CmdrTaco Looks Back on Fifteen Years of Slashdot 178
CmdrTaco sent in a link to his weblog post looking back on his experience running Slashdot for fifteen years: "For me the story of Slashdot is utterly inseparable from my own life. I built it while still in college: when normal people did their homework or had personal lives, I spent my evenings making icons in The Gimp, crafting perl in vim or writing a new story to share with my friends. I’ll never forget the nights spent tailing the access_log and celebrating a line from microsoft.com or mit.edu with friends like Jeff, Dave, Nate, and Kurt."
Yeah, welcome to the club, pal (Score:5, Insightful)
Over the last few years, my light hearted sarcasm was slowly replaced by bitterness. Somewhere along the line became unable to hide my feelings from my friends, family and finally even my co-workers.
Yeah, that's called "aging" and it's pretty common. Generally speaking, your chronological age bears a proportional relationship to the percentage of time you spend bitching about shit. By the time you're collecting Social Security, it's pretty much 95% bitching (the other 5% consisting mostly of bragging about your retarded grandkids, who you think are geniuses for some reason).
Re:The Problem with Trading Hands (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot editors publicly claim they think it's only a good thing
FTFY
A good read (Score:4, Insightful)
And one that any person who reads slashdot daily should take in.
Being slashdotted still means something to the people that were around when it happened daily...
Re:The Problem with Trading Hands (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Problem with Trading Hands (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been for years, you should have been here in the beginning.
The biggest problem is that the fight against the trolls and shills was lost. I have watched really good insighful posts get modded to oblivion because it said anything negative about Android, even when it was 100% true and offered a solution. Same for Microsoft Shills and shill mods. The Moderator system seems to be really easy to game, and it's really really easy to make an autoposter that reposts the +5 comments to the dupes to get into the moderation pool. Read at -1 and look at the insane amount of spam that get's on the site.
Although slashdot could get worse, Gawker Media could buy Slashdot and install their crap-tastic commenting system.
Re:The Problem with Trading Hands (Score:5, Insightful)
what if a giant just wanted to buy Slashdot to shut it down because of the negative press it generates for them?
Easy.. we'll make our own slashdot, with blackjack and hookers. On second thought, scrap the /.
Long time User (see UID of three digits) Agrees (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sad to see the changes...and I will agree that SlashDot is not what it was. I've been considering frequenting it less. I seldom post, but I do read a lot of articles (and quite often commentary). :)
Course, I'm not what I was 15 years ago either
Re:Interesting navel gazing (Score:3, Insightful)
The behavior would be astonishing, if I weren't as well versed in human nature.
Indeed. I first noticed this syndrome with MUDs back in the day. Imms would come or go; changes to gameplay would be made, and players would inevitably pine for the golden days that never really were.
Imagine my shock when I found out this applied to every facet of life.
Re:Summary of the last 15 years (Score:4, Insightful)
"I'll probably get modded down for this, but ..." (comment goes to +5 immediately)
Re:Interesting navel gazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea, I've been seeing that strawman pop up here pretty much daily for the last decade: "Oh, there's a bunch of posters with whom I disagree, Slashdot is falling apart, becoming a haven for the [insert group you don't like]!
If you think that's all it is, you have not been paying attention. Informed, well-reasoned disagreements are part of what made /. what it is, or was perhaps. Sadly, those have been largely supplanted by ill-informed and logically flawed disagreements. So yeah, even though it's to be expected as more and more of the retards find their way here, it is still lamentable. Wading through the dross, to get to something interesting/insightful/informative, grows more wearisome with each passing week, it seems.
Again, I've heard this argument many, many times over the past decade of following Slashdot, and not a soul, yourself included, has been able to provide any evidence whatsoever of any deviation from the norm.
If you honestly believe "ill-informed and logically flawed disagreements" are a new concept to Slashdot (or even humanity in general), I propose that perhaps you are the one who hasn't been paying enough attention.
Re:Interesting navel gazing (Score:5, Insightful)
We just had a chance to ask Steve Wozniak, the actual person, any questions we wanted. And he responded. Here. We have articles about the Mars rovers and actual scientists who are working on them respond. We have some highly intelligent debate that illuminate issues deeply.
Yes, there is a lot of crap and the gems seem fewer and fewer... but you are absolutely correct. He/she/it needs to provide proof for their claims.
Re:Yeah, welcome to the club, pal (Score:4, Insightful)
But in Taco's case, he's not nearly old enough to be telling kids to get off his lawn or to be bitter and bitching. I'm actually a bit surprised. WTF does he have to be bitter about?
Because it isn't an age issue, it is a been-at-this-job-too-long issue.