Slashdot Turns 100,000

This entry represents the 100,000th story posted on Slashdot. Technically this is a bit late since we're missing the first few months of stories from the DB, but there are now 100k items in the story database and I thought that milestone was worthy of sharing with the universe. We've come a long way in the last 12 years, and while the site isn't always exactly what I want it to be, I'm very proud of the work done by our thousands of submitters and by the editors our readers have "affectionately" referred to as "The Slashdot Janitors" for so many years. Special grats to timothy who is just short of his 17,000th story and is far and away the most prolific person here. The hall of fame has a few other bits of trivia.

Comments

Age and quality.

[pwnies]

What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the comment quality follows an inverse pattern. Or more simply, as the number of users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan. Digg used to be a decent site for discussion; now you'd be laughed at for even suggesting that the comments might be notable. Reddit is quickly getting there. Slashdot though seems to best this pattern. While I'm well aware that someone will reply to this with "In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!" or something similar in a successful attempt to disprove my point, but I think it still holds true in some respect. Kudos slashdot, keep it up. You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements and we'll still be here to comment without RTFA - and we'll both be thankful for it.

Re:Age and quality.

[Shadow of Eternity]

Tragically this is because the degradation is instead shifted to the editors. Slashvertisements, things in "ask slashdot" that should instead get someone redirected to google, and kdawson....

Re:Age and quality.

[ModernGeek]

I credit the moderation system.

Re:Age and quality.

[Shakrai]

You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements

The new UI doesn't bother me as much as it bothers some people but for the life of me I can't figure out the new meta-moderation system. It also seems to me that the quality of moderation have been down and we've seen a lot more people using negative mods to punish those they disagree with than we did in the past -- whether or not this is related to the new meta-moderation system is open to debate.

Re:Age and quality.

[Narpak]

Yeah goon on "you" Slashdot for keep up the good work. Must say that I sincerely wish that the comment system used by Slashdot would inspire other news-sites as it is, in my own personal experience, the best system for making the decent comments readable and pushing the crap down into lower, and thus hidden from anyone not actively looking, tiers of the structure. While it is perhaps not perfect it is functional and, as I said, better than anything else I have seen.

Now on a different note; I wonder how many stories it would be in total if they removed all the double, or triple, posts.

Re:Age and quality.

[pwnies]

As do I. Having comments separated by funny/insightful/etc, capping them at +5, and only letting a select few upvote is a surprisingly effective strategy.

Re:Age and quality.

[Taelatus]

What I like most about the comments is that the good ones are usually far more interesting than the article being commented on. I hate to admit it but I usually skim the summary and dig straight into the comments section of any particular article. I almost never RTFA.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I credit the stupidity of the users. Collectively they dont have enough intelligence to know they are supposed to be dumb.

Re:Age and quality.

[Darkness404]

I think more and more people kept making dummy accounts to accumulate mod points and use them to shape discussions.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

the comment quality approaches 4chan

The average quality is horrible, but 4chan has quite some decent discussion threads at any given time.
There are just so many, it is inevitable.

Re:Age and quality.

[DAldredge]

You mean the same moderating system that hasn't given me mod points in 4 or 5 years?

Re:Age and quality.

[dancingmad]

I dunno, there are old-timers here who have been around longer than I have, and I go through cycles of posting and not posting, but I think there's been a pretty marked change in both the kinds of users and the stories. I will probably get moderated to hell for saying this, but when I started lurking and then signed up for an account, slashdot at that time was more like some parts of reddit (to disclaim I post in both places, and I think the general quality of comments are better here, but there was a level of free-wheeling, shared culture that isn't quite as present here - it reminded me of the quirkiness of the jargon file). Back in those days everyone would catch and upvote semi-relevant Simpsons and Red Dwarf quotes for example (I got into RD via slashdot, if I remember correctly).

Perhaps the change in stories has been related; it's gotten a lot more general (it probably started before but I remember noticing the change as and after the politics section was added).

So yeah, the site's still around and there are still people posting and it's still relevant (more than I can say for digg), but the focus and community have changed a lot and for better or worse, as far as "net culture" is concerned, it seems like 4chan and the sites that interact with it's culture (reddit, unyclopedia) have more influence.

Don't get my wrong, I still love the slashie.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here, etc. etc. Slashdot has dropped in quality drastically in the past few years. (I'd login but my UID isn't as low as it should be, can't pull the get off my lawn with my UID, read for too long without registering, only in the low 800 000s) But both comment and article quality has drastically dropped from the early days of slashdot. One used to come to slashdot for the intelligent discussion, with the stories as a nice bonus, now we neither have the high level of discussion slashdot once had nor the articles; "what colour should I wear today" level of quality askslashdots, posts that should be askslashdot that aren't, idle should be nuked from orbit. People read slashdot for slashdot, we did not need digg-lite in our slashdot.

I long for the days of old when the threads weren't 90% reiterating common sense, political fighting or some mix of the two. Perhaps I'm part of the problem while I should be part of the solution, like many of us; make an effort to sway discussion to actual discussion, submit stories, be the change as it were. But yes, off my lawn, etc. etc.

Re:Age and quality.

[epp_b]

...You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements...

Really? I think the comment system UI features that have been added over the past while are slick and efficient. The fewer times I am required to leave the current page for a small chunk of data to load, post or be rearranged, the better.

Re:Age and quality.

[maxume]

It's the worst one, except for all the others.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!

Re:Age and quality.

[Firehed]

I haven't gotten mod points in quite a while either. That's why it's successful!

Wait a second...

Re:Age and quality.

[Nithendil]

The problem is the editors are still horrible. It is one thing to fuck up technology information, it is another when you butcher a health article by mentioning an amino acid that has nothing to do with the paper or study abstract. http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/12/06/060243/Reducing-One-Amino-Acid-Could-Increase-Lifespan

Re:Age and quality.

[rm999]

On Slashdot, the moderation system keeps good comments at the top and bad comments hidden. This is why the quality seems so good: one only has to read the top of the comment page to get really good discussion. So, regardless of how many trolls there are, they remain out of view. This was Slashdot's greatest innovation, IMO.

Reddit deals with the same issues: plenty of smart users, so they need a good ranking to keep the good comments at the top. Reddit used to use Slashdot's approach to ranking, but the inherent moderation system is different so it didn't work. The average comment in an active story on Reddit can get dozens of mods VS less than 1 on Slashdot. Reddit's problem was Slashdot's system heavily biased in favor of comments with a lot of moderation (upvotes minus downvotes is scaled higher). Typically, the first few non-troll comments were fixed at the top. On Slashdot this isn't a problem because mod points are rare so people use them with more care; also, the maximum score is capped at 5.

Reddit recently started using a more statistically sound approach which rewards high upvote:downvote ratios, and the comment quality has drastically improved. It saved the site, IMO. Slashdot is still known for having better quality comments than Reddit, and I commend them for it.

See http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html for more information on reddit's new system.

Re:Age and quality.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

To my way of thinking, there are main two factors at work here

1) The nature of the discussion. The kind of people who frequent 4chan and digg not have... the patience needed to discuss the kind of stories or threads on Slashdot. Stories about plastic flash memory and drivers in the Kernel are simply not very attractive to the kind of person for whom posting "lol" and "NO U" is a way of life.

2) The moderation system. Like it or not, the moderation and karma system helps separate the wheat from the chaff in comment threads. There have been complaints about group think and even censorship, but by and large a casual reading of +4 and +5 posts gives readers quality feedback on the story and is often even more educational than RTFA. In the last 5 years, I've learned more about technology from +5 comments on Slashdot than from any other source. Vapid posts are kept to a minimum and while there are many of them, funny posts do I think keep the discussions lively and interesting.

Another big factor to my mind is the lack of anything resembling post-counts, avatars, images, or anything that would be regarded as cruft(I'm still using the 1.0 discussion system so YMMV). This site is all about text and its content, and that is the way it should be. You can read Slashdot on lynx and get essentially the same discussion(minus the soothing green light). The signal to noise ratio on pages is high, in terms of raw content and on the quality of that content. Slashdot proves that you don't need the latest in web N.0 technology trends to run a good site, and long may it continue to do so.

Re:Age and quality.

[rolfwind]

Digg is direct democracy, Slashdot is a republic.

I've seen the most intelligent comments get buried to negative infinitey on digg simply because they went against the prevailing group think at the moment. Not so much here.

And you're correct, every UI change here has been an unimprovement.

Re:Age and quality.

[Threni]

I've said it before and I'll say it again - it would be great if there were questions/tests which could be somehow worked into Slashdot so that a rough idea of people's techinical skills/ability/knowledge could be gathered, and applied to rating. I'd like to prioritize comments from people who know what they're talking about.

Re:Age and quality.

[PopeRatzo]

the 100,000th story posted on Slashdot

Yes, Slashdot. Salute!

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a 4chan regular. Comparing 4chan's comments to Digg's is an insult.

As odd as it sounds, at least 4chan has taste.

Re:Age and quality.

[Nithendil]

Oddly enough in my old slashdot account even though I never commented and rarely used them I was handed 5 moderation points pretty much every week.

Re:Age and quality.

[Firehed]

The UI would be fine if a) it worked correctly cross-browser, or at least among standards-compliant browsers and b) the javascript that powers most of it wasn't some of the slowest ever written. Honestly, the whole lot of it could be replaced in about 5kb of code that works 10x better and 50x faster, in about two hours worth of work. Well, if half of slashcode hadn't been eaten by a grue years ago.

Re:Age and quality.

