without slashdot paving the way? Interesting to think
about.

------
frankwiles
Getting something on the front page of Slashdot was one of my proudest
moments.

------
ocschwar
What I miss about Slashdot more than anything was the editors and writers
using the comments section to fact check the stories.

Ye ghods, do I miss that.

------
seanalltogether
I wonder where sites like slashdot and digg will continue to fit in to the
news landscape over time? If I'm looking for tech news straight from the
horses mouth, I often end up at arstechnica, anandtech, or verge. If I'm
interested in the zeitgiest I might look to HN or reddit. Is there a middle
ground to this that's viable?

~~~
zokier
I love(d) /. article summaries, even if the quality of editing was a running
joke. Also the fact that it was simple sequential list and not constantly
changing and living front page was a nice aspect. On HN you might miss a good
story either because of bad title or because not checking the front page often
enough. On the other hand aggressively refreshing HN and optimistically
clicking more links leads to massive overload. Personally I think the middle
road of /. hits a very good balance.

------
dekhn
I am where I am today because of Slashdot. All those early articles about
Google running Linux...

------
avenius
I started reading slashdot around 2000-2001, being about 14 years old at the
time. I would venture to say that slashdot and its community has been as
educational (or even more) as school, and played a large part in my deciding
to work in IT.

Since I never signed up for an account there (I was a kid and knew I had
nothing to bring to the table), I never experienced the friend/foe system or
participated in moderation. Still, the site has had an amazing impact on my
life and given me an insight into topics I never would have learned about
otherwise. Nowadays it feels HN has taken over, but I still feel a need to
express my gratitude for both the site and the community.

------
peter303
Five digit slashdot here and star post name, but I have most switched to
Hacker news. HN updates immediately, raises highest voted topics to top. I
notice both cover the same articles. The slashdot ads are a lttle annoying.

------
beezle
Wow.. time flys when you are getting old! To protect the mostly innocent, my
uid is just over 64K, so definitely one of the early adopters. /. was
definitely the premier place for nerdy/tech news prior to the dot.bomb and it
definitely had an outsized influence in the tech world.

Many have spoken of having their websites slashdotted though it was not
uncommon to get email months and years later about a story submission. Somehow
early netizens believed the submitter must be an authority and would be more
than happy to answer their questions lol.

------
nl
I had a 5 figure uid, but I read it for a long time before I registered. First
started before the '97 Green redesign.

I found a comment parser attack on '98 or so which let me post a "Powered by
WindowsNT" on a FreeBSD thread. The ten minutes it survived was a highlight. I
actually used an image from the Microsoft site because there wasn't anywhere
else you could host images back then.

One things I haven't seen mentioned is the hidden sids (remember
sid=wahiscool?)

------
fak3r
Fact: Slashdot is dying

It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community
when CmdrTaco confirmed that he is resigning from Slashdot, now that Slashdot
market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1
percent of all geek news outlets. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft
survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this
news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in
complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com]
in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive geek news reading test.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict
Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak
future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot
is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already
aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of
blood.

Slashdot YRO is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
contributors. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot
contributors only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no
longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Slashdot leader CmdrTaco states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How
many users of Ask Slashdot stories are there? Let's see. The number of Ask
Slashdot stories versus Slashdot posts is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1.
Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ask Slashdot stories users. Slashdot
book reviews (or, 'Slashvertisements') are about half of the volume of Ask
Slashdot stories. Therefore there are about 700 Slashvertisments. A recent
article put Slashdot Security posts at about 80 percent of the Slashdot
market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Slashdot users. This is
consistent with the number of Slashdot posts.

Due to the troubles of OSNews, abysmal sales and so on, OSNews went out of
business and was taken over by Digg, another troubled geek news site. Now Digg
is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share.
Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If
Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geek news dilettante dabblers.
Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this
point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.

Fact: Slashdot is dying

(source from Thursday August 25, 2011 @12:39PM:
[https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054](https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054)
also notice I got a n00b to respond to me... oh, such simpler times ;) )

------
Shivetya
I really enjoyed the early slashdot but lost interest when politics ran
rampant in nearly every part of the site. the vitriol associated with it and
more (stuff you could not see) just reduced the value the site had in my eyes.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I have visited the site.

tech sites need to keep their purity to stay accessible, politics, direct
story posting or the constant indirect type, need to stomped out with a
vengeance

------
lazyjones
User 8xxx here... Slashdot was great while it provided the best daily overview
of IT stories. I wonder what changed - I can vaguely recall switching to
heise.de and later HN.

Perhaps the way it presented the stories worked better for a few major pieces
per day and everyone tries to read "all" interesting stories every day now, so
pages with just headlines and broader coverage took over?

I miss the quieter "online life" of the late 90's...

------
dbg31415
I remember, about 20 years ago, having an argument with someone on Slashdot.
Then realizing, about 10 messages in, that I actually knew the person I was
arguing with. Being able to connect with friends online, being able to make
friends through dialogue online... the site was easily the best online
community at the time.

Bonus: Even 20 years ago it had better design than Hacker News! (= (Couldn't
resist.)

------
iamleppert
Slashdot was truly a part of my youth, it was the site I went to when I was a
teenager, in between taking breaks from coding. It made me feel like there
were others out there like me and was a great source of inspiration growing up
in a less than stellar childhood in Ohio.

It makes me nostalgic for the web of yesteryear, when it was mostly about just
a bunch of nerds sharing their passion for technology.

Thanks, CmdrTaco.

------
uuoc
Ah, slashdot. Things were good in the beginning. Then they sold out to Dice.
And Dice took it in a bad direction. So bad that a bunch of us abandoned it
for the comp.misc Usenet group.

And in my case, I have simply not returned, and don't plan to return, even
though they 'claim' to be past the Dice era now. Fool me once, shame on you,
fool me twice, shame on me.

------
jzl
Is there a way to figure out when you joined? Not seeing a "member since"
date. My id # is 7xxxxx (6 digits). I was reading it regularly for quite a few
years, maybe 4-5 years IIRC, before finally deciding to sign up. No idea why I
waited so long, I guess I was more into the articles than the commenting side
of things. Dumb of me!

