
RIP Kuro5hin - Jerry2
http://www.kuro5hin.org/
======
rustyk5
Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down
the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously
failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone
forever, but it may be a little while before it reappears. There's a very good
chance that it will reappear in the form of an archive of static html pages
though, not a live community. So if you'd like to, this is probably a good
time to mourn what it was, although in that sense K5 has clearly been over for
years.

~~~
cbd1984
Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of
thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.

~~~
rustyk5
Yeah I don't really mind continuing to host it -- in archived form it wouldn't
be any burden. But I'll talk to people.

~~~
orionblastar
[http://dontsuemebro.com](http://dontsuemebro.com)

Del Griffin seems to be working on Scoop improving it on his Scoop site. He
can run your Kuro5hin and maybe even fix the cancel button and other things.
He's currently adding HTML tags and trying to fix the https links without the
a href tag in autoformat.

~~~
trane0x40
I'll run it better. Turn it over to me. There's gold in the database that got
censored on the site. I'll assume all legal liability.

~~~
orionblastar
Yeah Lulzara can't sue any more because he had a Vespa accident and died. So
Crawford's diary on him could come back an be undeleted.

It tells the truth on technology companies and how they cheat software
consulants out of money.

------
brianberns
First there was Slashdot, but CmdrTaco insisted on picking the stories for us.
He called it an "omelet".

Kuro5hin came along to fix this, but discouraged posts that were just links to
pages elsewhere on the web. IIRC, this was called "link farming". How many
users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the
ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many.

Digg then encouraged links, but shot itself in the foot with a stupid
redesign.

Nowadays, reddit is king because it avoided the obvious mistakes of its
predecessors.

~~~
Pxtl
Except that Reddit is gradually turning into 4chan. Every time I see /r/all,
it's a little more mean-spirited, a little younger, a little more toxic.

Outsourcing moderation and libertarian ideals all sound nice, but when the
rubber hits the road it gradually chases normal people away. Reddit just did
it it slower because the strengths of their platform and content overwhelmed
it... but it's getting there eventually.

~~~
overcast
I can't even go on Reddit anymore, in fact I just avoid it all together at
this point. I'm sick of the memes, I'm sick of the left wing, hive mind, down
vote brigades, and I'm especially sick of everyone just being an asshole to
everyone else.

~~~
frabbit
Left wing? I don't bother with Reddit because they strike me as a herd of
authoritarian neo-liberal drones. Left-wing definitely not.

~~~
overcast
Reddit is absolutely a liberal dominated forum.

~~~
c0nducktr
> they strike me as a herd of authoritarian neo-liberal drones.

> Reddit is absolutely a liberal dominated forum.

Sounds like you two agree.

------
fencepost
The Wikipedia page mentions that it was running on Scoop, but doesn't include
that Scoop was written by Rusty as the framework for k5. Scoop went on to be
used in a few other places, among them HuSi (where a bunch of core k5 folks
moved to, though it's now pretty defunct as well).

The most well-known site I'm aware of that used Scoop was DailyKos, which I
believe started on WordPress, then moved to Scoop (highly customized and
eventually almost entirely rewritten I think), then finally onto its own
custom-build CMS. There may have also been one more stage in there.

Source: 3-digit UID on DK, and was a regular way way back when on both k5 and
HuSi.

~~~
Jaruzel
I found a citeable reference[1] to back up your statement about Rusty being
the original author of Scoop, and have updated the Wikipedia article
accordingly.

[1] Wikipedia is quite strict with how cites are referenced, and
unfortunately, I couldn't take your word for it!

------
gedy
> "Kuro5hin — pronounced corrosion"

Ah, all these years I thought it was a Japanese name..

