

Retention of early Slashdot users - _delirium
http://www.kmjn.org/notes/early_slashdot_users.html

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davidu
I'm one of those early users (uid == 18). I find the site too hard to navigate
these days. I don't know where to click or how to filter it back to just the
nerdy stuff. I guess I deserve my uid==18 since I feel like an old fogey
saying that. :-)

~~~
aerique
I'm not quite sure how or why I stopped reading Slashdot. I think it happened
gradually possibly due to MMO addiction and getting my first full time job as
a wage slave. Then I met my girlfriend and got two kids which all ate into
internet time.

After I got back into the more social side of the net I gravitated towards HN
and Reddit. I did check Slashdot once or twice but I preffered the cleaner
presentation of the former two sites.

(uid 206)

------
ben1040
I can only speak for myself but I stopped obsessively checking Slashdot (which
had been a habit since 1998) around mid-late 2006 when Digg/Reddit had started
getting momentum and interesting stuff was showing up sooner there since
content wasn't curated.

Now I look at Slashdot maybe once a week, and I never read or participate in
the comment threads -- because a given story on Slashdot likely showed up on
HN three days prior and had a more interesting discussion then.

~~~
garyrichardson
My slashdot OCD ended when I found google reader. I still have Slashdot in my
feed. By the time the slashdot story shows up, I've already read the source,
hacker news comments and probably some other blogs I follow commenting on the
story.

Plus, to follow any links in story blurb you have to click through to
slashdot, which is highly annoying.

~~~
golgo13
Does anyone else remember the hatred toward the old editor michael ? What was
the deal with that? Also, doesn't it just seem off having the facebook and
twitter buttons under the summary? Is it just me? UID = 597418.

~~~
garyrichardson
just catching up on my comments.. UID 6588. A friend of mine had the fortune
of getting UID 1234.

It's awesome that so many people can remember their UID's, even a decade
later.. Goes to show you how important Slashdot was.

------
jinushaun
I stopped reading Slashdot as much because the curated nature of the site
meant that stories showed up and were discussed on Digg and Reddit DAYS before
they showed up on Slashdot. So Slashdot content felt old.

However, I find the discussion better on Slashdot due to their complex rating
system, which is why I still visit Slashdot. Up and down votes are too
simplistic and you get a lot of bad comments bubbling up or being buried for
seemling no good reason. That's why I stopped reading Digg and Reddit.
Interesting, informative, off-topic, flamebait, etc... More sites need to
adopt Slashdot's rating system.

------
yardie
I guess its just the way of the world. I've long used Slashdot but after a
while the trolls start to take over and the conversation goes from informative
to herpderp gradually. I've seen this happen to Digg, Fark, and k5.

Recently, it's also started happening on reddit. I would go there for the
interesting articles but the frontpage is loaded with shitty fake AMAs,
slanted political blogs, or stupid pictures. I could filter this stuff out,
but then that would defeat the purpose of having community driven content.

Just remember, reddit didn't kill Digg and blogs didn't kill Slashdot. Digg
was killed by the trolls in its membership. And Slashdot was killed by the
latent racism/nationalism/sexism in some of its posts (if you ever read some
of the comments concerning H1B, outsourcing, etc. it was fucking scary). I
stopped visiting because the level of dialog dropped through the floor.

Also, this occasionally happens to HN, but I believe the community has been
much better at keeping these shenanigans at bay. Unless the comments are well
managed and moderated then they shouldn't have a problem keeping traffic up.
But like anything in life, people move on and eventually it will happen here
too.

------
flomo
Slashdot didn't originally have user registration, you just typed your nick in
a field when posting a comment. They were already quite popular when they
begin to require logins, and IIRC the <4 digit UIDs were consumed within a
week or two. It would probably be a better metric to check UIDs under 20K or
so.

All this talk of early slashdot reminded me that (for some reason) my account
had unlimited moderation points back in the old days.

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gaius
I'm a low-4-digit (or was, 1359) and left because the blogging system was just
so bad. I think less that 1/4 of the screen you got for your own content.

That was the final straw, it had been an echo chamber for a while on the main
board by that point, you know, every other comment seemed to be "Micro$oft is
EVIL!!!!!", rather than the semi-intelligent debate I'm sure it used to have.

------
linker3000
I'm a mid-stream adopter (uid == 626634) and I took Rob's departure to get
around to removing /. from my bookmarks - something I'd been thinking about
doing for some time. The main reasons for cutting the cord are that other
sites (ie: HN) tend to list important/useful tech stories first and have a
better signal-to-noise ratio in their comment threads.