[ShatteredArm]

That's nothing. I couldn't even figure out the old meta-moderation system.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Back in the day slashdot discussions used to be primarily about technology. Nowadays even in stories that are ostensibly about technology, all the discussions end up being about politics instead. For example someone posts a story about a cool new electric car, and half the comments are ignorant hicks repeating the same old ignorant bullshit about the inefficiency of burning coal. The same applies to pretty much every discussion. Just look at that list of top stories and you'll see that 9/10 of them are about politics or creationism (same thing really). A single top 10 story about technology (and a stupid one at that) on a site that is supposed to be "news for nerds" is pretty damned bad, if you ask me.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

The probability of receiving moderation powers is inversely proportional to the frequency for which you post on Slashdot.

Re:Age and quality.

[bsDaemon]

I've had like 30 points in the last few weeks... it can grow tiresome, though the dry spell before that was an equal burden.

Re:Age and quality.

[Valdrax]

You mean the same moderating system that hasn't given me mod points in 4 or 5 years?

I don't know what's up with you, but I get mod points about 1-2 per week.

Hmm... Maybe this is a sign of Slashdot's quality, after all!

Re:Age and quality.

[stefanlasiewski]

Yes, that one. Apparently it's been giving me all your mod points. Most weeks, I get more mod points then I can have time for.

Re:Age and quality.

[Xugumad]

Oi, 6-digit, get off my lawn :)

Re:Age and quality.

[TapeCutter]

Yes, it's the only site I can think of where I occasionally learn something from people I violently disagree with. The comment system allows me to easily carry on a debate or discussion with another user, IMHO it is second to none. I look forward to another 10yrs of humuor and insight.

Of course there would be nothing to discuss without the much maligned editors, so thanks and keep up the good work.

Re:Age and quality.

[Beardo the Bearded]

If you get them, just do what I do -- find a thread you don't have any interest in and moderate the first X posts as "under-rated". (X is the number of mod points you get, which is 15 for me.)

This gives you the benefit of nothaving to actually moderate plus you can't be meta-moderated.

I get points about once a week. YMMV. CYLDFD.

I'm really only posting here in case there's an acheivement... achievement... anchoviement.

Sorry, not enough sleep makes everything seem funny. At least I'm not rambling on pointlessly.

Wait.

Re:Age and quality.

[satoshi1]

This is what I do as well. I've learned far more from you guys here in the comments than I have from the maybe five articles I've actually read since I joined this place.

Re:Age and quality.

[Mister Whirly]

Weird, I get them at least 4-5 times a month. How is your Karma?

Re:Age and quality.

[Mister Whirly]

Jesus, who the hell has time for all that? And why bother? Having all your comments rated highly and $1 will buy you a cup of coffee at your local diner.

Re:Age and quality.

[rabiddeity]

The new UI doesn't bother me as much as it bothers some people but for the life of me I can't figure out the new meta-moderation system.

I agree. It's straightforward if you see a positive mod and it's good; plus means "yes, it's funny, I agree, mod up". But what does minus do? Does minus mean "that's not funny at all" or does it mean "that's not +5 Funny"? And how are you supposed to metamod things that are labeled Troll or Offtopic? Does plus mean you agree with the negative moderation, or does it mean "this should be rated higher"? Same with minus. It's the equivalent of the OK/Cancel box in bad UIs, in that it's not at all clear what effect your actions will have.

The old system was a lot better; you get three selections labeled "Funny", "Unfunny", or "Not sure", and mark the appropriate one. For a comment modded "Flamebait" the options were also clear: "Flamebait", "Not Flamebait", and "Not sure". Why can't we have the old metamod system back?

Re:Age and quality.

[Mister Whirly]

Well, what are you waiting for then? You seem to know how to fix it, so why tease us?

Isn't it funny how every coder in the world knows how to make existing code better in orders of magnitude with "hardly any work".

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

The kind of people who frequent 4chan and digg not have... the patience needed to discuss the kind of stories or threads on Slashdot.

This is what Slashdot posters actually believe. I've got a UID in the very low 11,000's and spend more time on /g/ than any other site, yet come back to Slashdot regularly. Hell, my name has been in the title of a story on Slashdot before now.

Also, 1.7% woodscrews.

Re:Age and quality.

[aembleton]

I think the Idle section has reduced the quality somewhat; if I wanted to watch a cat doing a back flip I'd go to a different website. There is also the ongoing legal cases and politics that seem to be making up an ever greater proportion of the stories. Yes, I know I can block these, but even then; it attracts people to submit these stories as Idle, Political and Legal are becoming as important to the site as tech stories.

Re:Age and quality.

[bertoelcon]

I have actually found that if I spend all my points before they run out and don't post while I have them I tend to continue to get them until I break the cycle.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bull-fucking-shit. The only reason you think things have become better around here because of moderation is because you agree with those that have the mod points. Many users here have lost mod points because they didn't do the Slashdot goosestep. Just because you agree with the bias doesn't mean that it's still not biased.

All in all... being a long time user? The quality of the mods have gone down. It use to be that people actually put out useful information now it's just opinion and people who agree with opinion getting modded up. Even if a post contains a technical truth and a reputable cite to back it up it doesn't take much to see it get modded down if it doesn't agree with global warming, liberal politics, open source, etc etc etc.

Re:Age and quality.

[bertoelcon]

Having all your comments rated highly and $1 will buy you a cup of coffee at your local diner.

My local diner coffee costs $1.50 plus tax you insensitive clod.

Re:Age and quality.

[blind biker]

Agree on the new metamod system: it doesn't make a lick of a sense to me, either. It's a bad combination of "If you don't want to not negate this, answer affirmatively" and total uncertainty whether your metamodding went through or not - did you actually metamoderate those moderations? Or have you just done a moderation of a lesser kind of the comment itself? Has anything even been submitted or are your metamods lost? etc.

Re:Age and quality.

[Ethanol-fueled]

The kind of people who frequent 4chan

I don't think that's really fair to say because the two sites serve different needs. People come to Slashdot for quality science and technology discussions and to learn new things. People go to 4chan because it's like an obscene version of Slashdot's idle with some insanely wicked and clever humor. Slashdot's humor tends to be sterile if not non-existent (perhaps rightly so), which is why many people who are fond of Slashdot troll it *cough* .

All in all, I think it's turned out pretty good. I'd hate to see it fail, it would probably push every back underground into IRC and those other discussion place which shall remain nameless. Disclaimer, I have a seven-digit ID and I may or may not know shit.

Re:Age and quality.

[juuri]

The moderation system here at slashdot is terrible.

But then again most online moderation systems are. Quite simply, it is somewhat depressing that at this point we still don't have a good trusted "commenter identity" system that rewards good posters in a better manner. There are a number of proposed solutions out there but no one seems interested in implementing anything but the most basic systems. We have far too much idle computing power to be implementing this simple systems that don't scale in terms of reward or users.

Re:Age and quality.

[negRo_slim]

I don't know what's up with you, but I get mod points about 1-2 per week.

Used to be the same way for me, then I found myself not being online much over the summer. Haven't gotten em since!

Re:Age and quality.

[electrosoccertux]

I think more and more people kept making dummy accounts to accumulate mod points and use them to shape discussions.

You can get the moderation formula down-- don't visit multiple times/day. Every 2-3 days seems to give me pretty consistent mod points.
The metamoderation I believe has you rate whether or not a users' unrelated comments "add to the discussion" and are helpful. I think this is how it works at least.
Ideally, people that do not mod fairly would post sucky comments. But obviously, this is not always the case. Most people may be perfectly safe modders until something like the AGW CRU scandal pops up-- if you noticed, in the first discussion we (slashdot as a whole in that thread) clearly determined that there was manipulation of evidence occurring, that this was not the scientific method, and the further attempts to hide the data/claim it was lost from a harddrive crash/delete it/etc. were plenty damning of AGW supports, and were supporting of the skeptic's desire for more peer review. What scientist doesn't allow people to see the original, un-"adjusted" data, etc. etc etc...
So in the first discussion we determined this; then there were several new stories posted about this later on, yet in these many comments such as "I looked at it and there is no evidence of data manipulation" got modded to 5, and many comments suggesting otherwise (and even those pointing back to the original, first entry where we determined what we did) were modded "troll" and "flamebait", to do just as you say, hide posts because the guy with mod points didn't agree.

Throwing the rating of other peoples' modding decisions (the original metamod scheme) doesn't help because then the people that metamod can do the same thing that they do if they want to mod someone down because they don't like the opinion-- they rate the +1 modding for a comment about a political ideology that they personally do not agree with, as being an incorrect/bad mod. Then the moderators that support questioning of AGW and mod up posts that bring up valid points, no longer receive moderation ability.

Now consider in all the above that the people most active on this site tend to be of a younger type-- myself included. As life progresses, we learn more things, our minds expand, and doing the same old just doesn't stimulate us like it used to. So we move on with life-- job, girlfriend->wife->kids, wham no time for slashdot anymore. So all the people that have balanced lives, that aren't political left/right extremists that troll the internet, in other words the people that we want to be doing moderation, aren't visiting. Of the few that do spend to dump their leisure time into slashdot, it's probably unlikely that they will receive mod points. So you can see the dilemma.

I also noticed an uptick bad mods when they started granting people 10 and 15 points to mod with. Maybe we should all go back to groups of 5 points, so that everybody would rather spend their points modding up posts that pick out faults with parent posts, rather than simply modding the parent post itself as flamebait or troll.

