I don't visit /. anymore, but definitely grew up on it. I don't think you can understate the impact it had on a generation of geeks. Especially when it comes to Open Source, I think /. was incredibly important in educating people on a concept, history and philosophy many of us take for granted now.
And hot grits aside, it really did set the bar for intelligent discussion. /. was the first site where the comments were always more valuable than the articles. RTFA's were common, sure, but so was incredible insight and inside knowledge. That's what made it all so addictive.
I remember hitting refresh constantly on /. during 911. Personally, I found it the best source of information anywhere, though you had to have your own sanity filter on as well.
Thanks cmdrtaco, and congratulations on a real legacy. For me at least, /. is mostly replaced now, but that doesn't diminish what it was.
One of my favorite memories from /. was refreshing to see a new version of the kernel was available. You'd spend a few hours downloading it, compiling, and reboot. Usually there were no new features you wanted, no bugs fixed, just the idea of being on the bleeding edge was "cool" enough.
I'd wager that more nerds run Linux on the desktop (or laptop) now than they did back when Slashdot was getting started. The biggest loser of developer mindshare in the years since has been Windows.
But, no one (in their right mind) is using Mac OS on the server, and any developer with a successful website has a lot more servers than they have laptops or desktops, so I reckon they're more of a "Linux user" than a "Mac user".
I, too, read /. in the late 90s and up to around 2005, when I became more interested in other things, and other sites began making the changes that /. (and presumably CmdrTaco) were resistant to.
I also remember trying to read the source and muttering over the innumerable lines of cryptic Perl.
Interestingly, it's those changes that eventually drove me away.
It's a really dumb thing, but being able to type: http://slashdot.org/~blhack and see how my comments were doing karma wise was really important to me. For a young, budding geek, the karma was valuable feedback on how well I was contributing.
A tiny change to http://slashdot.org/~blhack/comments was just...annoying. Typing that first URL was something that I did probably 15 times a day; having it change was annoying. Like if for some ridiculous reason, gnu decided to change "ls" to "ks" or something. Tiny, but still annoying.
Then they kept screwing with the comments system. Reading the comments at "3" was part of my daily routine.
Yeah, I can change it back in preferences, but it feels like every time I try to get back into /., I have to spend 20 minutes hunting around for a way to get it back to usable.
To me, when slashdot started changing things, it felt like there is a bar that I've been going to for a decade, but the owner recently decided to change the interior design.
My bar is gone. The same people still go there, but the building has changed. It's not the same thing anymore.
Eventually, it seemed like a lot of the people left too.
I think a lot of people have a similar history with slashdot. I still ocationally go back but reading his fairwell and by his partner Hemos (2)'s reply reminded me of the best parts of Slashdot.
PS: Ok, I admit it. I found the "you must be new here." reply really funny.
Thanks for all that you have done as well Hemos. Slashdot was my home from about '98 to '03 and I have more cherished memories from it, than any site since.
Well put sir. I "grew up" on Slashdot as well (started reading circa 1998 as I recall) and although it's definitely declined, there was a "golden age" of Slashdot when the comments were far more interesting than the articles, which made the site worthwhile. Doesn't diminish what Slashdot was though.
The comments were valuable in part because the moderation system was the first really good implementation... this was a huge win, and it's really sad that all other discussion sites haven't learned from it (slashcode is open source, so it's not a complete black-box).
Interesting decision. In practice I don't think this will change a lot, because it's been years since Slashdot was primarily the personal project of Malda; from what I can tell, he's been "just another editor" and a bit withdrawn from the decision-making for a few years now. But I can see wanting to do something else.
For all its downsides, Slashdot is a quite interesting experiment imo.
In terms of form: It was one of the first (the first?) widely read tech blogs, in the sense of something that posted about technology in reverse chronological order, with a comments section below it (the comments section was even threaded). The idea of having users submit stories and write blurbs was also fairly novel, and has led to several different directions. Kuro5hin and MetaFilter took it in one direction, expanding from blurbs to more general kinds of article submissions (and Kuro5hin switched to voting rather than editorial curation), while Reddit/Digg/HN took it in the opposite direction, paring it down to link submissions with no blurb (again with voting).
