20 Years of Stuff That Matters 726
Read on for a trip down memory lane.
Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.
The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.
While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.
Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.
As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.
Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.
One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.
It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?
On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.
The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.
We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.
Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Insightful)
... or was forced out...
Re:Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been on slashdot since 2000 or so, and I did not notice much of a difference between CmdrTaco here and CmdrTaco gone.
Re:Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Funny)
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Even when half your 'friends' no longer come out to play anymore.
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Too bad the number of friends/foes is capped. I find the system to be very useful to upvote comments from people I have found insightful that haven’t been upmodded but can’t add any more because I’ve reached the limits.
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Democracy is the two wolves dressed up in wool, discussing calmly with the well-armed sheep which restaurant they should eat in, while demonstrating that vegetarianism is in nobody's best interests as farming sheep is very bad for the planet.
Re:Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Interesting)
He was very noticeable earlier than that. When I joined /. (sorry, don't remember when it was, but definitely before 99) it still had that feeling of a personal blog that was unusually successful. We didn't even call them "blogs" back then. :-)
The main differences in /. between then and now are: :-)
* it now feels more "under editorial control" and less personal
* the meta-moderation system didn't exist
* the old comment system was better.
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The stories didn't change much, at least at first, and in the long run I'm not sure how much was just the changing nature of tech and the internet and how much was Slashdot.
The one thing I did miss when Taco left was his occasional but usually great comments.
Anyone else remember Slashdot Radio? I actually quite enjoyed that. Still hoping to get that surgery for HSV controls on my eyeballs one day.
Re:Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Interesting)
Go to the linked 9/11 page, and the top story on 9/11 itself. What jumped out at me right away was the quality of the comments that got modded Troll that day. They were for the most part anti-Islam screeds and gummint-did-it conspiracy theorists, but all of them composed by someone who actually expected their commentary to be read by others. Not a single instance of app apping cow nonsense, references to gay ethnics, or multipage cut-and-paste fetish descriptions.
If this site is not going to be News For Nerds anymore, let's at least bring back our literate trolls.
Re:Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Interesting)
That's true. We did have a more sophisticated kind of trolls back in the days.
But in the early days, there were true masters of the dark art, they could make comments so carefully crafted to goad you into actually replying in an attempt to actually engage in a meaningful discussion, and they even replied. Not even with canned statements but with witty, if trolling, remarks. Back then it was actually a challenge to know whether someone's just trying to fool you.
Re:Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Informative)
This is true of the moderation, rather than the trolling itself. Much moderation has become reaction to the opinion, rather than the quality of the post. I can tell because if I post something thoughtfully controversial, I often see a whole profile page of it being batted back and forth between rival gangs of driveby upmodders and downmoddders, often settling about where it started.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Funny)
You kids with your 20-digit UIDs all talking 'bout how it was. I remember when we had to compile special Windowmaker apps and have the right PERL modules to render Slashdot.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Interesting)
I also remember when a story was on fire when it had more than a hundred comments. At that point the site would start to slow down from the traffic.
There was also Jon Katz and his idiotic editorial pieces.
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Back when slashdot was slashdotted by being slashdot...
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Funny)
I remember when I hadn't realized my password was part of the URL, which I shared online, and somebody changed my newsfeed to only contain CowboyNeal submissions. It was probably CowboyNeal.
I'm not going to reveal how long until I noticed.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly my biggest regret in life is that I didn't register a Slashdot account earlier. I thought it was cool to post as AC... What a fool I was.
When I realized I went out in the rain, to the local graveyard, found a suitable headstone and knelt before it. Then I let out a desperate cry of "I COULD HAVE BEEN TRIPLE DIGITS!"
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Funny)
No matter how depressed I get, I know I can always count on AC to care enough to call me a faggot. It's the one universal constant of the internet.
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You kids with your 20-digit UIDs all talking 'bout how it was. I remember when we had to compile special Windowmaker apps and have the right PERL modules to render Slashdot.
Yeah! In the snow! And uphill both ways!
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You kids with your 20-digit UIDs all talking 'bout how it was.
It's irrelevant to the discussion, but this brought up a memory of my father telling me about going to REI to buy something, and when the cashier asked him for his membership card to put in the member number, she looked at it and said "This doesn't have enough numbers!" My father had been stationed in Seattle in the early 1960s, and had received a five-digit membership number when he joined the REI co-op (mine is seven digits, about thirty years later). One of the more entertaining memories I have of my fat
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I think this was the story that really started it all:
https://slashdot.org/story/99/... [slashdot.org]
Notice it was still called the "slashdot effect" back then. Look at the comments from the poor site owner! Although I still want to read the end of "She Hates My Futon"...