I think on the whole a much more involved moderation system would be needed. Have the meta-mods track how an individual moderator dumps his 5/10/15 points into a discussion. Of course have several people following any individual moderator, and have them all report back. Does the given moderator spend his points wisely? Is he using troll/flamebait to mod down things that are valid/non-inflammatory posts? Encourage those watching the moderator to not be lenient. If it's on the line as to whether the moderator is abusing points, go with abuse. Explain all this in the metamod section so it gets publicity, or create a link that says "read about the new metamod formula!". Many criminals decide not to commit the crime they desire to when they realize they won't be able to get away with it, and part of th

Re:Age and quality.

[Iskender]

Now that we are talking about quality, can someone link me a story I can't find despite much effort?

It was basically from the beginning of Slashdot and consisted of CmdrTaco saying that he had bought more underwear, so that he now had a "full set" for the entire week.

Yes, there was such a story. I will be thankful if someone links it. :)

Re:Age and quality.

[mooingyak]

Having all your comments rated highly and $1 will buy you a cup of coffee at your local diner.

My local diner coffee costs $1.50 plus tax you insensitive clod.

Putting the value of having all your comments rated highly at approx $0.50

Re:Age and quality.

[russlar]

You mean the same moderating system that hasn't given me mod points in 4 or 5 years?

You can have mine.

Re:Age and quality.

[el3mentary]

In the middle of a long dry spell myself

Re:Age and quality.

[Moskit]

Yup, the same one - welcome to the club ;-)

While the comment quality has not gone that much down, editorial quality did, in my opinion. I agree that comments convey much more than story "summary".

Re:Age and quality.

[Mister Whirly]

Yeah, I know. Welcome to Slashdot, in Soviet Russia coffee drinks you, get off my lawn, Natalie Portman and hot grits, etc.

Re:Age and quality.

[SnarfQuest]

comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites

All I can say about that is:

1. Hot grits down Natile Portmans pants.
2. In Soviet Russia, the social news sites comment you.
3. Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
4. Profit?

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I credit your stupidity. Individually you have enough dumbness to suppose yourself intelligent.

Re:Age and quality.

[aembleton]

Agreed. I also like the memes that go with the funny posts. These give some sort of shared understanding and culture to /. Maybe this exists elsewhere, but I haven't seen it.

Re:Age and quality.

[SnarfQuest]

I get them all the time! (-1 Troll)

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

...Nowadays even in stories that are ostensibly about technology, all the discussions end up being about politics instead. For example someone posts a story about a cool new electric car, and half the comments are ignorant hicks repeating the same old ignorant bullshit about the inefficiency of burning coal.

Yes, that's true, but do you realize that your comment is using electricity and thus burning coal? Burning coal is very inefficient. I think you need to realize this.

Also, you neglected to mention politics or creationism in your post, even though they are both extremely important, I'm not quite sure how.

Re:Age and quality.

[fbjon]

There are all kinds of modifications that can be done, some of which sound good. But really, how much better can the discussion realistically get?

Re:Age and quality.

[TheKidWho]

1-2 per week? I tend to get 15 a week at minimum...

I always wondered how often others got mod points.

Re:Age and quality.

[Lord Lode]

Apparently it is, it would be very interesting to know why exactly this works. I mean, seriously, comments almost never get deleted here, right? (unless it's related to scientology?). And you can post as anomymous coward without logging in? It's a miracle that it isn't full of crap posts and automated spam messages.

Re:Age and quality.

[AbRASiON]

It seems quite good here and I frequently have to defend slashdot on other sites, purely because of the Microsoft hate here (which in my opinion has significantly weakened over the last 10 years)
I will say one thing about the comments here and that's that a contrary position is not shunned completely and mod'd down, Digg comments are absolutely and utterly horrible, to be blunt they are effectively a clusterfuck of circle jerk madness - if you're not part of 'them' you're the enemy and be prepared to be mod'd down - heavily, gave up 3 times with Digg and the last time was the final time, not interested (and don't even use the site anymore)

To make my point though, I could have said how terrible slashdots comments and users are, contrary to your claim but as long as I wrote it out fairly well, I'd still be moderated relatively well

Re:Age and quality.

[Sir_Lewk]

No, I really don't think so, I often browse at 0 or -1 and even then the comments in general seem more intelligent. Sure there are a lot of offtopic trolls, but I still think that is far better than ontopic stupid people (though there are of course a far bit of them).

Re:Age and quality.

[somersault]

You must be new here ;)

Re:Age and quality.

[Hadlock]

I visit 5-10 times a day (I really should invest in an RSS reader) and still get 5 mod points ~2x a week. I think the moderation system works fine. I don't see any moderation abuse to any great degree here. Usually if someone is astroturfing or BSing or just plain wrong, people will call them out on it in replies.

Re:Age and quality.

[somersault]

If you're going to do that, you might as well just ignore the mod points..?

I've found that when I post less I tend to get more mod points. Even if I don't use them it still tops them up every few days.

Re:Age and quality.

[interkin3tic]

It also seems to me that the quality of moderation have been down and we've seen a lot more people using negative mods to punish those they disagree with than we did in the past

That's odd, recently I've noticed a lot more comments deserving negative mods to re-educate, including a lot from some user.... shaka-something... Shakira? No wait, that's someone else.

Re:Age and quality.

[interkin3tic]

I hate to admit it but I usually skim the summary and dig straight into the comments section of any particular article. I almost never RTFA.

You must be old here.

Re:Age and quality.

[zenwarrior]

I credit geeks being geeks and thus (thankfully) frightening today's typical internet user away from /.

Re:Age and quality.

[ctmurray]

I would appreciate some more understanding of how the mod system works. Like many that posted, I recently got some, but there was a long dry spell. My karma is excellent. But I did have advertising turned off and wondered if that affected my chances. Recently I made a comment that was pretty funny and was modded up as so, then I got some mod points. So do my mod points depend on my posts being modded up? I post and comment regularly, but as we all know, not every post gets read or commented. But I was also trying an experiment where I did not disable the ads at the same time my post got modded up - so I don't know if either was the key. I looked around for more information about the mod point system but failed to find anything in more in the FAQ (I read the FAQ but it does not answer these types of questions).

Congratulations to /. and I agree the articles are mostly interesting, I have learned quite a bit, and I enjoy each evening going through the stories.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hesitate to even say it, but yeah, after the greatly stupid $RTBL purge, no mod points for me either.

Re:Age and quality.

[Nemyst]

Isn't that symptomatic of how the "net culture" has changed, though? Back when Slashdot was new, being on the Internet was something few people did, even less so without inhibitions. It was the lair of tech and science geeks, and that was that. People would dig up interesting science/tech articles and then the comments would debate it over and over (with of course random quotes).

However, nowadays you can't help but notice the politicization of the Internet and, by extension, of all things related to computers and science. I'd argue the politics section you noted highlights that fact: politics now influence this community far more than it did before. There are now ideological debates, megacorporations to praise or decry, lawyers to monitor, laws to bash or applaud... Blogs, social networks, all have changed the face of the Internet and I only believe it normal that Slashdot changed to reflect that.

I honestly wouldn't mind seeing more science and tech articles and less law stuff, but at the same time I'm glad I have a good source from which to read the latest developments in copyright crap or ISP abuses... I guess. Bah, you see my point!

Re:Age and quality.

[nschubach]

I think it has to do with the attention factor. ACs can post what they want, but they aren't going to get more than a few views before someone mods them out of view to the default filters. They lose the attention a controversial topic may bring and they soon get bored and move on to those other sites. In this case, "Don't feed the trolls," seems to be working!

Re:Age and quality.

[CodeBuster]

It's a miracle that it isn't full of crap posts and automated spam messages.

At least part of that stems from the aforementioned moderation system, the fact that most regular users don't browse at -1 (which means we wouldn't actually see AC spam even if it was occurring), and perhaps also because geeks are not good marks for the sorts of products generally plugged via spam; that and geeks have the means, motive, and opportunity to take active technical measures against spammers making us doubly not worth the effort from the spammer's point of view. In short, The spammers don't spam Slashdot because picking fights with the geeks is not in their interest; it wastes their time and invites sophisticated and targeted retaliation which only distracts their attentions from their real prey (i.e. grandma's AOL account).

Re:Age and quality.

[fbjon]

Hell, my name has been in the title of a story on Slashdot before now.

Indeed! "Anonymous" Hacks Palin's Private Email

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

/g/ was far better when it was about anime girls getting horribly dismembered.

Re:Age and quality.

[openfrog]

I credit the moderation system.

Of course, and as others have said, who choose to use and to read Slashdot in the first place. It is a very interesting community and I would believe, vastly more influential than what is suggested by the conventionally self-deprecating comments.

I love Slashdot so much that I often find myself worried about the possibility of organized attempts to manipulate the system. The next topic (the 100, 001st): Virtual Money For Real Lobbying, address this very issue, but about other discussion groups. I must say that I am reassured most of the time by the efficiency of the moderating system, with one recent exception: the issue of climate change, on which there have been 5 or 6 stories over the last few days. I admit the topic is controversial to begin with, but the comments I have seen modded down, with the intelligence and tone associated with the scientific minds whom we are used to read around here, and some comments I have seen modded up, left me with the impression of a massive attempt at manipulating the moderation system, only partially successful perhaps.

My immediate reaction was to reflect on what form of comment analysis, statistical or otherwise, would allow confirmation or infirmation of such coordinated attempts. Anyone has an idea on that?

Re:Age and quality.