~~~
jonathankoren
It was a joke on multiple levels. The founder was Rusty. Rusty -> rust ->
corrosion -> kuro5shin. The second level was that it was a reference to Neal
Stephenson's Sno Crash character Da5id character. The pseudo-Japanese and
l33t-speak spelling was did give it a a cyberpunk flair.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=ybSFU9aDzsoC&pg=PA154&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=ybSFU9aDzsoC&pg=PA154&lpg=PA154&dq=kuro5hin+faq+name&source=bl&ots=94uMWwKTVR&sig=kU3aiEolGgfkGBu6SNRkcQJ2D6o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQ4eWe_rrMAhUU1mMKHUnXBVAQ6AEIIzAC#v=onepage&q=kuro5hin%20faq%20name&f=false)

~~~
chris_wot
To be honest, there was something very awesome about the site layout. When the
story submission queue was full and the trolling was only very much in the
background, then it was a really good and amazing site.

The trolls turned incredibly mean though. They didn't ever come out of the
woodwork, and they were completely anonymous. They were the harbinger of what
was to come about half a decade later.

------
nikcub
Kuro5hin ran a block-all in their robots.txt[0] so this is more historic
internet content that will dissapear into the abyss.

Anyone know of a mirror or an effort to mirror and host the site?

[0] [http://www.kuro5hin.org/robots.txt](http://www.kuro5hin.org/robots.txt)

~~~
k5mumble
I wrote a k5 screen scraper, and have 95% of k5 diaries, unfortunately I don't
have any stories. Date range for my archive is: 2001-1-4 to 2015-7-22 For a
total of 161,942 diaries: [http://k5.semantic-db.org/diary-slurp/161942--
archive-diarie...](http://k5.semantic-db.org/diary-slurp/161942--archive-
diaries--html-diaries--nested-format.zip)

Here is a summary of what I have in my archive:
[http://kr5ddit.com/post/759](http://kr5ddit.com/post/759)

Here are some tables showing which kuron had the highest number of posts over
the lifetime of k5: [http://kr5ddit.com/post/759](http://kr5ddit.com/post/759)

~~~
k5mumble
BTW, rusty was certainly aware of my screen scraping project, and did not tell
me to stop. And it would have been very obvious in the log files.

------
PaulRobinson
k5 was the first place where I realised that trolling was a hobby for some
people, that I encountered the knuckle-dragging form of misogynism that has
now come to the fore on Twitter and social media generally, and where I
realised that long-form writing in a forum-structure could have a home.

I loved k5 when it was good. But when it was bad… man, it was really bad.

I will remember it with a sense of fondness, but given I only checked in on it
twice in the last 4-5 years shows how little I'll miss it.

------
dempseye
You can still read legendary Kuro5hin contributor localroger's writing here:
[http://localroger.com/](http://localroger.com/)

~~~
taxicabjesus
My story, 'Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0' was the last to post. I saved my
diaries and stories about my adventures in the taxi, I guess I should buy a
domain of my own.

~~~
gnu8
Please do that. I enjoyed your stories, particularly 'Who Are Your Lifelines?'

~~~
taxicabjesus
Glad you liked that, thanks for commenting here. One of the pieces I've
drafted but not yet posted is on the subject of "ordinary rendition", and is
thematically related to the Lifelines piece.

Rusty appeared above and told what happened (datacenter moved), and said k5
might come back some day. I rarely use twitter, but I'll put a link to my site
here: [https://twitter.com/taxicabjesus](https://twitter.com/taxicabjesus)

------
atdt
Google's cache has approximate 480 story pages still in its cache. The Wayback
Machine won't show any results for the site because of its current robots.txt.
It'd be great if someone could scrape these pages and provide them as an
archive. I am not sure how to do that without running afoul of Google's terms-
of-service.

List of URLs: [https://dpaste.de/YbEq/raw](https://dpaste.de/YbEq/raw)

~~~
userbinator
You can use [http://archive.is/](http://archive.is/)

~~~
r721
Archive.is supports batch archiving too:

[http://blog.archive.is/post/45031162768/can-you-recommend-
th...](http://blog.archive.is/post/45031162768/can-you-recommend-the-best-
methodscript-so-i-may)

------
Theizestooke
Kuro5hin was great in the very early days. A good, maybe somewhat more
technical companion to Slashdot. At one point it started devolving into a
collaborative blog with bad op-eds on politics, and fanfiction.

~~~
viraptor
The last part is painfully true. I came back a few years ago to check if K5 is
still alive and what does it look like and could hardly figure out exactly
what the article was about. Reality and fiction strangely mashed together in a
very chaotic op-ed.