In terms of content, imo it was a main way, especially in the late 90s, that a generation of tech people were introduced to things like the EFF, free software, problems of software patents, driver support for Linux, hardware hackability, and other such techno-liberty type things. Those predated Slashdot, of course, but it sort of crystallized a community on the web, alongside those that had previously been organized mainly around mailing lists, Usenet, etc. It also gained considerable mindshare for those ideas from a broader set of readers who weren't necessarily "activists".
Not only were the comments threaded, they also had an elaborate moderation and karma system in-place that still works very well. (With meta-moderation, to boot.) I often browse Slashdot at +5 to get a quick overview of the discussion. If there something interesting going on, it's easy to drill down and see the less popular posts and counterpoints related to the +5 post.
I think it's a great compromise: Get karma, you get a slight, but not overpowering, visibility boost. Lose karma or post anonymous, and you get a slight, but not overpowering, visibility malus. Capping the range of post ratings at -1 and 5 ensures that nothing ever truly gets voted into oblivion. Oh yes, and you can post anonymous -- even when logged in! How cool is that.
The moderation system is one of the things Rob and I are most proud of. We set out to make a system that would allow for anonymous postings while avoiding it turning into Usenet. I think, with some hiccups, we largely succeeded. We also took careful steps to make sure that we get anonymized all the data; all the IPs and subnets are hashed, so even we can't go back and find the real IP while still having something to work with.
You guys did great! Nothing in the world even comes close to /. moderation.
Reddit is a prime example of a simple karma system going off the deep end. Instead of reinforcing good behavior, the trend is now that a substantial majority of the community competes for karma score. The noise level has increased sharply over the previous years such that the "popular reddits" are now in the same domain as Digg or 4chan. (Thankfully subreddits such as proggit are still an excellent source of information.)
I think karma works here at HN because it is a hidden score (to avoid the Reddit scenario) and the community heavily discourages low-quality posts. In a sense it relies directly on the userbase mentality and could easily be negated by a change in demographics. (Hopefully we maintain a high signal:noise ratio...)
/. meta moderation rewards users for moderating "correctly" and it doesn't consider the sum input of all users. It's not something that every community could or should adopt, but it certainly seems to have prevented a large fluctuation in community quality for well over a decade. It's also really awesome that comments are not just quantitatively scored, but also have qualitative tags.
Both you and Rob have effected the evolution of the Web as well as how we consume our news in more ways than we'll ever know.
>I think karma works here at HN because it is a hidden score (to avoid the Reddit scenario)
That's only recently been the case, and the majority of the HN community still seems to be against it. If anything I've noticed more low-quality comments that haven't been downvoted lately, but that could easily, as you suggest, be a result of changing demographics and not connected with hidden karma. Unfortunately, as any community grows larger there will be a lowering of overall quality, though the number of high-quality comments may remain the same. It's the perception of lower quality that drives away the best members, so a preponderance of low-quality comments obscuring a number of very good ones can have a disastrous feedback effect.
I recall reading that part of pg's decision to start HN was as an experiment in entropy-avoidance. To that end, he has never sought to grow HN's traffic beyond that which the community could absorb. Now that HN is constantly mentioned in blogs, techcrunch, on facebook and g+, that might not be a viable strategy anymore. I eagerly await the changes he has in store for HN.
As for reddit's karma system being broken: that's not the problem. It's the demographic. The karma system works great in subreddits with a good community, and terribly in some of the larger subreddits with more of a 4chan/facebook crowd. Determining visibility by voting is only a problem when the voters are idiots. Also, as much as the HN community (many of them current and former redditors) may decry the devolution of reddit's overall quality, we really aren't the target audience. Reddit is a business that makes money through growth, and the overall reduction in quality has coincided with a huge surge in popularity and profitability. That's no accident. We may not like it anymore, but that's not an indictment of their business model or strategy.