-Jeremy
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Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Insightful)
I still see short; thoughtless comments, trolls and flamebait, mainly because I browse at -1, but they've always been more likely to appear under Anonymous Coward than any actual userID. What moderation did was to allow people to choose for themselves how much, or how little of the total thread they wished to see. Even at the unfiltered setting I prefer to browse at, I think I'm seeing far less Goatse links, pointless Natalie Portman/Hot grits comments and the like than I used to. Mind you, I do find the more recent "apping appers use aps!" and "You're all group think cows!" trolls to be at least more entertaining than the goatse and Rickroll links were. (entertaining in the sense of watching in fascination as a homeless man with mental health issues rubs dog shit all over his face to repel alien mind probes.)
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As for the spam, trolls, flamebait etc etc, near as
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with this. I am about the same (other than I browse at 0, not -1). I hit slashdot every day, not really for the stories so much as the comments. Glory days past or not, there are still a lot of good comments well worth reading. I like that there are people willing to take the time to make a reasoned case for their positions, whether I agree or not.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that a community as large as Slashdot could survive without moderation is silly. Check out literally any other comment system with a similar scale and no moderation (your local newspaper, YouTube, etc...) and you will find nothing but worthless trolling, crazy people, and flamewars. Without a way to control the trolls all of the quality people leave and the forum turns into a raging dumpster fire until it is shut down entirely.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone remember the guy who had a sig: "Karma: Chameleon (Mostly due to the fact that you come and go)"?
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the issue, is that Tech over 20 years has been so ingrained in our culture.
20 Years ago,
Multi-Tasking OS (why would anyone want to do more than one thing on a computer)
Email/Online Chats (this is for only Nerds who have no life)
Mobile Devices (Only toys for geeks who want to show themselves as social outcasts)
Being that this technology had made it part of normal culture. This type of stuff is no longer the domain of the News for Nerds, because it just happen to be cool now.
As well ever sense 9/11 politics and tech started to get interwoven. So were the big issue use to the DMCA and now it is the Russian Government using Facebook to polarize the American People to destabilize the nation. Debates on Net Neutrality, Outsourcing of Tech workers, expanding green cards towards tech workers, to trying to kick out all immigrants who may be working tech.
With the decline of the Middle Class, the Technology Sector is one of the few middle class worker areas....
In short life isn't a simple tech job, for a harry toe programmer. Tech is now integrated with the rest or the world.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:5, Insightful)
Russian Government using Facebook to polarize the American People to destabilize the nation
For me the biggest change over the years has been realizing that Slashdot really is Stuff that Matters. I thought it was just nerds, but then...
- GCHQ leaked documents showed the targeted Slashdot for influence and malware distribution
- Reddit and 4chan started having a measurable effect on politics, eventually giving birth to the alt-right
- Russia managed to destabilize the UK and then the US via social media, and the EU only narrowly avoided it
- It's actually possible that World War 3 will be started with a tweet now
Slashdot is more important now than ever I think.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Interesting)
Russia managed to destabilise the UK? When did that happen?
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Informative)
Last year with Brexit. We have been in turmoil ever since, severely weakened government and an unclear future.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Insightful)
The hated of democracy will never stop. The people got what they wanted, not because they were stupid, nor because there was some grand conspiracy: they simply disagree with you about what's best.
People disagree on important things. That's humanity. It's not because one side of an issue is stupid, or because of Reds under the bed, but because people have different value systems, and thus can come to different conclusions as to what's best from the same data.
Re: Slashdot Died when CmdrTaco Left (Score:4, Insightful)
The Brexit campaign was awful. Endless lies, no plan even offered so it wasn't clear what people were actually voting for, and outside influences from social media.
It's also quite telling that Brexit supporters have stopped trying to claim it will be great and fallen back to "it's the will of the people", while also opposing any further democratic consultation.
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Slashdot's dead???? Has Netcraft confirmed it?
One notable story I heard about first on /. (Score:5, Interesting)
9/11. At the time, my habit was to login and go to sites like cnn.com for the morning's news. None of the normal news sites would come up. That is odd I thought. Continued onto /., where I first saw the post about it. I immediately went and turned on the TV. Crazy stuff.
