Slashdot Mirror
The History of Slashdot Part 4 - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
As the dust settled following the dot-com bust, we would see only minor changes to Slashdot. Hemos moved to Boston both to be closer to Andover HQ, and to get his wife in commute range for her grad school work. Nate went to California when his wife got a teaching job. Both moved to Ann Arbor a few years later, as did CowboyNeal, Samzenpus & I. The band was back together, and has been for the last several years.
These days we have a little office in A2 where we do much the same things as we have always done. Jeff spends way to much time in conference calls with corporate offices. He's got a fancy VP title which means he makes the big bucks in exchange for radiating his head on a cel phone. But he's always been a people person so I think that suits him just fine. Nate is an engineer for SourceForge and working on his own advanced degrees. CowboyNeal is on leave right now, but we're looking forward to his return. Samzenpus still sits at the receptionist desk scaring away the door to door salesmen that still seem to show up randomly with no clue what we do. We conduct most of our affairs via a jabber channel where people on both coasts work together.
At the end of all of it, I'm happy that I still get to work with my oldest friends, as well as a number of really honestly great people we've had to good fortune to meet up with in the last decade. And beyond that, I've had the good fortune to work with a number of other smart and cool people that have gone on to bigger and better things. On some level, the memories and people are the most important part of life, and I'm very happy with how that has gone.
As for Slashdot itself, there's a theme in the discussions about Slashdot jumping the shark. That theme has resurfaced regularly for our entire lifespan. From the creation of user accounts in 1998 on, every action we take on Slashdot provokes a 'This is the end of Slashdot' from someone. But what this tells me is that we actually haven't jumped the shark at all- if we had, they'd stop saying the same thing every time we do anything. You learn a lot in my position about large communities: Most of you never say a word... only the most passionate of you ever post. And an angry user is 10 fold more likely to post than a happy one. And when nobody can agree on anything... well there's meaning in that too.
At the end of the day, we've done some reasonably great things over the years. Take for example Sep 11. On that day the mainstream news websites buckled under the loads, and although we had to turn off logging, we managed to stay up, sharing news in a time where it was often difficult to get. That was the day where the team of engineers that make this site happen pulled together and did the impossible, forcing our limited little hardware cluster to handle traffic that was probably triple or quadruple a normal day.
Or take Columbine. When this tragedy hit, our readers took it a differently. Instead of blaming video games, we looked hard at the culture of abuse that drives high school. We talked about how the jocks beat us up. We knew that the terrible events of that day are almost inevitable when you stick kids into a system where certain groups of kids are given free reign to beat up others based on extra curricular activities. During that series of stories many people had a place to talk. It was cathartic. Our role was small, but it mattered.
Darker moments like those are rare, but there are countless other moments good and bad. Many you see on the page, and others you don't. From little successes like trading banner ads for office chairs or the time Gamara chucked Hemos's cel phone into an empty ice bucket... except it wasn't empty. Or the time the crazy guy showed up at our office and offered to give Samzenpus his car in exchange for 5 minutes of time with CmdrTaco, where he would "Reverse Engineer My Life". I proposed to my wife here... and she accepted and now years later we have a baby. I couldn't begin to enumerate the countless moments that have made the last decade here awesome.
I have other thoughts that are perhaps more bleak. There's a possible dark future for Slashdot if corporate interests take over. There's constant pressure from within the company to create new "products". Sometimes these mean new/more/bigger ads which usually result in people installing junkbusters. Far worse is the occasional attempt to create some sort of content partnership that blurs the lines between legitimate Slashdot content, and the paying advertiser's message. I hate these meetings because I have to constantly be the guy that says 'No'. My worst fear for Slashdot is that someday someone with deep enough pockets comes along with a check so big that someone in the company with a shortsighted view of the future is willing to cash over top of my objections.
Likewise, there is pressure for us to grow as a site, but this has 2 major problems. The first is that our audience was here in the 90s: we were the early adopters that made the internet great in the first place. Our growth will never match the population of the net because we are a small group that isn't growing: we were here first. Second is my personal feeling that marketing is just icky: read if you want. Or don't. If you don't find us on your own, you probably weren't meant to be here. That's my Gen-X showing I think, but it's still how I feel. And it really doesn't help when people on-line regard Alexa as legitimate and definitive. We could gain traffic by posting boobs or covering other subjects, but that would distract us from our real focus. And it would drive you guys away.