Absolutely spot on for Reddit. Don't get me wrong, it's amusing as hell, and the community is open about it's Karma-mongering, but still... basically broken from the point of view of intelligent, accurate, discussion. /. was always good in moderation and what gets posted.
And you can modify comment scores by moderation reason, to boost e.g. informative comments while hiding e.g. funny ones, if you want to read a more serious discussion.
I honestly believe that Slashdot was one of the first sites to Get it Right with regards to content moderation, and continued to get it right even while sites like Digg were struggling to figure out how to handle users being dicks to each other.
I think people just lost interest, mixture of the community losing interest and the founder losing interest. The rise of blogs didn't help, I don't think: many of the people who in 1999-2004 would've written an article to submit to Kuro5hin would today prefer to post it on their own blog and just submit links to places like HN/Reddit. That has the advantage of letting you "own" your writing, to build a personal brand, perhaps monetize it, etc.; but it does result imo in a bit less of a community aspect.
K5 was interesting to me, and I actually was the one who negotiated an ad deal between Andover and Rusty to help him with money for the first couple years. K5 had very much the same feel as Everything2 which was the "other" site to Slashdot that the original krewe did. E2 still has a tight community with numerous marriages, people still talking. I think the problem with K5 is that become too self-referential, and ultimately people lost interest. That was the same thing with E2 -- while people for a time loved being part of the community at some point you have to start to do other things in life and the time commitment drops away.
Yeah, that was possibly the best site ever. Back when it went downhill all the people jumpt over to hulver.com but I left around that time. People talk about community, but that site was a _real_ community. Anyone remember the year we did a secret santa gift exchange?
I once had something I wrote on the front page... that was crazy. Remember how you would submit a post for editing first, and let the grammar geeks fix every little thing first? And you didn't just post a link to a blog post, you wrote the whole thing right there, on the site, the longer the better. I just looked for a link, but apparently my stories are too old, and are gone, and my last diary post was 2004. Anyone know where you can go to find that kind of community nowadays?
I once sent a really awesome link of hot news to two friends - they never replied or said anything but one posted it on his facebook immediately as if he had found it and got all the likes and comments and the other posted it on slashdot only to actually make it to the frontpage and surely I didn't get any mention.
I've been down on Slashdot for the last few years, even going so far as to remove it from my RSS reader and bookmarks bar. I check back sometimes here and there but devote most of my time to HN/reddit now.
Taco's farewell (and Hemos' reply in comments) really brought to me back why I liked Slashdot in the first place back in 1998- an editorial voice curating interesting tech stories.
That editorial voice was important to me in 1998, as I was in college for CS and was really uninformed about things like (as _delirium notes in this thread) the EFF, the RIAA, open source software, The Many Uses of Linux, etc. I compare that to today when I just scan lists of links on reddit or HN and pick out the items that interest me. The editorial voice was a good starting point for me- it directed me to interesting things that I couldn't have fathomed. As I grew into my techy career and interests, I needed it less and less.
I hope it's not viewed as complaining or whatnot, but I do wonder if anyone else avoids Slashdot in 2011 almost purely because of the commenters' obnoxiousness. I always get a picture of sysadmin-like greybeards pounding away furiously at their keyboards the moment anyone suggests that some software, somewhere be written in something other than C or perl. Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was (and "-5, Troll"? shudder.) And for that I thank you.
> Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was
In a lot of interesting varieties! Some even sort of artistic, and some precursors of later SomethingAwful/4chan/internet-meme types of things.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Slashdot editor Rob Malda resigned from his editorship this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the HN community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to geek culture. Truly an internet icon.
Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past. If we cannot scorn ourselves, we run the risk of taking ourselves to seriously.
Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past.
I do as well, but I also keep reminding myself "This is Hacker News, not Slashdot." And so I down-vote people who post memes and the typical /. off-topic crap. I just always take comfort in knowing that, when I want that stuff, Slashdot is still around.