[Nefarious Wheel]

Or more simply, as the number of users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan

I think that works as a calculus limit. But mainly I think it's the type of people who congregate here that makes it worthwhile.

Re:Age and quality.

[goon]

"... What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. ..."

I am surprised /. has survived. The place pretty much as it was back when it started in '97.

This is my first post for a couple of years. But there was a time when I lived here. I remember when /. was sold & CmdrTaco said all he wanted to do was run it I'm sure I for one didn't believe he'd still be at it now. The sig/noise is still bad if you trawl below the +2 level. But at +5 it's readable. I think the combination of moderation, ability to filter comments (text, best comments at top), culture and relationships have helped shape the site into something *still* readable. HackerNews [0], where I sort of trawl now exhibits all of the same sorts of growing pains /. had to go through.

[0] HN is to Startups what /. is (was) to Linux.

Re:Age and quality.

[_Sprocket_]

Perhaps the change in stories has been related; it's gotten a lot more general (it probably started before but I remember noticing the change as and after the politics section was added).

So yeah, the site's still around and there are still people posting and it's still relevant (more than I can say for digg), but the focus and community have changed a lot and for better or worse, as far as "net culture" is concerned, it seems like 4chan and the sites that interact with it's culture (reddit, unyclopedia) have more influence.

It seems to me that Slashdot has always been a relatively niche audience. If Slashdot ever influenced 'net culture, it was because 'net culture itself was once very much a subculture. But that has changed. The user base of the Internet in general has grown, become more diverse, and become more main-stream. Sites like 4chan are a part of this broader audience. And while Slashdot has also felt some of this broader influence, it still remains pretty firmly removed from the mainstream.

Re:Age and quality.

[einarw]

Probably just the old American paranoia again. I wouldn't worry.

Re:Age and quality.

[sn00ker]

Oblig: you must be new here.

Re:Age and quality.

[ascari]

Don't forget the car analogies. Invaluable.

Re:Age and quality.

[JustOK]

plus an unknown constant vaguely related to pizza.

Re:Age and quality.

[ascari]

Mod points? Wait a sec, is that how it works?

Re:Age and quality.

[Omestes]

The moderation system is awesome. It is the one thing I always notice the lack of when reading other blogs. It also is much better than the binary system on some blogs, and Reddit and Digg, which tends to lead to an even larger herd (hurd?) mentality than here. But there has to be more, Kuro5hin has a much more expansive and powerful (or at least arcane) mod system, and has collapsed under the weight of its own lack of relevance long ago.

The thing that probably lead /. to keeping its glory is the diversity of the crowd here. Most of the people here are geeky, many are educated, and every single one of us is opinionated and not scared of trying to fight for ideological supremacy (be it Democrat versus Republican, Socialist versus Libertarian, Vi versus Emacs, KDE versus Gnome, etc...). The fact that there is no 4chan-ian hive mind here helps a ton. Every time I come to this site, I can expect to nod my head in complete sycophantic agreement, and erupt flaming bile within the same discussion.

I just wish that the Politics section never hit, it seemed to have made EVERY damn discussion political (Bush uses BSD therefore BSD sucks... FreeBSD is socialist, therefore it sucks... etc...).

Re:Age and quality.

[religious freak]

I have found that I get metamoderated into oblivion (and therefore lose my mod-points) if I moderate a discussion in a way which does not fit the general opinion of most slashdot users.

That's the negative aspect of the /. moderation system, it encourages groupthink and censorship.

But yes, I agree, it is certainly the worst - except for everything else.

Re:Age and quality.

[bn557]

But what about the $0.50 worth of petrified coffee?

Re:Age and quality.

[phantomlord]

I visit numerous times per day and get 15 mod points every 2-4 days whether I use them or not. I mod up 12-13 comments for every 2-3 I mod down, and will hold onto my mod points for really good posts rather than just blowing them on the first 15 decent posts I come across. I spend 3-5 points in a typical day. Sometimes I let 10 or 12 points expire (and get 15 more the next day), sometimes I get points, spend 3 and come back to find 15 waiting again. Maybe twice a month, I spend all 15 in less than 3 days.

I'd assume that I have a good history in meta-mod and that's why I get points the way that I do. I did go through a dry spell of almost a year where I didn't get any points at all for some reason, but they came back about 6 months ago and have been freely flowing since. It's rare that I sit here with no mod points to spend unless I just finished my 15 and then I know I'll almost always have more the next day.

Re:Age and quality.

[krelian]

Lately I am getting 15 mod points almost every day compared to the old 5. Is this something new or have I been blessed?

Re:Age and quality.

[nathan.fulton]

I'm curious, how do you determine your meta-mod status?

Re:Age and quality.

[GaryOlson]

You have succumbed to the overpowering hum of groupthink.
All your thought are belong to us.

Re:Age and quality.

[religious freak]

how do you determine your meta-mod status?

Guessing.

But it was fairly obvious. I was consistently given mod points for years, until I moderated the heck out of a story in which I was of the complete opposite opinion of 80% of the comments in the story. So I positively moderated those that agreed with my point of view (and made valid, logical points). Within one month of my moderation, I lost the ability to obtain mod points for 13 months (kind of an interesting-to-know timeframe).

Re:Age and quality.

[ZPWeeks]

I think Slashdot has done much better than other social news sites in this regard. At least some of the mods and meta-mods can recognize that upmodding shouldn't correlate to agreement with a statement. Try posting unpopular opinions on Digg or Reddit and you'll see how much harder it is to be heard because everyone has downvoting power. Honestly, I'd be overjoyed to see a flurry of insightful or informative comments, even when they're not what I agree with. I want to be forced to think and be confronted by conflicting opinions - that way I can form more educated opinions of my own and be less influenced by groupthink circle jerks.

Re:Age and quality.

[buchner.johannes]

Also, the ordering of comments. Sites where the most recent comments come first encourage repetition, circling around the same arguments and bad quality, whereas a thread you can follow allows picking up an existing conversation on top of arguments already made.

Re:Age and quality.

[jc42]

Yeah; I've been getting 2 or even 3 15-point mod sessions per week for a while now. One thing it makes me think of is that I don't really understand all that much of how /.'s mod system really works. Is it actually documented somewhere that we can read? I haven't found anything that I'd call very informative about the mod system.

Part of the reason I'm interested is that some friends and other acquaintances have recently asked me about building some online news/blog sites for a couple of local organizations. Doing the basic programming seems rather straightforward, but I suspect that there are some subtleties for which it'd be best to learn from others. I'd want to include some sort of moderation system, so I'd like to read about some experiences with such things. Both successful and unsuccessful ideas would be useful. It'd probably be better than me making guesses about how to do it.

I did look into slashcode, but found that the documentation seems scarce, and apparently nobody is feeding and watering it any more. I also did a bit of googling, but didn't find much useful. Maybe I just didn't guess the right keywords ...

Anyway, if the /. editors have produced any sort of history of what they've tried, what worked, and what didn't, it could be interesting reading to some of us.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that you moderated messages based on whether or not you agreed with them, which is exactly how you should NOT moderate ? No wonder you don't get mod points anymore ...

Re:Age and quality.

[michaelhood]

I credit the moderation system.

I do, too. Lame as it may seem, I enjoy posting and getting feedback on my thoughts or kudos for my lame jokes..

Re:Age and quality.

[rolfwind]

he UI would be fine if a) it worked correctly cross-browser, or at least among standards-compliant browsers...

Here are my problems with the UI. Years ago, if I was writing a comment and I wasn't logged in, it was no big deal because the anonymous comments had a log-in option; now I have log-in clicking a link - opening it in a new window or tab if I don't want to lose what I wrote.

My second problem are the sliders near the top to control comments. I have no clue how these stupid things work. When I'm logged-in, I get these nice drop-down boxes that have a comment threshhold (5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, -1) and whether the comments should be nested or presented another way. When I'm logged out, it's some stupid horizontal slider thingy that I have no clue how to operate. Perhap what I'm presented when I logged-in is a holdover and a preference set in my account that the newer members don't have (Idk) but it's how I remember the site since I joined. Ever since then, they've been experimenting with some new system ever other year or so that's just makes it less and less usable imo.

I don't think I'm too set in my ways, I moved from different webmail clients to gmail because of UI improvements, but they were fast and intuitive (new yahoo mail sucked worse than classic though).

Re:Age and quality.

[SuperMog2002]

Another big factor to my mind is the lack of anything resembling post-counts, avatars, images, or anything that would be regarded as cruft

You pretty much nailed it right there for me. I absolutely cannot stand it when forums allow avatars and images. The exact same posts plus avatars and images (especially animated ones) would have driven me off many years ago. Incidentally, the tendency for +3 and higher posts to contain mostly accurate spelling and grammar is also quite a nice change of pace compared to most forums, not to mention the distinct lack of "lol" and other such abominations.

Re:Age and quality.

[rockNme2349]

You think there might be an achievement for posting here? Interesting.

Re:Age and quality.

[ggruschow]

I think /. users benefited from the rise of digg, 4chan, reddit, etc. The quality on /. had been going way downhill before they became popular. Those sites drew away most of the idiots, and /. learned what it's good at. After /. stopped trying to compete head-to-head in the more-news-faster-and-crazier game, they appear to have reached an impressive equilibrium.

Admittedly, I rarely read /. anymore. It seems to have grown more focused, which is good for the site.. but I'm not as interested in the topics it's focused on. OTOH, I absolutely never read digg or the main reddit anymore -- even though they theoretically cover my interests better.

Bring back JonKatz. Actually, hell.. I miss USENET.