Similarly, new websites and technologies arise regularly. From Kuro5hin to Digg to Reddit, there have been dozens of websites that do similar things to Slashdot with varying degrees of success. Some have surpassed us, while most have faded into obscurity. From AJAX interfaces to alternate methodologies of content selection, they all have ideas, some good, so bad... some right for Slashdot, and some wrong. Distinguishing one from the other is tricky: you guys all deserve a modern web application, but at the end of the day, our story selection and discussions are what make this site unique. Drastic changes would alienate our long-term user base, so we need to tread cautiously.
A 10 year anniversary is a good time to think about what a 20 year anniversary would be like. And I think that the only way that Slashdot in 2017 is as good as Slashdot in 2007 is if we continue to maintain editorial independence, moderate advertising quantity with a clear distinction between advertising and content, and of course, that we continue to select the right stories to appeal to our existing audience... not to spend our time courting other audiences that would only dilute the discussions that bring so many of you here day after day.
For me personally I've spent a lot of time this month reflecting on Slashdot and my role here. Every day, 7 days a week, from my first cup of coffee until the moment I close the lid on my laptop, Slashdot is a part of my day. It's most of my browser tabs, most of my chat windows, and most of my inbox. And that's fine because I love this place: the readers, the content, and the people I work with. I'm honored that I continue to be the caretaker of this place.
Of course I've been here my entire adult life and I doubt that will always remain true. Certainly to leave would leave a hole in my life. But it's a constant struggle to maintain the site up to my standards. It's a struggle that I often win, but occasionally lose too. On some level, what keeps me here is knowing exactly what would happen within a few months of my departure. I don't like that one bit.
But let me end on a high note: I am very aware of Slashdot's unique place in the history of the internet. There's no way I could thank everyone that made that possible, but you all know who you are. I dream that in 2017 we can look back at 20 years and be just as proud of our second decade as our first. Keep reading. Keep submitting stories. Keep posting, moderating and meta moderating. If it isn't to much trouble, click on a banner ad every now and then. And hopefully I'll see you then.
--
Rob Malda
Pants are Optional
I share your fear that one day that will happen, Rob. I don't want to see that happen: not now, not ever. To make this absolutely clear, the day that happens is the day I tip my cap and leave this site for good.
Personally, I wish you'd never sold the site and continued to run it with the original team but there is no use crying over spilt milk. We are where we are.
At some point, Rob is going to have to take a stand against these goons and defend Slashdot from corporate greed. He says he already is but I fear like the Ring of Power, the pull becomes stronger over time and it will develop in to a darker more insidious threat. To defend against this threat successfully he will need convincing evidence that Slashdot will be thoroughly destroyed if the enemy prevails.
I hope people will stand with me today and that this thread will form part of that defence.
If you agree with what I've said can you please reply to this thread with "I agree." Let's send these people a message that ultimately this site exists for us. We are their customers, not the advertisers.
Simon
You're so wise it makes me sick. Why can't more people be like Rob?
Seriously, if you want to make a killing off of Slashdot without making changes that would kill Slashdot, you should expand your articles into a full-length book. Your site is officially an Internet institution. You are a bonafide part of geek culture now, which makes your perspective unique and interesting. You also have proven experience in building a successful community from nothing to millions, which would come in very handy in lots of industries and fields, both small and large.
Plus, when the book is reviewed and the link is posted in the article, you could earn royalties AND sales commission, how sweet is that?
Who knows, maybe you could even patent some of your methods of community-building, and then post an article on how evil you've become. ;-)
Congratulations on 10 years of hard work. You have a lot to be proud of.
.... still here.
Keep fighting the good fight.
I still swear some days that the trolls are going to drive me out, but here I am
And as an aside - Slashdot (and its ads... believe it or not.) led me to one of the best decisions I ever made in my career.
Moons ago, you had an ad running for some company called "Ironport". They had a neat device that was just a mail delivery engine. As a company that has over 60 million customers, that's important to us. When customers' bills are ready, we're sending, well, 60 million emails. So such a "spam cannon:" is important.