Interestingly enough, I rarely find much in the way of memes on Reddit. But I think it's because I almost never visit the front-page or any of the popular sub-reddits. I stick to a lot of very niche / specialized sub-reddits like /r/machine_learning and /r/semanticweb and /r/csbooks, etc. <shrug />
Trolling as an art form. I can still remember when "subscriptions" to /. first came out and the people who added a line to their signatures, bemoaning the little asterisk by the name of subscribers. I think I was probably the first (and probably only) person who anonymously bought gift subscriptions to several of the worst complaining offenders. Apparently some of the recipients tried to refuse the gift subscriptions, but /. didn't have a process for that, and I probably gave the admins a headache that they didn't anticipate. Ah, those were the days...
I quit reading /. when the comments became too difficult to wade through, even when reading only +5's the system became overloaded with noise so I stopped visiting. HN is now my go-to site for news, due to the high quality of the comments (read 'em first to see if the link is worth the time) and the generally high value of articles.
I quit years ago when the obvious meme-jokes heavily outweighed any interesting discussion. Even knocking down Funny posts didn't always help.
On the very few occasions when I've returned, I've also really, really disliked the adjustments to the comment filtering and viewing - looks ugly and seems quite confusing. Like others, I do think they had an excellent moderation system that no one else seems to have matched since.
With you on the switch to HN as well. I deleted /. from my bookmarks a few years back and have probably visited twice in the last year just to see if it's still alive.
Similar experiences here, but I still remember /. and CmdrTaco with fondness. It was an incredibly cool idea, even if it didn't completely evolve the way I would have liked.
I'll be impressed if Hacker News can avoid the problems popularity seems to bring.
Indeed, I entered college for CS in 1998 and Slashdot was my main source of tech news for many years. (userid #132!) The comments would actually have more info on the story, or even someone related to the story itself posting (e.g. Carmack) I still have /. in my RSS reader but don't really read the comments anymore... however one of the main reasons I come to HN is for the comments, just like /. years ago.
My experience is similar but in addition I also noticed that I would come across many of the topics a day or two before they were actually posted on /. so it started to get less and less relevant. Now I don't visit at all.
It's a shame that Steve Job's leaving overshadows this. Slashdot has been a rock of the internet for 14 years, and I still regularly visit it. This paragraph is good:
In the last 14 years, Slashdot has covered so many amazing events: The explosion of Linux. The rise of Google. The return of Apple. The Dot Com Bubble. The DMCA. 9/11. Wars. Elections. Numerous successful Shuttle Launches and one Disaster. Scientific Breakthroughs galore. Cool toys. Web2.0! Social Networking. Blogging! Podcasting! Micro-Blogging! The Lord of the Rings being filmed and an entire trilogy of new Star Wars. OMG Ponies!! So many moments that I could run this paragraph for hours with moments where we shared something important, meaningful, or just stupid. But the most important to me was my marriage proposal to Kathleen. Slashdot has posted Over 114,000 stories so far. And there will be many more to come. I just won't be the one picking them.
There was a tremendous amount of work done that morning to keep the site up. Basically the site went static for long periods, which was the only way to save the poor database servers that were screaming and bleeding from their eyes under the load. If I recall correctly there was an after-action report posted later about the technical aspects of keeping the site working that day. Slashdot had nothing near the infrastructure that many "medium-sized" websites have today, which was bad: didn't have enough hardware to survive, but also good: the bosses were close enough to the metal to make immediate programming changes to reduce the site loading.
So it's really the opposite: Slashdot was unprepared for bursting of this magnitude, but able to react reasonably quickly to combat the unpreparedness. Other sites were probably more prepared (CNN.com) but once the load exceeded their preparations, it took them a while to, you know, get permission from the big boss to make the site static and otherwise react. CNN and other major sites did get their act together in fairly short order, actually - it's not at all the case that they were down for an extended period - they figured things out pretty quickly, just not quite as quickly as Slashdot.