Re:Age and quality.

[NeutronCowboy]

Oh, not this. Please.
There is direct democracy, and there is representative democracy. A republic just means that there is no monarch as the head of state, and the population has some sort of say in how government is run. As a result, a direct democracy is a republic, a representative democracy is a republic, and a military junta letting the population a rubber-stamp house of representatives is a republic.

Everything that's possible in a democracy is possible in a republic, because a republic is a superset of the various types of democracies and non-royal, inheritance based forms of government.

That said, there are benefits to representative democracies that are lost in a direct democracy. But I wouldn't go so far as to categorically state that representative democracies are always better. For one, it's much easier to bribe one representatives than everyone of his/her constituents.

Re:Age and quality.

[Wonko the Sane]

The editors and the original readers are getting older, having children and paying more attention to politics.

Re:Age and quality.

[josecanuc]

The comment quality hasn't gone down quite as much as the noise level has gone up. So many more posts on each story and crap moderation of comments means it's harder to find the gems.

I also hate the comments that are just pastes of wikipedia... Come on guys -- if you are clueless, just keep your mouth shut!

What has gone down are the newsposts themselves. Tsk tsk.

Re:Age and quality.

[Draek]

The problem of rewarding good posters too much is that it tends to make the community degenerate into a clique. Look at Wikipedia and its editors, for example.

The best thing about Slashdot's moderation system, IMHO, is that it rewards good *posts* rather than posters because even Anonymous Cowards can provide interesting insight, and even the most intelligent fellow is liable to the ocassional episode of stupidity.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a friend of friend of Taco and thus able to comment in his journals. I ripped him a new one for some faggoty journal entry he made. He then defriended robogoatgruff (uid 20, my friend of a friend of taco) so I couldn't comment in his journals and I have since never had mod points.

Re:Age and quality.

[Ogive17]

I get more mod points than I know what to do with. Pretty much every week I'll get 15 mod points, then I only use 2-4 before they expire.

Re:Age and quality.

[Draek]

The problem with your suggestion with respect to meta-modding, is that the more complex you make the procedure, the more you ensure only fanatical people follow it.

Hell, as it is right now I can't be arsed to meta-mod most of the time, having to read an entire thread to determine whether a short one-liner is an innocent joke or some stupid flamebait is enough of a pain without having to check the moderator's entire modding history to see whether there's a 'bias' or not.

Re:Age and quality.

[phantasmagoric]

Slashdot is like Playboy- nobody reads it for the articles.

Re:Age and quality.

[Draek]

It wouldn't do you much good. I'd wager that a good percentage of the Slashdot population is knowledgeable in IT and programming, yet they'll still happily provide legal advice in the YRO and Ask Slashdot sections.

You could say that, then, the test should be divided by areas and then the bonus be applied to comments belonging to related stories but there's been plenty of ocassions where a simple joke or off-topic comment turns into a debate that may be insightful, but have absolutely nothing to do with the story it belongs to.

Re:Age and quality.

[Shakrai]

the fact that most regular users don't browse at -1

Actually I would recommend that everyone browse at -1. There isn't really that much spam/trolling to contend with -- in exchange for having to scroll past one or two racist trolls you'll get to see raw unfiltered discussion that may not have survived the group think that permeates the moderation system.

I stopped caring or paying attention to moderation a long time ago. Give it to me raw baby!

Re:Age and quality.

[Shakrai]

Sounds like someone is a little bitter that opposing points of view to his own occasionally survive the moderation process.

Re:Age and quality.

[conureman]

I often find myself modding up posts I disagree with, to undo an unearned "troll". Was that you?

Re:Age and quality.

[Lazy Jones]

or at least among standards-compliant browsers ...

Yeah, as if a site like slashdot could have afforded to bet on relevant browsers becoming standards-compliant any time soon. Professional web development since the early days has always been a struggle to "make stuff work in bug-ridden browsers" and not to chase the rainbow of W3C standards compliancy. Only fools did the latter for their own projects, or those with vanity blogs noone cared about.

Re:Age and quality.

[rolfwind]

That said, there are benefits to representative democracies that are lost in a direct democracy. But I wouldn't go so far as to categorically state that representative democracies are always better. For one, it's much easier to bribe one representatives than everyone of his/her constituents.

But that bribery exists on many times over. Bribing constituents have been happening for a long time. It's called farm subsidies, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, etcetera.

It has happened time and again that parties play to the fears of constituents being paid off that the other party will take away that money. Social Security and the elderly voting block is a great example of this.

And it's particularly relevant as this country heads into bankruptcy in the coming years, it will be Medicare and Social Security Spending that does us in, with interest payments on debt being in 3rd place.

Re:Age and quality.

[maotx]

100,000th story, what's the comment count at? 30408632?

Re:Age and quality.

[Lazy Jones]

But that has changed. The user base of the Internet in general has grown, become more diverse, and become more main-stream. Sites like 4chan are a part of this broader audience. And while Slashdot has also felt some of this broader influence, it still remains pretty firmly removed from the mainstream.

My impression is that slashdot has kept most of its older users from the early days, while the younger people from the "mainstream" era of the web never found it interesting enough to spend a lot of time on it. They frequent 4chan, digg, youtube etc. and have thus mostly spared slashdot from the onslaught of that kind of posts, except for a few years back (must have been around 2002-2004) when "meme" type posts were big on slashdot...

Re:Age and quality.

[conureman]

Amen. There's a lot of great trolling and off-topic humor that doesn't make it up to the surface at default. Also some pretty good posts come from people who are willing to post things that have killed their karma. I think most of the really useless trolls must be getting discouraged by our system, considering how many there actually aren't.

Re:Age and quality.

[heffel]

Same here. I wonder if it's because I don't post much?

Re:Age and quality.

[suso]

That's where you are wrong. i'm not sure how long you've been reading slashdot, but it used to be that many of the people that "made open source happen" would frequent it and get into discussions. Annoyingly enough those comments are somehow lost, but they were better discussions than what you have now. But I do agree with you, usually the discussions here are 100x better than say youtube comments.

Fake!

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tragically this is because the degradation is instead shifted to the editors. Slashvertisements, things in "ask slashdot" that should instead get someone redirected to google, and kdawson....

Kdawson? You clearly weren't around for the times of Jon Katz...

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

However, nowadays you can't help but notice the politicization of the Internet ... I honestly wouldn't mind seeing more science and tech articles and less law stuff, but at the same time I'm glad I have a good source from which to read the latest developments in copyright crap or ISP abuses

Max Weber made his observations about the materialization of the law, that is the predictability and the preciseness of the law is lost in the altar of the politics, already in beginning of 20th century. The Internet seems to follow similar arcs of development, which is either unfortunate or inevitable, depending of one's political ideology .

Re:Age and quality.

[mahadiga]

Slashdot = Wisdom of Intellectuals
Reddit & Digg = Wisdom of Crowds

Re:Age and quality.

[pseudosocrates]

<unlurk>

Agreed. I never post. I hardly ever mod. But Slashdot has been an immense education for me as a tech generalist over the past 8 years (yes - took me a few years to even sign up for a uid). A couple of thoughts.

I love the js powered post-expansion. Massive improvement as I no longer have to skip about posts. Never any speed issues.

Lack of avatars + user cruft mean posts rise to the top rather than personalities. The few who I can name have it for good reason - I've actively noticed who they are through consistent quality posting: nycl, badanalogyguy, akaimbatman, clevernickname...

To paraphrase a comment above - /. is where I frequently learn from people whose general views I actively reject

To another 100k.

</unlurk>

Re:Age and quality.

[krelian]

I agree!

Re:Age and quality.

[pseudosocrates]

I know it's fun to rag on the 'editors' here, and kdawson is evidently a troll account (no profile, just consistent flamebait), whenever I consider ranting against them, I think of this post from the 'idle' launch:

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=646041&cid=24603867

We all have PHBs, even /. editors. I love how they all appeared in solidarity, like the ending of a Stephen King novel.

Keep it up, we luv ya really ;-)

Re:Age and quality.

[LuxMaker]

You conspicuously forgot Linux vs. Windows, PC vs. Mac.

Re:Age and quality.

[LuxMaker]

Yes, but "Not sure" was taken in the movie Idiocracy so /. is trying to get away from that connotation. :)

Re:Age and quality.

[inode_buddha]

Seconded. I *strongly* prefer the old style where you could see what the original moderation was, and decide if it was "fair" or "unfair". And then click the "Metamoderate" button at the bottom of the page. The new system leaves me in the dark and wondering if it is effective, wondering what the results are.

Re:Age and quality.

[nitehawk214]

I am requesting that my moderator representatives mod the esteemed parent up.

If you do not mod him up, you will not get my vote at the next meta-moderation election.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I get 15 mod points at least once a month and I rarely use more than a few of them. I still keep getting them though.

Re:Age and quality.

[__aadhrk6380]

100,000 stories and 99,999 dupes. Variety is the spice of life!

Damn, wait, I think I already posted that once before....

Re:Age and quality.

[WuphonsReach]

Actually I would recommend that everyone browse at -1. There isn't really that much spam/trolling to contend with -- in exchange for having to scroll past one or two racist trolls you'll get to see raw unfiltered discussion that may not have survived the group think that permeates the moderation system.

The problem is that the /. comment display system chokes on pages with more then 100 comments if you like to read in Nested mode.

Sure, it shows you multiple pages, but the splitting logic is absolutely craptastic, resulting in duplicate messages appearing on multiple pages, and some comments can't even be seen if one of the nested root threads contains more then 100 messages.