Anyway, that simple banner ad on Slashdot put me in touch with the folks at Ironport, and here we are, 5+ years later, with a completely modern email infrastructure that Just Works (tm). The Ironport folks made some changes to their appliances to meet our particular needs, and it's been a great partnership for us.
Thanks guys. And if it weren't for that "icky" advertising, it would've never happened.
The future of Slashdot is identical with it's past: Hot grits, Digg circlejerks, and all the Roland Pipperqquualalllelee you can eat.
Actually, Slashdot was where I first heard about it. It's was just after the first plane hit - I seem to recall at the time it was thought it was a small plane. The second followed shortly with additional information.
"We could gain traffic by posting boobs ... it would drive you guys away."
Posting boobs wouldn't drive me away! I promise!
(unless they are saggy granny boobs or man boobs)
More music, fewer hits
What disappoints me more than anything else is the slow creep of the "Slashdot groupthink" that, which once was merely a quirky attitude prevalent among a few vocal members, has grown into the mindless anti-IP/anti-corporation/anti-establishment theme of most of the stories posted here. There are very few "nerdy" stories on this site anymore. Most of the stories are either devoted to Google and Apple fanboiism, "IANAL but.." topics, Microsoft/SCO/Bush bashing, or tech update minutia.
The only readable sections are Science and Developers. YRO has got to be a honeypot for trolls, but how can you tell the difference anymore?
The 2002-2005 troll eradication has left this site impotent and truly enmeshed in hivethink. Say what you will about their abuses of this site, trolls provided an entertaining, if not reasonably useful, devil's advocate. With only hiveminded thinkers left, like any monopoly, this site has stagnated.
The heydays are over, I think. And while I hope you make it 20 years, I have serious doubts that this site will make it that far. There are so few things actually covered here at Slashdot, and that list is being constantly trimmed, that I think at some point YRO will be the only section that survives intact. And if that's the case, then that will be a sad day indeed.
... is this: I read adds on slashdot. For the very simple reason that i believe that, while you may be relatively ad agnostic (a good thing), the kinds of companies interested in advertising to a community like this are the kinds of companies that i just might be interested in. I'm much more likely to click on an ad on a slashdot page than i am on a google results page any day, and that's because the community that has been established around this site dictates a certain amount of honesty, legitimacy, and decorum that i do not see on other news sites, or websites.
That is because of your editorial independence. So the day slashdot shills anything is the day slashdot dies. The corporatistas may not know it, but Rob Malda is the difference between the profitable business known as slashdot and no business at all.
You may one day leave, and that's fine. Good even, new vision invigorates a company. Your most important task is to be instrumental in choosing who will succeed you. It's good enough feudalism, it's good enough for slashdot:)
You said they always want new ideas - how about slashvertisements?
Not the usual lingo here - but an ad agency/division of
- text, and maybe pictures
- no or limited animation
- no sound
- no suggesting the the viewer is a moron (either in general or for not using the product)
- require a maximum size that an ad cannot exceed
- require any client put the ads in only a limited set of locations
- Ad voting, similar to the comment karma system here.
Advertising - done non-evil.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It's interesting to me that CmdrTaco sees 9/11 as one of Slashdot's greatest moments. Personally, I have mixed feeling. The fact that Slashdot stayed up indicated that Slashdot is run by some quality people but, more broadly, I see a tremendous failure of the media to keep 9/11 in perspective. This failure to maintain perspective has had profoundly negative consequences - most notably the US invasion of Iraq but also the USA's human rights abuses and reckless deficit spending.
Back when Slashdot started there was all kinds of interest in computers and the power of technology and science to change the world for the better. Now, the focus is on conflict and war accompanied by a loss of basic human rights.
The energy crisis (and associated problems - such as global warming) is real. But imagine that, instead of spending hundreds of billions a year on the mess that is Iraq, the USA instead spent hundreds of billions a year developing the science and technology to overcome these energy problems permanently rather than just prolonging the inevitable by fighting over the last reserves of oil. The USA put a man on the moon back in the days when most computations were performed by sliding two marked sticks together (slide rules).
If there was the will, the USA could solve our energy problems permanently - but by failing to maintain perspective after 9/11 the USA has lost it's way. That's not to say that Slashdot was the one thing that caused the USA to lose it's way. Merely that Slashdot was powerless to prevent it.