Thank you, John C. Randolph (~jcr) (Score:3, Interesting)
Your comment reminded me of heroes. And there's one Slashdot Hero that I'd like to thank for his fantastic contributions over the years: John C. Randolph [slashdot.org], also known as "jcr".
There are few users here whose comments I look forward to reading. John is among those commenters. When I'm scrolling through the comments rapidly and "~jcr" catches my eye, I stop and read the comment every time.
John embodies the original spirit of Slashdot. Unlike so many here, he has a huge amount of hands-on industry experience wor
20 Years of Stuff That Matters (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, unfortunately only rarely news for nerds.
Happy Birthday Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
I enjoy coming here.
Even if it has gotten worse (and that varies), Slashdot still has the best comment layout and system out of any news site I read
Re:Happy Birthday Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
And still one of the top news for nerds sites out there, even if some other crap sneaks in at times. Happy birthday!
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And still one of the top news for nerds sites out there
Which probably says more about the general amount and quality of "news for nerds" than about /....
Re:Happy Birthday Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
And still one of the top news for nerds sites out there, even if some other crap sneaks in at times. Happy birthday!
I read Slashdot for... the "articles"...
Re:Happy Birthday Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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Now THAT was a great April fools prank.
Unfortunately, the Wayback machine doesn't have a copy of it (April 1, 2006).
OMG PONIES!!!!
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I agree, and I still find comments (to be honest, I've usually seen the news elsewhere by the time it's posted here, but most of the time I look forward to what /. is going to say about it).
You do have to filter out some comments sometimes, but in all, /.'s comment base is still *much* more interesting and educated than that of the TFA.
One regret? I can't seem to remember the last time a website was "slashdotted" by having a link to it posted in a story :-)
MEEPT!! (Score:5, Funny)
Who could ever forget The Glorious Meept!! [slashdot.org]?
History of the world, according to Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
For some reason, the full text triggers the lameness filter, but follow the link to the History of the World, where The Glorious MEEPT!! plays a role...
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=64664&cid=5990632 [slashdot.org]
Re:MEEPT!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Recurring posters and in-jokes are one of my favorite things about Slashdot comments.
My favorite is probably posts from K'breel, Speaker for the Council [google.com] and the Martian propaganda fight against the so-called "evil Terran aggressors" (relayed by Tackhead [slashdot.org]).
It's been awhile since we had news from Mars. I hope he's doing okay.
Not a first post (Score:4, Informative)
But I must have been one of the first posters!
Re:Not a first post (Score:5, Funny)
Not so fast, alanw!
Re: Not a first post (Score:5, Funny)
Keep going
Re: Not a first post (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot. The only place where penis envy is about having the smaller one.
Re:Not a first post (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't forget CleverNickName aka Wil Wheaton.
No mention of the April Fools stories?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are mentions of OMG Ponies! and the Parrot runtime?
Apple.slashdot.org (Score:4, Insightful)
My one and only accepted story submission turned out to be the launch article for apple.slashdot.org
My little piece of Slashdot history .... otherwise, my comments have been consistently useless for 20 years now.
Seniority matters. (Score:3)
Only users with 4 digit IDs should be allowed to post in this thread.
Re:Seniority matters. (Score:4, Insightful)
So you dont qualify.
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That, and people who post pics of Nathalie Portman pouring hot grits down her pants ;)
Re:Seniority matters. (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet Slashdot, hot grits pour Natalie Portman down YOUR pants!
Re:Seniority matters. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, is there a separate thread for old timers?
Obviously a ton has changed, but I have fond memories of slashdot and credit it's consistent quality for a lot of my career progress!
Happy birthday slashdot!
Re:Seniority matters. (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. Anyone with less than a 4 digit ID is too old to post anything of value.
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Still one of my favorite posts ever (Score:5, Interesting)
February 14, 2002 - The day that CmdrTaco's life changed forever: https://slashdot.org/story/02/... [slashdot.org]
Also 20 year anniversary for How Users Read on Web (Score:3)
Maybe the Slashdot editors should have a look at this article, given the tome that was included in today's post.
