No, it was pretty good in the late 90s, very early 00s. Then it got competition from digg and reddit, and lost readership. Only the trolls perservered, and here's the key, without quality conversation, dedicated readers couldn't earn enough meta-karma to moderate. The 'never delete a comment' policy remained for about a decade wherein every story was quickly brigaded by racist, sexist and homophobic slurs, but mostly the n word; with only a handful of diehard commenters remaining.
To this day, I prefer Slashdot's summaries over headline-only aggregators, and I wish other sites would adopt features like the mod-with-reason and karma caps per comment. But they designed the system to limit the power of moderators, and those limits didn't scale with the imbalance between trolls and good-faith posters
After stopping reading /. every day sometime around 2010 or so I've started browsing it again about once a week or so. There's less discussion than there used to be but it's no better or worse than it used to be - there's certainly far, far less of the pointless noise that took after before I left.
Considering the amount of fuckery people engaged on during the site's heyday its moderation system handled things amazingly well. If you read at a threshold of +1 you'd barely see all the garbage posted there.
To this day, I prefer Slashdot's summaries over headline-only aggregators, and I wish other sites would adopt features like the mod-with-reason and karma caps per comment. But they designed the system to limit the power of moderators, and those limits didn't scale with the imbalance between trolls and good-faith posters