CmrTaco: I'm not a computer guy -- though I do learn a lot by reading /. -- so bear with me if this is a stupid question. What I've taken away from CSS Garden is that, through CSS, you can provide drastically different interfaces with the same content. Why couldn't Slashdot do something like that? Provide users with different ways of viewing the forums?
To be, by FAR the best forum interface ever is provided by Google Groups (in the "Tree View" mode). It's the only forum presentation I've ever seen that provides intuitive navigation from a left-hand pane, letting you see immediately where you are in the "tree". It is so superior, I am baffled as to why it hasn't been widely emulated. Other forums make you constantly go up to the top of the screen to see the hierarchy, which is obviously useless.
Where I'm going with this: I wonder if you'd ever consider approaching Google and asking them to share that code with you. I bet they'd do it -- it seems like a good, high-profile PR move for them. And what a huge boon for users. Man, Slashdot with a navigable left-pane hierarchy -- that would be a dream come true.
- Alaska Jack
The editorial independence of slashdot, and the meta moderating has keep me coming back here for years. I am glad you have been able to resist the coporate culture as long as you have, and maintain a quality site.
Back a couple of years ago, I was giving a presentation to a bunch of high school seniors on careers in engineering. I asked if any wanted to be CS majors. A few timidly raised their hands. I then asked if any of them had hear of slashdot.org. None of them had. I told them point blank that if they wanted to get anywhere in CS, they had better start reading slashdot.
Good luck on the next 10 years!
--C. Alan
Thank you, slashdot.org, for your existance! :)
I never posted this request before since I thought that the crew was split apart but since you're all in Ann Arbor, bring back Geeks in Space!
I used to have a ball at listening to CowboyNeal, Hemos and CmdrTaco chatting about what was happening online and whatever else happened to come up. I still remember CmdrTaco bitching about how lossy MP3 compression was and since then I've used his cymbal noise as an example of why FLAC is better.
Call it a podcast, I don't care! Since the quickies are dead (and I miss them too), I wanna hear what you guys think about the latest South Park episode, how your female WoW characters are doing and other nerdy, nerdy, silly stuff.
Anyway, throw us an audio bone and bring back Geeks in Space, please!
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
I remember for while when digg became popular, people would often complain that they had seen it on digg yesterday.
I decided to give digg a try, but found that so much crap got through as well that I was wading around trying to find the
"good stuff". Also, the comments are about on par with a pre teen message board, and headlines frequently look like a 9 year old wrote them.
This kept me on slashdot, where the worst that I have to endure is old jokes (that still make me laugh when executed correctly).
Most trolls get modded down pretty quickly, and I have actually end up learning something most of the time.
I still check digg every now and then, and the new fad is for a single (AWESOME!) picture to get dugg up.
I had an interesting IT experience about a year back, and said to myself, "self, I bet you could make the front page of digg with this".
So, as an experiment, I created a blogger blog and submitted it to digg. Lo and behold a few short hours later this non news story, personal
blog had hit the front page of digg. I enabled adsense and made about $20.00 from the thing. Its just not a news site anymore, and easily gamed.
music lover since 1969
> proposed to my wife here... and she accepted
> and now years later we have a baby.
Wait until your baby creates his/her own Slashdot account - mine did this year. That made me feel both proud and old...
sPh
Of course you may have reserved userid 10 for that purpose a long time ago...
Only halfway kidding on that. At a recent conference on IPv4 address exhaustion, /. got called out by name when the main speaker said that IPv6 wouldn't take off until Slashdot supported it.
/. crowd.
/.++, would hurt much. Certainly, IPv6 would add some tech cred without any damage. A working API like google maps or facebook have might be interesting just to see what new ideas are floating around.
I had started to write a question for the "Ask Rob" story, but ended up wandering off before hitting submit. In short, it was a question on future technologies, and whether there was any youthful geekiness left in the
But then, there was Rob's excellent response to similar question.
"I think the single biggest threat to Slashdot is for us to try to be something we're not."
Which is why slashdot still has legions of followers after 10 years. The moderation systems, the layout, the filtering systems are quite good for what slashdot is. The addition of RSS feeds, CSS, and the few other improvements over a decade shows that slashdot grows as necessary, too much too fast would only hurt.