Slashdot has changed over the 20 years (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't remember that it was 20 years. I would actually have guessed 21 years ago. All I know is I was sitting in my college dorm and a friend from across the hall mentioned that a site we had been reading had just gone live with user accounts and I should jump on it to get a low account ID. He had already signed up and has a 3 digit account. I didn't care enough at the time, so I waited an hour or two. By that time I got a high four digit ID since so many people had already signed up. That was the speed of how important these things were to people 20 years ago. There were two tech sites that I read all day every day at that point, because new articles were posted sporadically, and you wanted your FIRST PSOT! /. was by far the most relevant site to me at the time, but I also read Tweak3d. Stories on /. in the first few years were very entertaining. Most didn't get a ton of comments, and then you'd come across a story that was overwhelmed with comments and you'd go through and read every one, often posting a response or three in some of the more active threads - even if you were posting anonymously in order to not lose your editor points or whatever they called them back then. And then you'd come across the duplicate posts, probably by some editor who was drunk at the time and didn't remember the story having already been posted. Comments on those were brutal. A few years after that there was a new staff member (I don't recall the name) that had more blog style articles that weren't strictly in the same vein as the normal /. articles, and people hated him with a passion! He was more of a professional journalist than a techie that was writing news for their friends like the other editors. The point is that there was real atmosphere. There was a real sense of belonging to a site that mattered and was interesting and creative at the same time.
But things changed over the years. It was around 2010 or 2011 that the changes really took effect. The stories got less relevant, comments got less interesting, etc. Personally I still enjoy /. and read it every day, but I've probably only posted a dozen comments in the past 10 years, and it's rare that I even bother to look at the first few comments.
The mojo is gone. The excitement that used to surround each story, and the way the people commented (yes, even including a couple of the original trolls that would FILL the comment section with repeated random garbage) is just different. It's likely because the founders are gone, and /. has gone through multiple corporate overlords since those first few years. Stories are more boilerplate and more like the stories on other websites now.
There are likely still tens of thousands of lurkers like me from the early days that still read /. almost daily. Bring back the mojo and they'll start participating again.
Re:Slashdot has changed over the 20 years (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot has changed over the 20 years (Score:5, Interesting)
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Wow, 30. You make me look like a newcomer.
Re:Slashdot has changed over the 20 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it's funny, I had called my ISP because I had just installed RH 4.7 (I think) and was having trouble getting stuff configured to connect to the internet. Fortunately the tech support guy was a fellow geek, because he walked me right through setting up the configuration and after I was connected he said "There are two sites you have to check out Right Away". They were /. and Freshmeat. I signed up on both immediately, I guess it must have been the first day for /. accounts. I had no idea people signed up so fast.
Re:Slashdot has changed over the 20 years (Score:4, Interesting)
Dang Grandpa, I thought I was the old guy around here.
Re:Slashdot has changed over the 20 years (Score:4, Funny)
I've been here since 1999, and never, in all my years reading and posting, have I ever seen this many 3-digit and 4-digit UID's.
It's like someone forgot to close the door to the Alzheimer's wing of the old folks home, and suddenly all of 'em are now wondering aimlessly through the streets.
Re:Slashdot has changed over the 20 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Correction: in the past 20 years internet and computers in general lost their mojo, not just Slashdot.
20 years ago the internet was a new exciting thing. Computers also, to a degree; many people were new to it. Things were changing very very fast, it was an exciting time.
Now internet is like tap water, it's everywhere and you need it but you're hardly excited by it.
Happy 20th Birthday, Slashdot! (Score:3)
It's been a roller coaster ride for sure. Although the growing anti-science in the latter half of the site's existence has made it difficult for the original highly technical population to continue participating, Slashdot still manages to hold its niche together.
I look forward to another 20 years. :-)
Happy Birthday! (Score:4, Informative)
Happy Birthday, Slashdot!
For all your cruftiness, and all the complaints, you're still also the source of some of the most interesting discussions I run across on a day-to-day basis.
Voices from the Hellmouth (Score:5, Interesting)
The Voices from the Hellmouth [slashdot.org] series seemed like one of the most important stories on /. as enabled the masses of readers to express their own experiences of being bullied or treated by others within school. It seemed to be one of the first articles about us rather than about some technology or company.
Recall that this story was from back in '99, way before being in IT/computers was cool or mainstream.
Re: (Score:3)
I wonder where Jon Katz is today....
Happy Birthday, /.!
minority opinion (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot is still great. Happy birthday, and congratulations on finally implementing unicode.
Jon Katz (Score:3)
A better life for nerds. Stuff that matters. (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially in the wake of the Columbine shooting. The Jon Katz post "Voices from the Hellmouth" (https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth) helped me understand that what I was experiencing wasn't abnormal. Nerds, geeks, gamers, goths, loners, introverts -- they were all being profiled as potential mass-murderers. Many were treated as suspects in thought crime. Many were forced into counseling out of such fear. And still the worst was that it was so extremely taboo to say, "While I don't condone what they did, I completely understand why they did it." And that taboo prevented any real reduction in pain for those "at risk" social rejects.
