Slashdot Turns 5

As much as I avoid discussing Slashdot on Slashdot, I figured I'd just take a moment to say that Slashdot is 5 years old now. I've written a Journal Entry with a few more comments on the subject. And yes we know we jumped the shark about a week after we registered the domain name, but we just don't care! Here's hoping we're here 5 years from now doing exactly the same thing with the same folks. (As a side note, due to a data importing bug, we really don't know exactly when we made our debut, but I spent september 97 putting the site together... and when we went live, we didn't even have comments for the first week or so!)

Comments

Re:jumped the shark?

[nagora]

See this link for what "jumping the shark" means.

TWW

/. doesn't delete posts

[yerricde]

And deleting posts, while morally abhorrent, is the only way to keep ourselves from accidentally reading a 3 page long "taco snotting" FAQ.

Slashdot generally does not delete comments. Among over 4 million comments posted after the moderation system began, fewer than a half-dozen have been deleted, mostly for flagrant copyright infringement. Other than that, you can get 99.999% of everything posted, even the trash, by reading at -1.

Re:Why do no stories display the year?

[Lumpish Scholar]

My only main quibble with Slashdot is why aren't YEARS SHOWN ON STORIES!?

It's great seeing 'October 01'.. but what year is that? Why do Slashdot stories not display the year? /i>

It's not the default, but they easily can. Go to: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome and select a "Date/Time Format" that includes the year.

Happy Birthday and thanks for a unique site...

[SwedishChef]

Oh sure... it's not so unique any more but that's because you guys turned back all the code for the site to the community so there are Slashdot clones all over the place. When I first stumbled across /. it was truly unique. It was the first interactive site I found that gave Linux users a place to come to for news about an OS that back then was pretty much unheard of. And then, miracle of the Web, we could even add to the articles!!!

"Unheard of in 1997?" you ask. Let me give you an example. In 1997 my daughter was a sophomore at the local community college. In a computer course she was given an assignment to write a report on an operating system that was not made by Microsoft.

Since I was her Dad... and I had used Linux since 1993, she wrote her report on Linux and I helped her. She did a great job but only received a B. The instructor wrote across her paper, "marked down because Linux is a nonexistent system". The instructor thought she had meant to write the report about Unix and got the name wrong!

So if we've been pushy here on our forum we have good reason. Even now the rest of the media pretty much doesn't understand the Linux movement. They don't understand the "support" issue (I suppose hiring competent people is too much to ask). They don't understand the technical issues (two MS programmers were once given credit for "inventing" symbolic links). And, they don't understand the social issues (we're a community, dammit!).

I am proud to be a Linux advocate and a /. user. And I want Slashdot to know it. Happy birthday.

And thanks. :)

Re:Mod up parent

[BrianH]

Some idiots forgot their original passwords and had to create new accounts (like me). I remember creating this account and thinking ""A user number in the THIRTEEN THOUSANDS?!?! Everyone will think I'm a freaking n00b!" I don't feel so bad now though :-)

Unfortunately, most of the early people moved on. Slashdot used to be a very different thing than it is today, with far fewer posts per thread, and with more of an emphasis on discussion than comments. The moderation system kinda did away with that by breaking the linearity of most comments and hiding some others, and the massive influx of new users made those types of discussions unfeasible anyway. When this all happened, many of us whined and complained, but a huge number of users simply left.