Me too! I was trying to get a router working, and was pinging slashdot to find out if I was routing to the net. No response from slashdot - hmmmm, must have a network problem at my end. A bit later and I realised the net was up, but slashdot was down. It took me another few hours to realise that the reason slashdot was overwhelmed was because a major world-changing event was happening!
Slashdot was my first true time-wasting site. During free periods in high school I'd read Slashdot compulsively -- as nicpottier observed, it was probably the first site where the comments were often more valuable than the story.
Slashdot was a blog before the word 'blog' was coined. A universal shared experience, in my case for literally half a lifetime.
It's not enough to call Slashdot an early blog, because there were many proto-blogs at the time. Slashdot was actually social news before the era of user-generated content.
To me slashdot was critical in galvanizing the geek community and bringing free software to the mainstream in the late 90's. The comments added incredible value and created a community that I had not come across anywhere else.
I think the high point of that period was the announcement of the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base. Nowadays, itt is hard to imagine the need for all the stories on how to convince your boss to use this software some dude in Finland wrote.
Slashdot also championed everything2.com, kind of a proto-wiki.
The low point was all the trolling in the article about death of W. Richard Stevens, which lead to much of the moderation code that needed to be put in place.
Rob's run at slashdot was pioneering and hugely influential. I look forward to his next project.
Slashdot still has the best comment moderation system, even if none is perfect. When the story gets crowded by zillion of comments you still get the best ones in a single page without having to read literally 10 or 15 pages of comments.
> Slashdot still has the best comment moderation system
I disagree. It has a fundamental problem of earlier posts having far more chances to go +5 than those posted later. Something that is handled far better on HN that starts newer posts at the top of the comment page and lets them sink down.
Limited granularity, too. K5 improved on that, while HN's factoring in of time since posting seems to help to my mind as well.
Yet, for all its failings, it was an impressive starting point that led the way for a lot of others, and was massively influential in a way no single site seems to have become since.
I still read Slashdot but not as much as I did "back in the day" - it's my chicken soup site, where I go to feel comfortable surrounded by like minded folks.
While Jobs' resignation is big corporate news, CmdrTaco's might be bigger community news - the guy was "one of us." His site was one of the first online communities and their slanted (according to some) point of view was what spun off other hacker/nerd sites.
I will admit that I'll miss Rob Malda at Slashdot - his name there on the posts made me feel at home, someplace familiar.
One thing I don't see mentioned is that Slashdot was a uniquely Michigan success story. They were an example to a lot of Michigan startups that you could be successful and stay in the state.
I haven't seen him lately but CmdrTaco used to attend startup related events. One of the early Slashdot crew, Kurt DeMaagd, is now an assistant professor at Michigan State.
What the hell is going on today? Thats two influential tech personalities resigning from their signature positions in 24 hours. Im starting to get worried here. Whats next, John Carmack resigns from id?(heaven forbid!)
My world view has been shaken. Best of luck & thanks for the good times CmdrTaco. I wore out F5 keys on that site :)
Retiring the same day as Apple's CEO just seems like Rob Malda's style to me, in the best possible way. I doubt he made a snap decision to do it, but if he was already planning on doing it and saw the opportunity... :)
As someone on /. noted, Slashdot was also founded in September 1997, the same month that Steve Jobs returned to Apple.
Maybe this coincidence influenced Rob's decision.
Slashdot was the source of my now-permanent news habits, and, I believe, the Petri dish in which modern hacker culture was first cultivated. Slashdot had memes before they were called memes, or so it seems; most importantly, it had discussion via threaded comments and community moderation. I first used this handle on Slashdot, and whenever one of my sites goes down due to traffic, I'll say it's been slashdotted.
But the relevance of Slashdot as a site has been eclipsed, first by Digg, then by Reddit and HN. The network effect is part of it. The technology is part of it. There's some je ne sais quoi about these newer sites; maybe they'll be replaced by some other, more minimalist social news platform in the future.