When I went to college, I went in as "me". Long black hair, dark clothing, and chains. People were scared to be around me at first. One person asked me to play a game a gin rummy in my first week at the dorms. He used that game to inquire why "I was angry with life". (This is why I loved the first year of college. It was OK to ask awkward questions and get into deep discussions.) It was the first time someone had attempted that discussion with me. I told him that I wasn't angry with life, but that many things had happened in my life that made me feel contemplative and rebellious against certain ways of life. I continued and explained that I had decided that if "those people" looked like that, then I didn't want to identify is one of them by looking like them.
His eyes burst open like he just suddenly understood a massive part of his own high school experience 4 months too late. We continued to play cards, but I couldn't get the hang of gin rummy. We played poker instead.
In the following years, I decided to reinvent myself. The dark clothing went away. The hair went from long to short to long to short again. I got a bit athletic. I started learning about sports and held manly conversations with people about cars, football, and guns. (You know how it is... you learn one thing about at topic and suddenly you have to LEARN EVERYTHING.) Eventually, I discovered that I had become an undercover nerd. You wouldn't know it from looking at me, but half the time, I just want to go home and play Everquest. (Ya. I still play Everquest.) So when I break out my white-hot data skills, or legal knowledge, or when something at work requires me to learn a new vendor system and I master it in a couple days sufficient to send bug reports to the vendor, people flip out (with joy!).
In today's workplace, people LOVE to have a nerd on hand. They'll happily put up marginal social quirks to have nerd powers in the office across the way. The nation's most visible million/billionaires are nerds. People WANT to look nerdy to be hip. People are demanding that teachers make more FEMALE nerds so we can reach NERD EQUITY. And today, the discussion of the high school harassment is completely blown wide open. Bullying, cyber-bullying, sexual harassment, microaggressions, picoaggressions, quantumshade -- today, in many schools, being mean is bad.
It's not perfect. Your mileage may vary. But it's better.
Still, every 4/20, when people are joking about weed on campus, I'm solemn because I remember what happened with a couple of kids felt so rejected and so alone that they retreated into a cesspool of resentment and no one cared to notice until the violence came. (Seems similar to the building of a lot of white resentment building in the nation today.) I have to explain to people that the root of the problem wasn't simply mental illness or the existence of guns. A major part of the problem was that people felt that it was absolutely OK for kids to torture kids.
I've been part of higher education outreach into low-i
... and at least 6 years of right-wing politics (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, we see some front page articles now that point out a subset of the failings of the current POTUS, but regardless of how much someone loves him it would be nearly impossible to not have to come to face with his failings on at least a daily basis.
Re: (Score:3)
Some impressively low user ids posting today (Score:4)
I don't see 3- and 4-digit user ids very often. Glad some are still around!
Some have accused Slashdot of forsaking its mantra in search of more hits. While it may have been diluted a bit over the years, this is still my go-to for the nerdiest news. Hope you'll be around for another 20!
Memories... (Score:3)
I started reading in 1999 but didn't create an account until a year later or so. I got wind of the place through a college instructor who talked of things such as Linux Install Parties - which at the time was the nerdiest sounding thing I had ever heard. I remember people posting links to tiny grainy videos of the prequel Star Wars and Matrix trailers hosted on their personal servers. I remember waiting sometimes up to a day to visit sources linked in stories because they were "slashdotted". I remember spilling my guts and talking shit and having actual insightful conversations with people - or getting modded down and having to think about the dumb ass stuff I was talking about. That had a big effect about how I thought about online communication that I don't think my tiny brain had contemplated before.
I remember learning about new things, reading different points of view and growing up from a scraggly 20-something to a scraggly 40-something and watching my attitudes change over time (going back to old comments ... wow).
Slashdot was everything I loved about IRC at the time but with a moderation system and some really interesting people. It's still kinda this today. I mean I still read every damn day so there's gotta be something goin' on here right? RIGHT? Anyway, when Taco left it didn't feel the same, and certainly we've had a lot more political, and slashvertisement stories than outright nerdly or technical ones but still more sedate and varied than other sources that still somehow exist.
The only thing that has really left me with chills about this place is how people saw 15+ years ago how invasive technology would become and how much more difficult privacy would be to maintain and even how most people would likely give it up for nothin'... it seemed incredibly far-fetched at the time. Man...