~~~
rconti
Ditto. I just logged in to check. Mine is 2xxxxx (also 6 digits) and I, too,
regret not signing up when I first started browsing -- was probably more like
2-3 years for me though. I'm guessing 1998-1999? But I really have no idea.

~~~
isostatic
My first account was 1xxxxx, lost that, second account 2xxxxx. I remember
reading slashdot on NYE 1999, code red, the Billenium in Sep 01, and of course
9-11 when it was one of a few sites that stayed up.

Back in the day the comments section was full of "famous people" like Wil
Wheaton and Bruce Perens, which I found fascinating.

Slashdot inspired me to jump to Debian in 2000, and E17. I didn't stick with
e17, but did with Debian until about 07 when I transitioned on to ubuntu. The
standard broadcast Linux build (1200+ machines on 6 continents) for a major UK
based global broadcaster is ubuntu because of slashdot introducing me to apt
after a coupe of years of frustration with rpmfind.net. Funny how these things
work out.

------
aklemm
Ahh the memories, especially that time I got an Ask Slashdot accepted. That
was a BIG DEAL for some reason.

Addendum: Thinking back, Slashdot is where I came of age in tech. Also, I
browsed casually without registering for at least a couple years before
finally getting a userid in the low 600K area. I regret not registering right
away!

------
jbgreer
Slashdot user #4245 here, with comments dating to April of 1999, 2 friends and
1 fan, no foes or freaks. I also had the pleasure of meeting Cmdr Taco at an
early LinuxWorld (1998?) in California. I admit it fed a lot of my biases at
the time, but also provided a lot of useful information.

------
delinka
Has someone yet curated a list of All Slashdot Polls Concerning or Mentioning
Cowboy Neal?

~~~
dredmorbius
1\. Rob Malda

2\. Bruce Perens

3\. Natalie Portman

4\. Jon Katz

5\. Cowboy Neal

------
ciustuc
Sharing the audio version of the article for those who'd like to listen to the
article: [http://bingewith.com/#id694](http://bingewith.com/#id694)

------
mljoe
I can trace almost everything that helped me professionally and even many of
my tech opinions to something I read on Slashdot. Really the site that
influenced me the most.

------
hesk
Can't wait to read the same post 10 years from now.