~~~
chris_wot
And ridiculous troll comments about people who left the site a long time ago.
I saw one comment recently about the user kitten, who died suddenly of a brain
aneurism in 2010. They were still mocking him 5 years later...

------
chris_wot
Kuro5hin is really what I cut my teeth on before I discovered Wikipedia. I
wrote an article on Buddhism, it wasn't that great but I learned a lot!

I sure hope that the articles were kept somewhere - there were some pretty
amazing stories. Including the time that one of the contributors made a joke
about killing the president and the Secret Service came to his workplace...

~~~
antod
I remember that story.

I never posted anything on k5 though (seemed too hard/complicated to bother
with), but I read it a lot and commented occasionally.

Even the trolls were quite clever and good natured there for a while before
they got outnumbered by run of the mill stupid trolls spilling over from
slashdot.

------
Nursie
Bye-bye K5.

It was awesome knowing you in the beginning, then hell as it turned to a
troll-fest, then fun for a few more years as it turned into a weirdly tight-
knit community that abused each other for fun.

I have two IRL friends from there now...

But I won't miss it.

------
gherkin0
I used to post there when I was a lot younger. I'll miss it, but only its
early days. It had decayed so much that it should have been shutdown a long
time ago.

I used to see some kuro5hin usernames I recognized on Metafilter, but for the
most part I think they've left that site (or been purged, you can never really
tell).

------
a2800276
Sad. Kuro5hin was a great community in the day. When did this happen?

Oh how I loved the ASCII art reenactment players...

~~~
lwhalen
I became good online friends with kitten through kuro5hin. I was very sad when
he passed as well.

~~~
stereo
Kitten passed?

~~~
gherkin0
So did trhurler:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080113234818/http://www.swtime...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080113234818/http://www.swtimes.com/articles/2007/11/06/week_in_review/news/tuesday/news05.txt)

~~~
llimllib
I forgot about that :(

------
orionblastar
[https://github.com/BlastarIndia/scoop](https://github.com/BlastarIndia/scoop)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8026116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8026116)

I saved a copy of Scoop and documentation by Del Griffin on how to install it
on modern systems.

I also posted to Hacker News if Scoop can be saved a while ago.

------
seletz
Wow. That's one of those moments I really feel old ... ;-p

------
jonah

      Updated Date: 2016-04-28T16:31:29Z
      Creation Date: 1999-12-12T21:20:28Z
      Registry Expiry Date: 2016-12-12T21:20:28Z
    

So the registration was transferred to gandi, it wasn't expired and then
picked up?

~~~
fencepost
Well, it still has Rusty's name in the non-obscured fields in the Whois data.

------
fsiefken
I thought I remember it was already announced years ago by Rusty Foster that
updates were stopped. Still it's one of those classic internet sites I
frequented - just like the orange black freshmeat.net

------
orionblastar
Here are two replacement sites:

[https://dontsuemebro.com/](https://dontsuemebro.com/)

[http://kr5ddit.com/](http://kr5ddit.com/)

Kr5ddit is trying to be like K5 and Reddit, but it is still in alpha tests.
Instead of Karma you get Kr5ddits for people upvoting your comments, posts,
etc. Kr5ddits you can sell for bitcoins or buy for bitcoins. Kr5ddits you can
use to upvote your own posts to the front page. But Kr5ddit has Server 500
errors it needs help in fixing so they can handle more users.

------
dredmorbius
Good times. I remember stumbling on K5 as an alternative to Slashdot, trying
out a different moderation method, and building its own CMS (Scoop, as several
people have mentioned). I miss the sane discussion collapsing mechanism --
flat then threaded, then nested, then collapsed. It's a dynamic sites a
decade-and-a-half later could use painfully <coff>HN</coff>
<coff>Reddit</coff>.

I had the pleasure of meeting Rusty back in the day. Good guy. I hope Maine's
treating him well.

