

Slashdot hits the 100,000 posts milestone - philjackson
http://meta.slashdot.org/story/09/12/11/1615202/Slashdot-Turns-100000

======
philwelch
Interesting comment:

What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that
the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It
seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the
comment quality follows an inverse pattern. Or more simply, as the number of
users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan. Digg used to
be a decent site for discussion; now you'd be laughed at for even suggesting
that the comments might be notable. Reddit is quickly getting there. Slashdot
though seems to best this pattern. While I'm well aware that someone will
reply to this with "In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!" or something
similar in a successful attempt to disprove my point, but I think it still
holds true in some respect. Kudos slashdot, keep it up. You keep trying to
make UI (un)improvements and we'll still be here to comment without RTFA - and
we'll both be thankful for it.

[http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=304...](http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30408166)

~~~
m0th87
I don't think /.'s comments have degraded over time, but I never thought they
were particularly revelatory either. While they aren't very trollish, they
tend to be pretty biased. That might not be surprising given the community's
propensity toward Linux and OSS, but it hardly makes the comment quality high.

HN has a bias too, toward startups. But I think the comments here are more
centered because opinions on startups don't really become religious, whereas
any discussion on operating systems in general and OSS quickly turns into a
flamewar.

Also, YMMV, but the one-liners get really old, especially since they've hardly
changed. I remember the "in soviet russia" crap from over five years ago on /.

~~~
ggruschow
It thought /.'s quality was in a death spiral pre-digg, and as they tried to
compete head-to-head, digg seemed like their death knell. Within a year I
think they realized digg was different (crack-addict-speed-news) and if they
just focused on what they were good at, they'd do fine.

Since then, I think their quality and focus have both improved. A lot of the
idiots (who originate "in soviet russia" and "FP!" type stuff) have moved on
to digg, 4chan, reddit, etc. There's fewer posts than a few years ago, but
they're more worthwhile. While their SNR is worse, given their number of
comments / item, they actually seem to be doing really well compared to other
sites.

My account on /. is over a decade old now. I barely visit there, but that's
actually amazing - I still visit there over a decade later. I _never_ visit
digg or the front page of reddit, and I'm visiting HN less and less.

Part of is it that I'm maturing and managing my time better, but part of it is
I'm tired of the bustedness of these sites. I wish 3 things were fixed with
these sites:

1\. Discussions are maybe 1/2 of the value, but you can't participate really
unless you're on and active all the time. I'd guess this is because people
only go back to look at the topic again so long as it's on the front page, and
the discussions are tied to the topics.

2\. For me, most of the rest of the value are in links that aren't really
news. They're more like a good old book in the library.. "oh look what I
found. this is cool. [link to some page on <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki> and see
one of my ancient edits still alive on there]. They are in fact cool, and it's
great people are discovering cool stuff... but it's not _news_ , and I've seen
a lot of it already. There's got to be a better way of collecting and
presenting this sort of thing.

3\. Recommendation system / smart filtering darnit. The decent sites are too
limited in topics largely because the only filter / recommender that's working
on these sites is super crude: People just congregate on a site and stay
around certain areas big portions of them are interested in. That's busted.
Even on the best day ever on here, I probably didn't care about 50% of the
stuff posted.. and I'd love to hear about and discuss things with other areas
that aren't start-ups (HN), free software (/.), or programming (LtU, proggit)

Then of course, there's the Eternal September scaling issue...

------
diN0bot
/.'s comment system is awesome. it is gold.

one interesting thing is the inverse relationship between time and the
usability and quality of the comment _systems_.

we start with /., which has--after lengthy iteration--a reasonable system of
karma and crowd sourced filtering, plus a brilliant comment presentation
system (open/close nodes, point threshholds with one-liners visible before
google made that cool).

then we get digg, reddit, hn, each one providing less and less features. hn is
the worst: you can't close discussion branches, there is no summarizing, the
points are not capped. actually, these charges are against all the
"accumulating-points" set. still, i noticed a real drop in features when i
went from reddit to hn, predominantly in the lack of sub-domains or
categorizations (/r/scifi, /r/python, etc).

anyway....very interesting from a social point of view.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I disagree that hn's is the worst. Slashdot has a fancy system because the
signal to noise ratio is so low there. Even reading at the maximum post
"quality" level of 5 there is a lot of spam, off-topic banter, lame humor,
etc. In comparison, I find the S/N here to be orders of magnitude higher. I
think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain behaviors
which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more of a
passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle.