So - I generally pick a score level that is
(There's a bug in the bug tracking system for this issue. It's at least 5 years old and probably over 8 years old. Which shows how crappy the slashdot comment display logic is.)

Re:Age and quality.

[Threni]

Sure, but I'd still rather read nerds talking shit about stuff they know nothing about than idiots doing the same. It's too easy for people to just turn up and start typing. It would be nice to apply your own choice of weighting - ie if someone has been here n months without being modded down too much by people who aren't foes/friends of foes etc. You could probably even come up with some sort of system where you train the mod system to reflect your biases by looking for patterns behind who you mod up/down.

Re:Age and quality.

[Shakrai]

D2 solved that issue. It spits out 250 comments at a time and you can keep requesting more of them until you have the whole damn discussion on one page if you are so inclined.

It's one of the few redeeming qualities of D2.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are different types of government and there are different forms of government. "Democracy" can be used when discussing either type.

Democracy and republic are in fact both different forms of government as used in this context and the OP is correct.

Please, don't take my word for it, do some research on this subject. Now how smart do you feel?

Re:Age and quality.

[Idiomatick]

Perhaps not on /. because of the site but sites with huge groups could actually have good content if it were sufficiently filtered.

Re:Age and quality.

[Idiomatick]

Vi versus Emacs

I thought all the vi users would have died of old age by now. :P

I personally like the politics section. It definitely fits into the 'stuff that matters' category. And I like the variety of opinions available. Where else on the internet can you find a group of educated nerds willing to DEBATE not argue (for the most part). Though they are misused sometimes people on /. point out fallacies, how many other sites can claim that?

Idle on the other hand is like it was design to drag /. down.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard you like mudkips.

Re:Age and quality.

[martas]

heh, that's funny. get it? he agrees, i.e. groupthink! heheh...

Re:Age and quality.

[rastoboy29]

Uh, have you ever set your threshold to 1?  It's bad, like everywhere.

Apparently one of the better moderation systems around.

Re:Age and quality.

[RealGrouchy]

I've found that when I post less I tend to get more mod points.

Traffic loyalty scheme? If you haven't been posting much lately, maybe it's because you haven't been reading/visiting much either. Mod points (esp. when notified by the Slashdotter FF extension) perhaps serve to bring you back in.

- RG>

Re:Age and quality.

[roguetrick]

Ever since the "spent all my mod points" achivement, its become an obsession of his.

Re:Age and quality.

[D4rkn1ght]

My favorite news site always been /. because the attention it gives to stories and the research. It's a 100% better than the juvenile digg and the like.

Congratulation on the 100,000th stories. :-)

Re:Age and quality.

[interkin3tic]

It was meant to sound as a joke, sorry for that.

Re:Age and quality.

[peater]

> perhaps also because geeks are not good marks for the sorts of products generally plugged via spam

I need my viagra and I certainly would love to cozy up to the wealth of the Nigerian prince you insensitive clod!

Re:Age and quality.

[Tolkien]

ideological supremacy (be it Democrat versus Republican, Socialist versus Libertarian, Vi versus Emacs, KDE versus Gnome, etc...).

Hah! Your ordering fits perfectly with left-wingedness! Vi puts everyone on equal footing and KDE, well.. it's Linus' preference and he's Finnish...

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the comment quality follows an inverse pattern."

Unfortunately slashdot still suffers from this, most of slashdots audience is american or pro american. I see libertarians and hardcore free market types always get +insightful while more leftwing types get modded down or left unmodded into oblivion.

Slashdot has a huge pro american ideological bias. Slashdot's resident Ron Paulites or austrian nutjobs are a vicious bunch.

Re:Age and quality.

[blahplusplus]

"That's the negative aspect of the /. moderation system, it encourages groupthink and censorship. "

I agree quite a lot. Try posting anyting critical of free markets or austrian economics, see what happens.

Left wing criticism of anything gets heavily modded into oblivion all too often.

Re:Age and quality.

[wamatt]

That's why it keeps attracting smart and talented people. I hope it remains a quality niche site too.

Re:Age and quality.

[dancingmad]

I have two problems with slashdot and this is one of them (the other is the moderation system buries good comments if the article isn't new):

I have learned a lot of stuff from slashdot technical discussions; but I was a humanities (a foreign language and literature) major college, not science and I am in law school now. The groupthink here about the humanities and legal concepts is not just poor, it's often flat out wrong. Of course, if you know how to write a Hello World program in Perl, C, and Python, then you know that assault and battery are the same think, Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon, and Citizen Kane was just some flick.

Re:Age and quality.

[wamatt]

I do the same. Long live the slash!

Re:Age and quality.

[WGFCrafty]

You criticize moderation with this incendiary flamebait?

Re:Age and quality.

[Khyber]

I average about 10 posts a day.

Almost every other day I get 10 moderator posts.

Coincidence?

Re:Age and quality.

[thetoadwarrior]

I'd give you some of mine when I receive more than one allotment in a week but clearly you can't be trusted with them.

Re:Age and quality.

[thetoadwarrior]

I'd be nice to know the amount of comments and how many are of any value.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

erm how do I get to D2? (BTW I surf with my colors so some images or colors may not show and I could be missing a gif or png sometimes until I notice the cursor turns into a pointy hand)

And occasionally I use a text mode browser...

Re:Age and quality.

[Zontar The Mindless]

Digg used to be a decent site for discussion...

...back before it went online, you mean?

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

Digg was never a good site for discussion. It's been uselessly full of fanboy goons from Day One.

Re:Age and quality.

[IntlHarvester]

Actually, Slashdot has just the opposite problem. If you want people to read your post, you're better off replying to the GNAA First Post versus making a root-level post at the bottom of the page.

A whole lot of slashdot discussions are really only one or two root-level threads

Re:Age and quality.

[rolando2424]

and erupt flaming bile within the same discussion.

You should go see a doctor about that.

Re:Age and quality.

[Provocateur]

and even the most intelligent fellow is liable to the ocassional episode of stupidity

That was only the *one* time, I told you. Jeez, cut me some slack will ya. Well, since you've been most gracious in not mentioning my name, I won't be the spelling Nazi right now, and we'll call it even. In fact, to top it off, on Monday I will even pretend you didn't even make this post.

Re:Age and quality.

[IntlHarvester]

The moderation system is awesome.

I could complain about moderation all day long, but the bottom line is that it generally works from the reader's standpoint.

The one thing that most /. posters don't understand is that moderation is for the general unregistered user's benefit, not your karma score. If you browse Slashdot without being logged in, the discussions are boiled down the essential gist of the issue,without hundreds of posts of nerd nonsense.

Re:Age and quality.

[IntlHarvester]

Isn't that symptomatic of how the "net culture" has changed, though? Back when Slashdot was new, being on the Internet was something few people did, even less so without inhibitions. It was the lair of tech and science geeks, and that was that.

It is symptomatic of the fact that early net culture was 20 years ago. Its not like modern science undergrads are watching "Red Dwarf". If you weren't 'there' (ie home on Saturday night watching PBS on broadcast TV in the 1980s), who cares?

And hoestly, a lot of the Monty Python/Simpsons "nerd humor" stuff was tired and worn-out even among "nerds" long before there was a Slashdot or even the WWW. There's only so many times you can beat something with your onion belt.

Re:Age and quality.

[maxume]

To get more of what you want from the sliders, make that thing bigger (so slide both knobs all the way to the right to get everything, all the way to the left to get a minimal picture of the comments).

I also only use it when logged out, and it is somewhat terrible (perhaps because my computer can't chug through the changes fast enough, but I suspect that there is probably room to improve the implementation).

Re:Age and quality.

[dkf]

You mean the same moderating system that hasn't given me mod points in 4 or 5 years?

The slashdot system seems to be relatively hard on people who post one-liner smartass comments all the time. If we look back through your recent history then we don't see a lot that is likely to attract the karma-positive moderations. I suspect it also helps if you include a little context with <quote>s of what you're talking about. Otherwise it is too easy for people doing metamodding to not understand what you're talking about (no, you don't need to quote the whole lot. Just the relevant sentence or two).

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have demonstrated discernment and worth. Congratulations.

Re:Age and quality.

[shiftless]

That's what underrated and overrated are for.

Re:Age and quality.

[mqduck]

At least part of that stems from the aforementioned moderation system, the fact that most regular users don't browse at -1 (which means we wouldn't actually see AC spam even if it was occurring)

The Slashdot moderation system, while flawed ("Offtopic" is superflous as a means to moderate crap posts and only serves to punish topic diversions), works impressively well even if you browse at -1. I browse at -1 and have a bonus of +1 given to AC posts -- so that every post starts out at 1 (or 2, as normal) -- and Slashdot is still almost entirely free of trolls and such to me.

Re:Age and quality.

[EsbenMoseHansen]

I do believe the code is open source; I also think that is more or less the documentation :P

As for writing your own, don't. Find some suitable software instead. There are quite a lot.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

But people can change their minds as evidence changes. In the case of the AGW CRU leaks, it initially seemed dodgy because of the way the story was presented, but less so once some cursory analysis of the data had been done. So changing moderation over time is not so unexpected.

Many posts would be moderated differently depending on when they are posted. For instance in the Slashdot 'Strike on Iraq' story from 2003, this post:

"Here's hoping it'll be over quickly with minimum casualties."
Got +5 insightful.

Nowadays it would be +5 funny.

Re:Age and quality.

[Better.Safe.Than.Sor]

you suck

Re:Age and quality.