------
fit2rule
I yearn for a return to USENET, when things really were distributed and
uncontrollable .. these days we have so much content being generated around a
nexus that is too easily controlled .. I wonder why we haven't re-invented
USENET yet.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
Well, at least some of my more embarrassing submissions are now gone forever.

------
balakk
Probably just weathering another DDOS attack.

------
userbinator
Permanent or temporary outage?

------
robtaylor
Why does it need to go offline? A read only state would cost peanuts.

------
circuit_breaker
Another one I miss. Recently also was thinking about plastic.com

------
OnceIWasAQ
RIP K5. Truly an American Icon.

-Q

~~~
chris_wot
May that meme die with K5.

~~~
OnceIWasAQ
As it should

------
reiichiroh
But we still have memepool, right?

------
smegel
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin)

~~~
deanclatworthy
I'd not heard of this community before. Before my time, I guess.

The idea of publishing something or not is rather interesting. It presumably
encouraged much higher quality content.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
> It presumably encouraged much higher quality content.

Haha, oh boy. You're talking about k5, man. We practically prided ourselves on
terrible and meta content. But yes, some of the longer-form stuff was truly
interesting. You had to submit to some pretty grueling dissection of your work
by a broad group of people, though, and I only front paged a couple articles
because I didn't truly understand what was going on.

I actually landed on k5 a couple months ago and read stuff I wrote in 2001,
_long_ before I realized the permanency of the Web. It was an interesting time
travel experience to a long, long time ago. I'm half glad it's dead so that
portion of my life slowly fades into history/archive, because I honestly have
no idea what I was talking about half the time.

+1 FP, dammit rusty

~~~
chris_wot
After 2005 to 2006 the site became ridiculous. That's because Rusty had the
guts ripped out of him when some arsehole photoshopped his wife's image on a
pornographic image.

The trolls laughed at it, but it destroyed the site and I really feel that
Rusty never had the same attitude toward K5 ever again.

This is why trolling needs to be banned. It's OK to have some fun, but when
you start pissing in your own backyard, or let terrible people to take over,
then they bully even the founders and everything goes to shit.

Twitter should take note.

------
cooper12
What's an SJW?

~~~
ecopoesis
Social Justice Warrior, an attempted dogwhistle[1] used by GamerGaters / men's
rights activists / anyone of scared of a more equal society, in a derogatory
way against people who promote equality and not being a dick on the Internet.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-
whistle_politics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _a derogatory way against people who promote equality and not being a dick
> on the Internet_

By being the biggest dicks on the Internet, not afraid of lying, blackmailing
and destroying careers and lives by unleashing Internet lynch mobs.

I'm sorry, but SJW movement is a cancer on the society, and it's _way_ beyond
issues of "equality" now. They're going out of their way in deploying
underhanded tactics to destroy anyone who doesn't agree with their vision of
"equality".

People who actually promote "equality and not being dick on the Internet" are
usually known as "reasonable people", and their group is known as
"civilization".

~~~
drabiega
This seems contrary to my experience, could you provide some examples?

Obviously each of us only sees a portion of the internet, but from what I've
seen it seems like most of the stuff you are describing has been aimed at
people described as SJWs, not perpetrated by them.

~~~
CM30
How about this?

[http://imgur.com/a/wbK77](http://imgur.com/a/wbK77)

I may not like the people in that Donald Trump subreddit, but trying to
blackmail the staff with doxing threats is extremely unethical, and as blatant
as it gets.

------
vinhboy
I am going to predict that Reddit will soon collapse because it is overrun
with conservative minded people. It's starting to become a really hateful
community.

~~~
weanoob
Reddit? Conservative? Are you joking?

~~~
Trill-I-Am
Conservative is the wrong word but a lot of people on Reddit hate everyone
that's not a white socialist atheist anti-Zionist middle class man

~~~
robk
That's called a liberal by American terms

~~~
nailer
As an actual liberal, I prefer the term "authoritarian liberal" to distinguish
anti-free speech and 'edgy' sexist/racist left folk from liberals. And I've
never understood conservatives as much as I do now.