That being said, there is a part of me that wonders if adding some AJAX navigation or publishing an API so people doing mashups can make a
Rob, do you even have time to play with new technologies like AJAX, or look at what other places are doing with their APIs and mashups? Do you get out to conferences or trade shows (I know, with a new baby, probably not much)?
I'm not really asking for slashdot2.0, the newest paradigm for a social mashup avatar-driven search engine portal, because I probably would never use (or be able to use) it.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I enjoyed my years working behind the scenes on Andover/OSDN/VA's network admin and much of that because Rob and Jeff were fun to work with. For example there was LinuxWorld in NYC, when we drank a few too many Gin & Midori concoctions to the point where [name withheld] couldn't remember his hotel room, or what floor it was on, or even coherently explain where the jacket he was wearing came from.
Good times.
BTW: The fish restaurant in Boston mentioned in history of Slashdot part 3 was Anthony's Pier 4, a good place in its day but Boston has better nowadays.
You could really feel the pain oozing through the /. crew being forced to do something, which goes so much against the grain and the spirit of this board. Nevertheless I think it was the right decision since this would have been a fight with no way to win.
However, and to stay in Scientology(R) slang, the whole sordid affair was a big win for Slashdot. As usual: the good Scieno(R) burgers created so much rotten publicity and once again so many folks, who didn't give a shit in the first place, learned about the sinister methods of this "applied religious philosophy".
And all for the price of pulling a piece of bad science fiction. Science fiction for which some less enlightened members of our species pay 300'000 or so bucks to read at that. But then again you can find it on a lot of other places on the net for completely free.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
If it was up to me, the section was re-established. Perhaps periodically with another sponsor or so.
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The great refreshing taste of Pepsi. The preferred Cola of 1 out of 1 CowBoy Neals!
Ooh, sorry, I forgot the obligatory "I'm just a happy customer" comment. Really. I have no relationship with Ironport whatsoever besides being a happy customer.
I guess that any positive comments instantly become astroturfing? Believe me, or don't. It doesn't matter to me. I just wanted to share a story about how something most people see as negative can be a positive.
Lots of other people also found it interesting. I don't know the numbers, but I guess that means a thousands of people found something that gave them at least a marginal amount of entertainment. You effectively received a few cents from each of them for the service.
I think this is exactly how Digg and sites like it are supposed to work. Certainly they can't be free--bandwidth is still too expensive for that. You, the content provider just got a cut. If you were to find more interesting IT stories you could do this more, and everyone in the process would gain from it again.
I have been reading and posting to Slashdot since at least 2001. I've posted 1,376 comments during those years. Slashdot mods have both lauded my postings and bitch-slapped them for complaining about the "rules" on Slashdot, ranting on Creationism vs. Evolution, the MS vs. Linux debate, and probably hundreds of other somewhat random topics. Sep. 11, 2001 was particularly memorable as this is where I too first learned about the awful events of that day. But it's also funny that this is the one site, that despite all the other newer and shinier sites out there (Digg) that come along from time to time, keeps me coming back for more. There IS discussion on this site, not just adolescent e-penis boasting like you find on sites like Kuroshin or Digg. Why? Because this site found its nitch early on, and never strayed. I have found over these past 6 years, that all of my favorite brick-and-mortar entities, be they church, shopping, or entertainment, also do the same: they cater to exactly their nitch and never stray from it. So keep up the hard work, gang, and don't stray!
BTW, corporate entities: many if not all of my favorite technology things that I have bought over the years were in one way or another promoted by others on Slashdot at some point in time, I looked into their recommendations, and decided to buy the technology for myself. By no means does this mean that I WANT comment spam from corporate shills - I most certainly will see such fraudulent shilling and resent all the more your product... but if you produce a good product and your customers appreciate your efforts enough to mention the product on Slashdot, WITHOUT compensation for doing so, then you're doing the RIGHT THINGS and should keep it up! A short list of things I've used based on customer recommendations on Slashdot:
Godaddy
Fastmail
nVidia graphics cards
Linux - Mandrake first, and now Ubuntu (love it!)
O'Reilly books
Edward R. Tufte's books
Firefox
iPods
and a host of other stuff that I've recommended to friends and family as well
Let us know how much you made off slashdot.