[Hurricane78]

Well, Slashdot still is only thought halfway to the end. The idea is a trust-relationship model trough action rating. Or in other words: People rate other people’s works, which given them a karma. which then is used to determine what a moderation of that person is worth.
But on Slashdot, instead it determines, who gets mod points. Which is a bit more binary, as there are no people with e.g. 10% moderation power, or anything in-between. You either have points or you don’t.

So it’s pretty close to the theoretical perfection.

The only thing it still has problems with, is that it has no concept of competency, and that meta-moderation is used. normally, one who moderates badly, would get thrown out pretty quickly, because he would lose his moderating power. But because /. does not know how competent you actually are, to moderate on a subject, that isn’t built-in.

I thought about this for a long time. But one thing remains open, even in a theoretically perfect system:
The ability to abuse the system, when you can’t uniquely identify people. (The sock-puppet dilemma.)
One could simply moderate one’s socks who then moderate oneself.
Also social aspects mean, that this can happen even without sock puppets. (Social engineering / politics.)

Unfortunately I haven’t found a solution to that problem yet.

Re:Age and quality.

[Hurricane78]

Of course it doesn’t give you mod points. The FAQ clearly states, that the ones who get points, are in the middle. The very old and very new ones don’t get points anymore. It also states a half-assed reason for this.

But then again, I hope that was the point of your joke and I just wooshed myself. Or else you must have bought that account and must be new here! ^^

Re:Age and quality.

[Hurricane78]

And Soviet Russia looks forward to another 10 years with YOU! :D

Re:Age and quality.

[EsbenMoseHansen]

or those with vanity blogs noone cared about.

I cared about them. They were cool!

Anyway, there is nothing wrong with striving.

Re:Age and quality.

[shiftless]

I think what he meant to say is he gave points to those who had valid, logical points, yet had not been upmodded or in some cases unfairly downmodded since the opinions they expressed conflicted with the Slashdot groupthink. Happens all the time, and good for him for trying to swing the balance a bit.

Re:Age and quality.

[memnock]

has the average number of comments per article gone down in the last year or so? it kind of seems that way to me. i realize there are plenty of /. users, but i don't know how many folks are staying active here. i realize stuff like Facebook is drawing larger and larger crowds, so that could explain a drop in participation at /., i'm just curious if there is a measureable difference, not what the cause could be.

Re:Age and quality.

[John Hasler]

> Well, what are you waiting for then? You seem to know how to fix it, so why
> tease us?

Block Javascript and select "Classic Discussion System". There you go. Hardly any work at all.

Re:Age and quality.

[stjobe]

I hesitate to even say it, but yeah, after the greatly stupid $RTBL purge, no mod points for me either.

Same here, haven't seen a mod point since that debacle.

Re:Age and quality.

[OverlordQ]

I haven't had mod points in about 5+ years.

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's ok to abuse the moderation system by only upmodding the posts you agree with just because your opinion happens to be in the minority?

Re:Age and quality.

[OverlordQ]

Glad I'm not the only one, haven't seen any since early 2004.

Re:Age and quality.

[el_jake]

Tell me the version of clueless you prefer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clueless

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

wot ? you mean there are article to read ? I thought it was only a flame war zone.

Re:Age and quality.

[kju]

The FAQ clearly states, that the ones who get points, are in the middle. The very old and very new ones dont get points anymore. It also states a half-assed reason for this.

This is incorrect. The FAQ does not say that "very old" accounts are exempt from getting mod points. And i can assure you that does not happen either, my account is obviously "very old" and for quite a while i keep getting 15 mod points every few days or so.

Re:Age and quality.

[shutdown -p now]

Well, what are you waiting for then? You seem to know how to fix it, so why tease us?

I'm not GP, but I'll bite.

I'm not a web developer. I haven't ever dealt with AJAX (even though I know how it works, in theory), and I've no idea how to fix Slashdot. However, I visit other websites, and I've seen quite a few interactive sights which are both more convenient, and much, much faster. A good example of a site that uses Ajax rather heavily, but is nonetheless very well designed and convenient to use, is StackOverflow.

Re:Age and quality.

[Akira Kogami]

The scarcity of mod points helps a lot with the type of posts that get upvoted. I mean, I just saw a Digg article (well, picture) where the most dugg comment was "Ha Ha! That was pretty hilarious...and true.", in response to some 4chan meme image. The good thing about limited upvoting is that people will usually only upvote comments that are either particularly witty or of substance, not thoughtless drivel that inspires no conversation at all.

Re:Age and quality.

[penguinchris]

I noticed the same thing in one of the climate articles - the "skeptic" viewpoint was being modded up and others were being modded down, even when the skeptic was on a clearly losing side of an argument.

Even if moderation in that thread devolved to simple agreeing or disagreeing with the poster, I find it hard to believe that the majority of slashdotters who had mod points agree with the "skeptics" more than everyone (including scientists) who were posting logical rebuttals and better information. Browsing at +2 or higher means seeing only the "skeptic" side of the argument, and it's not because they are correct or made better posts!

Re:Age and quality.

[PingPongBoy]

I have found that I get metamoderated into oblivion (and therefore lose my mod-points) if I moderate a discussion in a way which does not fit the general opinion of most

Confining your moderation to one discussion tends to make any of your biases appear as a pattern. However, if you use your points in different discussions, maybe you look like a better moderator.

Re:Age and quality.

[Mister Whirly]

See, now that seems a little more honest than "I could fix it in two hours with a bare minimum of replacement code".

Re:Age and quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

Implying that Slashdot contains intellectuals.

Please, don't flatter yourself.

Re:Age and quality.

[badkarmadayaccount]

Signed certs?

Re:Age and quality.

[anaesthetica]

The ability to abuse the system, when you can't uniquely identify people. (The sock-puppet dilemma.)

I wrote a long essay on this subject over at another (essentially failed) competitor to Slashdot.

Congrats!

[nametaken]

Congrats /. and "Thanks!"

You've been a regular haunt of mine longer than any other tech site and I'm glad you're still around. :)

Re:Congrats!

[RJFerret]

How about we celebrate when we reach a round number, like 131,072. Shouldn't a binary milestone count for more here?

Re:Congrats!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, reading all the comments on how wonderfully the /. mod system selects for good posts and this is +5 insightful? Not that it's a "bad" post, but how exactly is this the pinnacle of insight?

lowest account number?

[axjms]

third post?!

I am curious to find which one of us reading this has the lowest account number? I had a really low one but lost that account..

Re:lowest account number?

[ModernGeek]

You have to hold a four or five digit UID to wake them from the darkness, otherwise they won't listen and will continue to hide.

Re:lowest account number?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really want to play the low UID game, it is possible, perhaps even probable that CmdrTaco will posit with his uid of 1. I'm betting he plans on reading most or all of the comments here, since this as a meta story, and thus is one of the few times he can expect most of the comments to be about the site, and thus of serious interest to him, despite no longer being completely in charge. (If he was, I doubt the awful Slashdot 3.0 improvements (as opposed to the 2.0 system that we eventually got used to) would be in effect. He must know how awful Slashdot 3.0 is.)

Re:lowest account number?

[Tackhead]

You have to hold a four or five digit UID to wake them from the darkness, otherwise they won't listen and will continue to hide.

Only one way to find out:

``Pl'ngooi hglw'grtz Natalie Portman /. wgah'nagl b00bies petran''
(In a pool of hot grits at Slashdot, Natalie Portman lies naked and petrified.)

Thanks for 100,000, Taco and Company.

Re:lowest account number?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my highest numbered account, my first one (three digits as I recall) got lost in some sort of database snafu in the early days and my second one I forgot the password to. I only ever read via RSS though... (and even then I mostly just skim).

Re:lowest account number?

[Anonymous Coward]

third post?!

I am curious to find which one of us reading this has the lowest account number? I had a really low one but lost that account..

I think everyone under a 100 is dead? I guess there's still one "WW I" soldier left so there could still be one or two out there.

Re:lowest account number?

[Yprime]

This is my second account. I lost the email account that was tied to the first and forgot the password. . I had forgotten this one too for a long time, so I mainly use my third one which has a uid in the 600k range.

Re:lowest account number?

[BigEd]

This is my highest numbered account, my first one (three digits as I recall) got lost in some sort of database snafu in the early days and my second one I forgot the password to. I only ever read via RSS though... (and even then I mostly just skim).

Ha! I wasn't even logged in when I typed that. *sigh*

Re:lowest account number?

[palpatine]

How's this? I know a few ppl with even lower though... and obviously the staff!

Re:lowest account number?

[maxume]

Probably CmdrTaco, he seems to spend more time reading and commenting on the meta stories than the general stories.

Re:lowest account number?

[gmuslera]

Maybe more than lowest account number (mine isnt that high, but surely won't be the lowest one) what really matter is to be in this community all this years, since 1997.

Re:lowest account number?

[Darth]

You have to hold a four or five digit UID to wake them from the darkness, otherwise they won't listen and will continue to hide.

I have a five digit UID and am nihilistic enough to awaken eldritch horrors purely out of curiosity to see what would happen.

Is there a man page for it?

Re:lowest account number?

[PopeRatzo]

I had a really low one but lost that account..

Me too.

My really low account number was one lower than your really low account number, but I lost it. I think it's somewhere in a dresser drawer, next to the keys to my other car, which is a Porsche 911 GT3 RS and has a kicking sound system.

Re:lowest account number?