Actually, "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene). Although, the meaning in popular culture has morphed from the generic definition (any self propagating idea) to refer to fast spreading cat videos and the like.
I remember the episode of The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose did a segment about Slashdot - and even hinted at morphing the concept more toward what he created with Digg (giving users more power to source stories - voted up purely on their merits).
/. has definitely had a big impact in the way we obtain our news (more targeted, and with social interaction). But I, like most people here, I imagine, left it long ago in favor of Digg, Reddit, or HN.
What's been interesting to see is the gradual migration back from Digg & Reddit; not so much HN. But the issue tends to happen when sites begin to try and cover "everything" that you end up driving out the original and central audience.
I actually stopped visitng /. for awhile there when I found digg would cover stories almost immediately, only showing up on slashdot a day or two later. But once digg got too popular their promotion system clearly broke down (not to mention the awful awful 'community', and I've been back to /. (and later HN) since
I actually like the slightly slower, curated speed of 10-15 posts a day, spaced out a bit, instead of a constant churn of thousands of things. Although, with HN you can get an algorithmic approximation of that via HN Daily. The main thing that's still missing is the "why you should care" blurb that's Slashdot's signature: not just a link, but a link with something about why it's being linked in the first place. I find titles to be a bit too cryptic for my tastes, and the use of only titles tends to promote linkbait titles.
Digg really shot themselves in the foot when they tried to make the site "personalized" - most in their audience wanted there to be just "one" primary home page.
Reddit seems to have been able to create many successful smaller communities around sub-reddits.
It's another lesson that trying to be all things to all people usually satisfies no one.
I was always impressed with the story selection on Slashdot. There was a certain mindset that they were pandering to, but it flat-out worked.
I was a voracious reader of Slashdot in the early years until I had an epiphany when reading the They Might Be Giants interview in 2000. I realized that the collective geek mindset was rooted more in fantasy than reality. Posters were so desperately wanting the TMBG guys to be off-the-wall wacky and absurdist, but really it was more that the two John's were just doing their own thing, and that thing was outside the realm of normal music. Yet no one picked up on it.
I couldn't read Slashdot after that. The geek fantasy fog was too thick and pervasive and self-referential.
I went to go see CmdrTaco speak in 2005. Someone asked him how to make a website as popular as Slashdot. Malda said to start it in 1997. Of course in the next year the meteoric rise of both digg and reddit began.
I think there is a moral here about not resting on your laurels and never thinking no one can catch up with you.
The latter. I can testify to that. And if you look back at when Kevin Rose was doing the G4 stuff, there's an interview with Rob where Kevin asks Rob what he would do different. Rob outlines basically Slashdot + user voting. A few months later, Digg comes out. True story.
It's made its way into near-future SF. Some character in a novel by Ken Macleod, faced with a Plot Device disaster, says to a friend "I can't even get to Slashdot."
In less-than-near-future SF, the antagonists in Alastair Reynolds' _Century Rain_, the "Slashers", were supposed to be the intellectual descendants of Slashdotters. From Wikipedia: ``...they trace their existence back to "an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the first computer networks", whose symbol was a slash and a dot.''
I had to groan a bit at this gratuitous reference in an otherwise tight novel. :)
I once submitted a friend's blog entry to slashdot. It was picked for the front page. I can't remember exactly how it works, but you get an email or a notice on the site saying your story will appear shortly.
I was in my friend's living room at the time, sitting near the laptop on the end of an ADSL connection that served his blog.
"Ummmm.... I think i've done a baaaaad thing."
That lil' ol' laptop was absolutely hammered for the next day, even after moving the images, etc., on to 'proper' servers and making the site static.
I submitted my review of of the Unicomp Customizer (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/05/29/1334258/Review-o...) years ago, and I think that day remains the most traffic I've ever gotten. Granted, it's a generic Wordpress.com blog and thus not susceptible to Slashdotting, but I still remember looking at the traffic spike and going, "Wow."