------
Mc_Big_G
I was always proud of having a slashdot userid < 262000 :) Definitely spent
too much time on slashdot in the university computer lab.

~~~
onion2k
You need to be less than or equal to 203094 to be one of the cool kids.

~~~
acomjean
ID > 20611, No wireless, Less space than a Nomad... Lame

I always found it funny how the ranking of user by the order they joined
encourages people to join. I guess its the same as not being a "green" user
here.

------
TailorJones
Great. Yet another non-closable pop-up window.

------
fleeno
We were one of their first advertisers! If I recall, we traded them some RAM
and maybe a server case as part of the deal.

------
clairity
wow, crazy, how time flies. i stumbled onto slashdot in late '97 as a side
effect of wanting to put together a computer for a project. i still think it
had the best moderation system, however complicated it was. it gave you lots
of control on how you wanted to view comments.

------
ipunchghosts
Does anyone else remember kerneltrap?

------
ipunchghosts
What's the story behind Anonymous Coward, the most popular slashdot user?!

------
titzer
I learned about 9/11 from the slashdot front page. Wow, 16 years ago.

~~~
isostatic
I did the same when the dupe was posted 3 weeks later

------
akeck
I learned about Slashdot from a screenshot demoing the Enlightenment VM.

------
jimjimjim
so much nostalgia. big big thank you to rob and the rest of the team.

------
jackgavigan
First post!!!

------
dghughes
+5 funny

------
JoshMnem
I wish that people would stop blogging on Medium, especially about Free
software topics. I click the link and get an obnoxiously animated popup shoved
in my face that tells me that I've read my two articles for the month and that
I should log in for the full experience. Why should people be asked to sign in
to follow a blog when there is RSS/Atom? Learning how to use Hugo, Metalsmith,
Hexo, Pelican, or Jekyll is not difficult.

~~~
Jarwain
For an author, I'd imagine there are discoverability and convenience aspects
involved in the decision to post on medium, versus hosting one's own blog.

~~~
JoshMnem
Free software issues are more important than "convenience". Passively
consuming TV shows from a couch is more convenient than developing technical
skills and building things online, but one is objectively more useful to
society than the other.

------
katastic
I hope this doesn't come off as dickish but it's not intended as such:

I was really expecting more... well... history. As soon as I get interested
"he's gotta upgrade for the onslaught of users! How will he handle it?", the
article stops.

p.s. Just realized Mr. Taco submitted it himself. So let me add, "Hope your
having a great day, and thanks for contributing to the internet and hacker
culture." ... But I still want to hear more about your history. ;) I've
thought about starting my own IT-centric social site so I'm dying for info.

------
johansch
Ahh, memories. (I'm slashdot user #9784.)

I remember when our tiny company (with a 2 Mbit/s uplink, iirc) was
slashdotted:

[https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts-
on-...](https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts-on-the-pike-
programming-language)

I was running (our homebrew) web server with debug output in an xterm (with
timing details for every request served) throughout this ordeal, just to be
sure it didn't screw up. (We didn't really have a thorough testing regime,
ahem.)

------
attawahid
I remember Chips&Dips and got confused one day when I couldn't find it.
Started searching and found it again under Slashdot and have been a fan and
loyal visitor ever since. Thanks a lot for this awesome write-up of Internet
History :-)

------
trollied
No mention of Natalie Portman or Hot Grits in the Post. Colour me
disappointed.

------
reaperducer
Coincidentally, 90% of what's on /. is also on HN. I'm not sure who's copying
whom, but it seems like someone is wheezing someone else's feed.

~~~
jandrese
Or they just cover the same interest areas? New Intel chips come out and both
Slashdot and HN cover it, but not because someone is copy/pasting articles,
it's just a story that both would cover.

Slashdot has a lot less "Everybody should switch to strongly typed functional
programming language X" articles than HN, while HN definitely has fewer Your
Rights Online type articles.

~~~
AlbertoGP
Yes, and I've started reading it again a couple of weeks ago when I found that
my account still worked. The reason to open an account back then was that the
number of comments grew so large that I could not hope to read/skim them all
and had to store the filter settings.

The current HTML/JS seems lighter than I remember, which was a problem for me
as I started moving to other boards like HN.

We'll see. For now I've meta-moderated again after all those years.

[edit] BTW, relevant discussion in /.:
[https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-
of...](https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-of-stuff-
that-matters)