In theory I have a slashdot account that's about a decade old, I have
forgotten the password and no longer use the email address it's attached to. I
haven't bothered going to extreme efforts trying to recover it (e.g. searching
out old password lists I have written down somewhere) nor have I bothered
creating a new account. Discussion on slashdot is just not worthwhile, at best
it's like trying to have a conversation by yelling across a boisterous lunch
room, at worst it's just spitting into the wind (which tends to be the average
case). There are so many better alternatives out there now it's really not
worth the time to visit anymore.

~~~
camccann
_I think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain
behaviors which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more
of a passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle._

HN survives mostly by being small, self-selecting, and somewhat obscure.
Slashdot, for all its flaws, is remarkable for being large, well-known, and of
_consistent quality_. Most comparable sites would be well on their way into
the gutter at a quarter of /.'s age.

I'm aware of only three viable means of maintaining stability in an online
community: slavish adherence to the Peyton-Jones Law (viz. "avoid success at
all costs"), iron fist moderators and a tangible cost to participate (cf. the
Something Awful forums), or whatever secret sauce /. has.

HN almost certainly doesn't have the third, and the Powers That Be have better
things to do than implement the second. I seem to recall pg describing the
slow growth of HN membership in very positive terms, so I'm pretty sure
there's a deliberate strategy here.

------
bootload
_"... What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather
that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites.
..."_

I am surprised /. has survived. The place pretty much as it was back when it
started in '97.

    
    
        As our way of thanking you for your 
        positive contributions to Slashdot, 
        you are eligible to disable advertising
    

This is my first post [0] for a couple of years. But there was a time when I
lived here. I remember when /. was sold & CmdrTaco said all he wanted to do
was run it I'm sure I for one didn't believe he'd still be at it now. The
sig/noise is still bad if you trawl below the +2 level. But at +5 it's
readable. I think the combination of moderation, ability to filter comments
(text, best comments at top), culture and relationships have helped shape the
site into something still readable. HackerNews exhibits all of the same sorts
of growing pains /. had to go through.

[0]
[http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30409194](http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=30409194)

------
Hates_
Wow. For some reason it feels like such a "low" number. After so many years of
browsing /. it feels like there has been so much stuff posted that the number
should be so much higher.

~~~
dpcan
This week Digg posted that they've had over 14 Million stories posted to their
site after only 5 years.

Slashdot is probably talking about front-page stories and not submissions,
but, if we consider the editorial process, 100,000 is definitely high.

P.S. One of my most exciting geek-memories as a younger man was having one of
my submissions hit the front-page of Slashdot.

------
apowell
I remember being Slashdotted in 1999. It was a brutal onslaught of traffic.
Fortunately, more sites seem equipped to handle that sort of traffic today.
(<http://slashdot.org/story/99/12/04/158227>, if you're curious.)

~~~
vermontdevil
I wonder when's the last time a site got slashdotted now. Doubt it happens
much nowadays as it did in the past.

------
dasht
We'll see if this is later confirmed but, I think it pretty funny that (as of
this writing) Slashdot appears to be, well, Shashdotted over this post.
(Disclaimer: Obviously it won't be quite so funny if it turns out to be a
malicious DoS attack or some quite unrelated glitch.)

------
nickpp
I quit Slashdot when I noticed that my local newspaper's website had the
latest IT news FASTER than Slashdot.

And more relevant, too. Turns out I do not care at all about the latest SCO
vs. Linux lawsuit.

------
JCThoughtscream
My first response to seeing this over HN's twitter feed was "what, only?"

------
DanielBMarkham
/. was the first technology aggregation site I started visiting on the web.

I don't go back very much. I think the thing that did it for me was the site's
redesign. It's much too clever by half. The signal-to-noise ratio dropped over
the years as well.

Having said that, I thought the categorization system was awesome -- much
better than up/down voting. And on good days I really enjoyed the mix of funny
and interesting. It was a nice combination of amused peanut gallery and topic
expertise. Sort of a joyful love of learning.

------
chriseppstein
I'm always a bit surprised whenever I hear that /. is still running. I'm sure
they're still a very successful site, but it's been like, forever. Aren't they
bored?

~~~
selven
Google has been around 12 years, you don't see them getting bored.