It was; Neil and I actually talked about that at one point. Our first email exchange ran something along the lines of me saying my (then baby) first born had a Sandman mobile above her crib; Neil's reply "And my son's home page is Slashdot"
I feel really old now. All the things I remember most about Slashdot seem to have been forgotten.
Things I remember (most of these are pre-2000):
Netscape being open sourced (and the role Slashdot played in that)
Oracle shipping on Linux
The hidden Slashdot threads (wah_is_cool anyone?)
Discovering a input validation hole that let me post a "Powered by Windows NT" image in the middle of a thread about the original CERT XSS attack warning (http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html)
Slashdot built the community that a lot of people still have close ties to. I'll always remember reading my first few Bruce Perens posts, and adding him (and a few others) to my 'Friends' List.
I'll also never forget listening to their marketing person talk about how they could 'bitchslap' negative comments (about the advertiser) to -2 so that nobody could see them.
Slashdot is a great place for the folks who have been in the industry for any amount of time. It was always a trusted and stable source of news, reposts, and April Fool's Pranks. I will continue to think that this is something that he did on his own free will and volition, and not something that was forced upon him by the powers that be at GeekNet.
Ann Arbor, MI isn't the Linux Hot-Spot -- nor is it a mecca for new and exciting technology jobs. I hope he enjoys his time off and finds something that gives him the love and satisfaction that slashdot gave him over the last decade.
> I'll also never forget listening to their marketing person talk about how they could 'bitchslap' negative comments (about the advertiser) to -2 so that nobody could see them.
Citation, please?
Rob Malda's oft-cited bitchslap comment was about a script he had written to deal with Slashdot's most annoying commenters (people who used their own scripts to submit thousands of duplicate comments simultaneously), and had nothing to do with advertisers or marketing or denigrating products. In fact at the time the comment was written, I don't believe Slashdot had a marketing person outside of Jeff Bates.
This was during a call I was on with their Marketing team when the company that I was working for planned to do a mini sub-site within slashdot to extol and display the features of their newest product line. I don't believe it is public record, otherwise I would cite it.
The answer that I've always wanted to hear Rob give would come from these questions:
What are the underlying linchpins of the SlashDot community? How would you rebuild it? What steps would you take, what processes would you put in place, what technology would you use?
I would never want to create a SlashDot clone, nor would I expect anyone could clone SlashDot. However, there are very important lessons in community building, management and infrastructure planning that Rob is an expert at.
I thrived on Slashdot for years - definitely the first large, tech oriented news forum I was into. Really, one of the first blogs - but you rarely hear Malda quite take credit for his unique place in internet history. He's refreshingly humble.
Rob doesn't strike me as the sort of person who'd enjoy just kicking back and relaxing forever.
He's comfortably well-off, but is looking for a change. 14 years is a lot of time to dedicate to one project, especially when it's mature and stable like Slashdot is. I imagine he's going to take a well-deserved break and then like a lot of tech entrepreneur's, come back for round two and start another company.
Also, way to totally blow past what took me like 6 months to get in HN karma points in like 7 hours... :) You sure know how to make a guy feel popular ;)
It certainly has for me. Hardware is all nice and fine, but the informational content of slashdot has had far more profound effect on myself. I don't think I would recognize a version of me that grew up in a universe without slashdot.
Unlike the hardware maker, I think I almost feel a tinge of emotion here.. think I'll go troll on slashdot a bit today, seems like the right thing to do.
And hot grits aside, it really did set the bar for intelligent discussion. /. was the first site where the comments were always more valuable than the articles. RTFA's were common, sure, but so was incredible insight and inside knowledge. That's what made it all so addictive.
I remember hitting refresh constantly on /. during 911. Personally, I found it the best source of information anywhere, though you had to have your own sanity filter on as well.
Thanks cmdrtaco, and congratulations on a real legacy. For me at least, /. is mostly replaced now, but that doesn't diminish what it was.