Anyway Happy 20th /. Thanks for filling my compile time since 1999!
Happy birthday! (Score:3)
Dave Taylor Sent Me (Score:3)
I started here after reading an interview with Dave Taylor, formerly of id Software. Stuck around for a while. Wandered to greener pastures and come back every once in a while to see how the old girl is doing.
Not better, not worse, just different (Score:4, Interesting)
What keeps me coming back are the pure simplicity of the site and the opportunity to learn by having the more esoteric stories explained by truly knowledgeable people.
Happy bday Slashdot. May Cowboy Neal never die!
Still here too, after all these years! (Score:5, Insightful)
So thank you, posters, editors, and owners. Here's to another 20 years!
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot celebrates you!
I'm shocked - no Columbine? (Score:5, Interesting)
one tomographic megaphone, hold the wool (Score:3, Interesting)
Nostalgia? Pass the Gravol.
The only large parameter I've ever cared about here is whether sharp story submissions encourage sharp dialogue.
Why so often—during various epochs—story submissions tapering off into a woolly final sentence? Is it an actually goal here (by some) to unleash an obligatory pocket-protector Olympics of beat-the-buzzer geek stereotypy?
Trolls, consider yourself trolled—for the extremely predictable lolz.
No, true nerd-hood is about going through life in the spirit that no consequential detail is ever too small to hold up to the tomographic megaphone—for as long as it takes. Wool is what other people like to pull over the fine technical fine print. I continue to celebrate every wool-free story submission that /. has ever run.
Blessed be the pinprick lightsaber that shears sheep.
Wow, 0x14 years already (Score:5, Interesting)
Canberra, Australia -- 10 year party (Score:4)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Natalie Portman could not be reached for comment.
Re:first post + 20 (Score:5, Funny)
Off-topic!? Natalie Portman is never off-topic on Slashdot - irrespective of her clothing, petrification, or hot cereal status.
Re: (Score:3)
Many articles are just reposts from arstechnica, engadget, current political news, and trending social media stories...in the next 2-4 years, that slashdot will be no more.
Its current state is far better than what would happen if it was bought out by Fusion/Kinja.
Re: (Score:3)
Though the threshold setting (now "abbreviated") setting isn't useful anymore, the breakthrough (now "full") setting is still useful. I have my account set to threshold -1 and breakthrough 1. That way, most of the comments show up in "nested" style when I open a story.
Re: (Score:3)
My vote: keep the moderation system, but expand it to a high score of 100, and a low score of -100. Let users set the default value penalty/bonus they want to apply to ACs, and what bonus/penalty they want to apply to UIDs with 6 digits or less (which should help weed out all the astroturfers).
Also, it would be nice to make EVERYONE a meta-moderator: allow users to see all the moderation on a comment, and if they notice a pattern (such as liberal or conservative shills downvoting things they don't like), al
Re: (Score:3)
The only tweak it needs is to make down votes have half the weight of up votes. If there is disagreement it should err on the side of giving people a voice.
Real trolls will still get hammered down to -1, but controversial comments won't be censored.
Re:So when are we getting unicode support? (Score:4, Informative)
Unicode won't happen until two problems are solved.
Re:It's changed, not for the better (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the beginning days of Slashdot, the changing state of the art in TECHNOLOGY was the driving force in our lives, and it was EXCITING to us nerds because we were the ones building our future. But nowadays, the masses have technology out the ass and much of what we were building has already come into fruition.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crash, technology has slowly been declining as the preeminent force in peoples' lives. Instead, overbearing government policies have been usurping that position, using technology today to spy on us, id/track us, and coordinate control over all under the guise of thwarting the next mass shooting, terrorist attack, or just maintaining status quo. Their programs have created a huge "brain drain" that has left technology mostly stagnating today. This is why "News for nerds" is taking a backseat, because there is too much "Stuff that [supposedly] matters" in the political realm.
I predict there will be a re-awakening eventually. It won't happen on a public site like Slashdot. There are too many lawyers, too much politics for anything meaningful to be born out in the public today. Only the huge technology companies like Google can make any meaningful progress forward under today's hostile environment, and they are struggling to do so, in my opinion.
I have some hope for the darknet, although so far nothing particularly wonderful and game changing has come out of there that I know of. And maybe nothing ever will. If the NSA can infiltrate everything, civilization may well be stuck working on political progress before technological progress can come back in vogue.