So Long, CmdrTaco, and Thanks For All The Posts 238
With CmdrTaco moving on to his temporary retirement home, the Slashdot editors who will continue to poke and prod at reader submissions (the heart and soul of this site: without readers, there'd be nothing to talk about as well as no one to talk about it) would like to offer an extended 'Thank You' to Rob, and offer some thoughts on the years so far, as well as what comes next. (Of late, though, we're lucky to have the growing contributions of Clinton Ebadi, aka Unknown Lamer, who got an oddball start on the Slashdot page a long time back.) Read on for a few words from Samzenpus, timothy, and Soulskill.
From Samzenpus:
I first met Rob Malda about 12 years ago while he was living in what we affectionately called The Geek House. At that time, Rob was just one of a motley crew of nerds who would assemble in the living room every night. They could usually be found sitting in foof chairs bathed in computer screen light. What made Rob different was how passionate he was about a website he made, something called Slashdot. Before I knew it, Slashdot had grown and I was working as user support. A few years later I was posting stories and Slashdot was a geeky household name. In that span Rob changed a lot. His Foof chair morphed into an Aeron, tubes of Pringles became business lunches, and we convinced him to embrace the wonders of natural light. He proposed to his wife and now has two kids. What didn't change in all that time was his passion for making Slashdot a great site. In the FAQ, Rob says that Slashdot is like an omelette: a combination of important news, interesting discussions, and fun stuff. What makes it great is the variety of ingredients. Rob may have started the omelette, but we'll keep it cooking and make it bigger and better with the stuff that matters.
From timothy:
In 1998 or 1999, my housemates Alvin and Dan (both of them Comp-Sci students at UT-Austin, where I'd been a lowly advertising major) pointed out to me a little site called "Slashdot.org." A strange name, and a page that seemed to be nothing but black text over an assault of white and green. It took a minute or two to parse what was going on, but then — Whoah! Smart people were discussing (and arguing about!) Linux, The GIMP, patents, and Neal Stephenson: I was hooked instantly. I've been posting stories to the site since early 2000, and in that role I've gotten to know CmdrTaco a bit. I didn't realize beforehand just how much effort can go into a simple-looking web page, and how hard it is to decide how many people to please at any given time.
Rob — CmdrTaco — has that whole span of time never wavered in his dedication to the site, and to the readers. A small example, but one that has always impressed me given what's at stake: as banner ads have infested the Web, Rob has fought for modesty and sanity rather than some of the intrusive pop-ups, interstitials, autoplaying videos and other discourtesies of modern online advertising. (We'd probably all like it if the site could exist with no ads at all, but in an imperfect world keeping them tolerable rather than obnoxious is a respectable stance, even if it means disappointing some advertisers.) And while we've been through plenty of experiments with user interface elements, new sections, and allocation of the moderator points that make the whole thing go, Rob's also taken a hard line about distracting features that don't speak to the site's core: News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters (and building conversations around those things). It's notable that Slashdot is one place where the marketplace of ideas is encouraged to bloom more than it is at many newspapers' sites, and even our friend "Anonymous Coward" can freely have his say. We like that, though it gets messy sometimes. It's meant a lot of sleepless nights for Rob and his shifting corps of engineers, trying to figure out ways to let readers help algorithmically bat down the trolls and flamebait, and to give some recognition to readers who contribute their insightful or funny comments.
It's very strange to think of reading Slashdot without CmdrTaco in the lead — even when I've disagreed with him on some particular design issue, I've never doubted his sincere belief that the readers come first. Rob isn't being frozen in carbonite, though — despite his claim of "no plans," he's got his own maker-style projects to work on, a few kids to take care of, and probably about 15 years of sleep deprivation to start chipping away at. He promises to remain part of the Slashdot community (he's still user No. 1, after all), and I expect will be a sort of unofficial Editor Emeritus for the foreseeable future. And that's good, because we'll keep working on ways to make the site friendlier and easier to use, but still dedicated to the same News for Nerds.
From Soulskill:
So, what changes from here on out for You, The Reader? Well, surprisingly little. Rob has always been clear and vociferous in defining what makes a story appropriate for Slashdot, and those standards have become deeply ingrained in the rest of the editorial staff. Slashdot won't be the same for us, but we’ll work hard to make sure the content we run continues to educate, inform, entertain, or some combination thereof. As always, feedback is welcome, and you can head over to /recent to have a direct impact on the submissions process. The engineering team continues to streamline the site’s layout and add useful functionality in order to facilitate what matters most to us: giving you folks a place to read and talk about news that matters to you.
So long, and thanks again for all the fish. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, not Web 2.0's social media, but Web 1.0's social media: a place that was pseudonymous, but still reputation-based. A place where pseudonyms stood alone - no "like" or "+1" buttons. Not a place for 140-character tweets, but a place for paragraph- and essay-length commentary.
To stretch the analogy, in the first incarnation of Jobs' Apple, users bought Macintoshes not to show off their respective bling, but to get work done. (No, not coding work, office work - but it was work nonetheless, and it was work that couldn't be done nearly as easily, nor as well, under the Wintel equivalents of the mid-80s.)
Likewise, Slashdot - and the rest of Social Media 1.0 - were not built so much as place in which to speak, but as place in which to listen. I've learned far more in the comments from the past 12 years of Slashdot posts than I could ever have learned from the agglomerated mewlings of marketroids and demagogues alike.
At any rate, so long, CmdrTaco, and thanks for all the fish.
And thanks for having what was by far the coolest booth at the 1999 LinuxWorld Conference and Expo at Javits/NYC.
Re:Unknown Lamer (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup, 11 years later and he's still true to his name.
Also, do you think Taco was pretty annoyed that Jobs had to go and preemptively one-up him?
Actually I was wondering if maybe there was some standing bet or ultimatum that CmdrTaco would have to retire from Slashdot when Steve Jobs retired from Apple.
At any rate, I have to add my voice to the chorus of "Thank You CmdrTaco!" Slashdot is by far the site I have been regularly visiting for the longest time and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Re:Break out the /. memes and the low IDs (Score:5, Interesting)
Moderation Tools (Score:5, Interesting)
How about fixing it so that I do not have to turn on JavaScript just to moderate? In the past couple of weeks I noticed that I have to turn it on in order to moderate. The result? I don't moderate.
I prefer the old style discussion system because it didn't use JavaScript and I still don't want to use it. Thanks!
/. in the real world? (Score:4, Interesting)
A while back someone posted a link to a picture of his car. I think the context was his driveway was captured by Google street view. Anyway, the vanity plate on the car matched the user's /. nick name. Someone replied with surprise that this should be the case. I had always sorta assumed this is what every /. user (with a car) did.
Well, given the current swell of nostalgia prompted by recent events, any one else out there with vanity plates, tattoos, or other real world paraphernalia related to nicks or things slashdotian? Care to post pics?
Here's my contribution [catandsean.org].
Yes, the birth certificates for your twins counts, if their names are Cowboy and Neal.
Re:Editors, non-snarky question: usability testing (Score:4, Interesting)
We do, but apparently not frequently enough. Part of the problem, I think, is that we've changed our design scheme several times, deprecating certain pages along the way, without automatically pointing people to the new "correct" URL instead. Then, as the design drifts further away, things break on pages we don't expect people to be using anymore.
For a long while we were pretty starved for engineering time, but that's changed lately, and we're making more progress. I will say this: any time you find a bug, or have a question about how something works, or find a specific bit of design that strikes you as unintuitive, feel free to email us and let us know. We get fewer bug reports than you'd think, but we fix 'em when we know about 'em.