[Anonymous Coward]

"According to legend, some went to sleep in secret places, deep beneath their ancient cities, where no one can bother them. The rest walk among the stars, on errands we can never hope to understand, barely aware of our existence."

Re:lowest account number?

[Token_Internet_Girl]

Ah yes, the Call of Cthbooblu.

Re:lowest account number?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, yeah. I had a low 5-digit account (in the 10k to 20k range IIRC; circa 1998) and now I can't even remember the name or e-mail of the account (I used a one-off e-mail address in an attempt to be anonymous). Doesn't matter anyway because I don't have the password or e-mail address any more. Pisses me off cause I wish I had it now. :)

Re:lowest account number?

[juuri]

I have a five digit UID and am nihilistic enough to awaken eldritch horrors purely out of curiosity to see what would happen.

Is there a man page for it?

Nah ain't no man page, he's talking about svr4 stuff, yur gonna need to get a bsd 4.3 compatibility layer before you can awaken any ancient horrors.

Re:lowest account number?

[bertoelcon]

When did you find the time to log on? Aren't there kids in your lawn that need to be told get off?

Re:lowest account number?

[mooingyak]

I am curious to find which one of us reading this has the lowest account number? I had a really low one but lost that account..

After taking the limit as account numbers approach infinity, I do.

But then, you do too.

Re:lowest account number?

[thoth]

I remember a few times the "low UID" issue came up (for no other reason than asking who's got a low uid??)

Somebody was bragging about their low UID (2 digits) and Taco responded "pwned".
Another time the discussion was about if people with low UID's posted useful info, and user #11 (I think) said "nope just pointless comments really". ;)

I see Palpatine posted below, #94 that's pretty low!

Re:lowest account number?

[sho-gun]

``Pl'ngooi hglw'grtz Natalie Portman /. wgah'nagl b00bies petran''
(In a pool of hot grits at Slashdot, Natalie Portman lies naked and petrified.)

Thanks for 100,000, Taco and Company.

*blinks* Did someone say something? I thought I felt a "disturbance" in my "force"

Re:lowest account number?

[sho-gun]

Oh and congrats taco and /. crew! Here's to a 100k more!

Re:lowest account number?

[Arthur Grumbine]

Ha! I wasn't even logged in when I typed that. *sigh*

Or maybe you were posting with that 3-digit account you thought you had... unfortunately I think everyone else also has access to UID (666).

Re:lowest account number?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know Hex.
Go ahead ... give it to me baby!

Re:lowest account number?

[voidref]

What about a lowish number AND a username with illegal characters?

w00t!

Re:lowest account number?

[_Sprocket_]

My really low account number was one lower than your really low account number, but I lost it. I think it's somewhere in a dresser drawer, next to the keys to my other car, which is a Porsche 911 GT3 RS and has a kicking sound system.

My lower account number was from Canada; you wouldn't know it.

Re:lowest account number?

[volsung]

Wow, you definitely win there. :)

Re:lowest account number?

[Owyn]

Yeah, that's pretty good. :)

Re:lowest account number?

[vitaflo]

"I have a five digit UID and am nihilistic enough to awaken eldritch horrors purely out of curiosity to see what would happen."

Oh great, now I bet Jon Katz will start posting stories again. :/

Re:lowest account number?

[steelfood]

He hasn't mowed his mom's lawn in a while.

Re:lowest account number?

[a.ameri]

I know you were trying to be funny, but GT3 RS with a sound system? Seriously?! It's like setting emacs with vi key bindings. Or setting bash as the default shell in NetBSD. It's travesty!

You pay $40,000 more than the normal GT3 for Porsche to rip out everything from the car to make it light, including the engine noise filters, GPS, adjustable seats, and the sound system. The engine and the chassis aren't that different between a normal GT3 and a GT3 RS. It's mostly the weight.

I assure you, that after you look at your bank balance and realise that it's $40,000 short cause you wanted to get rid of every last extra gram on your car, you will not be adding any weight to it. In fact, you'll soon be joining your local gym when you notice that you are not getting the claimed 0-60 times.

Oh well, I guess after 100,000 posts I still don't know that I shouldn't talk about cars here.

Re:lowest account number?

[Lije Baley]

My initial attitude of "registration is for lusers" cost me the fame and fortune of a super-low UID. Now I'm stuck programming computers for a living.

Re:lowest account number?

[DNS-and-BIND]

I could have had a very low account number indeed, but at that time I was all about anonymity and I thought it was stupid to register for an account at ANY website. If I had to put a name, I'd just choose a random name or look around the room for objects. I posted anonymous for a long time on Slashdot until it got abused excessively and default score threshold went up to 1. Ah, when goatsex was a new and funny joke. Why do you think everyone knows what it is? Then, after it became increasingly obvious that nobody read score: 0 comments, including the moderators, I finally registered for an account, choosing the name from a book that happened to be on my shelf at the time. Remember when Slashdot karma was a numeric value and people were putting the score on their resumes?

Re:lowest account number?

[PopeRatzo]

I know you were trying to be funny, but GT3 RS with a sound system? Seriously?! It's like setting emacs with vi key bindings.

I know, I know, but the Victoria's Secret models that I date like to listen to a little Deerhunter or Panda Bear when we're driving out to my yacht slip.

And it's a custom sound system that has every last extra gram of weight removed. Even the speaker coils are ceramic. And by the way, yes, the Victoria's Secret models also have every last extra gram of weight removed. I require that they remove their body jewelery before getting into the car.

Here's to the next 100000

[Anonymous Coward]

Go slashdot!

Re:Here's to the next 100000

[PopeRatzo]

Now it's official.

Re:Here's to the next 100000

[oldhack]

Look at that. How adorable. It's from the genuine AC, too.

Re:Here's to the next 100000

[awyeah]

... and, there it is.

yeah

[nomadic]

Thanks, guys. I've spent the past 10 years constantly criticizing you, but there must be something about the place if I keep coming back...Well done.

Re:yeah

[Valdrax]

Thanks, guys. I've spent the past 10 years constantly criticizing you, but there must be something about the place if I keep coming back...Well done.

Same here. We complain because we care, and you wouldn't see us griping if we really didn't like the place at heart.

Mazel tov!

[kencf0618]

I read Slashdot religiously --it's an intregal part of the background of my on-line life!

Re:Mazel tov!

[Teun]

Same here, it's a great way to experience how people the world over think about the subjects.

Congrats to CmdrTaco and his team!

Star War TV special?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to the 999,995th (or thereabouts) story?

It existed, and then was deleted.

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:iS4Q7wEpG2cJ:entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/12/10/1333202/The-Star-Wars-Christmas-Special-Still-Exists+site:entertainment.slashdot.org+slashdot+star+wars+holiday+special&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk/

Re:Star War TV special?

[Soulskill]

Something broke it temporarily. It should be fixed now: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/12/10/1333202/The-Star-Wars-Christmas-Special-Still-Exists

Re:Star War TV special?

[pwnies]

Neither that nor the Star Wars Christmas special ever happened. See to it that you remember that.

Re:Star War TV special?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to the 999,995th (or thereabouts) story?

It existed, and then was deleted.

http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:iS4Q7wEpG2cJ:entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/12/10/1333202/The-Star-Wars-Christmas-Special-Still-Exists+site:entertainment.slashdot.org+slashdot+star+wars+holiday+special&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk/

999,995 wasn't deleted because it was a dupe. We have those all the time, and it wasn't a dupe.

It probably had nothing to do with copyright threats from Lucas for links to places to find the episode.

No, it was deleted because (much like the rumored two sequels to The Matrix), there was no such thing as The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Re:Star War TV special?

[Anonymous Coward]

He has altered the deal. Pray he doesn't alter it any further.

100,000 stories?

[canajin56]

There may be 100,000 stories, but what's that without dupes though? 1000, 2000 tops? ;)

Re:100,000 stories?

[Firehed]

32, obviously. Someone forgot to convert out of binary.

Re:100,000 stories?

[TheRaven64]

Just one. In fact all stories ever posted have been about the Evil Bit. Some are well disguised.

Re:100,000 stories?

[Like2Byte]

32, obviously. Someone forgot to convert out of binary.

Baseless! BASELESS! That was a baseless comment!

Re:100,000 stories?

[steelfood]

The "missing" first few months of stories were actually the ones that got duped over the next 15 years.

Don't believe me? Your tinfoil hat is on crooked.

Congratulations

[Dartz-IRL]

From a new user.

Here's to the next 100k.

If it was ever all laid out, this site would actually be a pretty interesting resource for future historians. Of course, that depends on future historians being able to read whatever formats the site is stored in.

Anybody remember the Domesday Book project in Britain from the 80's being digitised into a 'permanent' format, that was obsolete a decade later.?

Anyway, kudos.

Re:Congratulations

[maxume]

The integrity of whatever media will be a much bigger problem than decoding the data on it.

Re:Congratulations

[TheRaven64]

Apparently you didn't read the post you replied to. A lot of the copies of the updated Doomsday book from the '80s survive, but reading them was a major problem a few years ago. Now a few have been copied - the originals still exist but there are only a few machines in the world capable of reading them.

Re:Congratulations

[geekoid]

Except the internet keeps changing. This bring all the content right along with the changes in formats.

Re:Congratulations

[maxume]

Oh, so they can still read and make sense of the disks?

The internets says that the integrity of the disks is part of their problem; I'm sure that if you handed a few clever hackers (or a future/alien anthropologist) a binary blob of the data, they would be able to make sense of it in fairly short order, so I'm happy to stand by my comment.

Re:Congratulations

[Neon Aardvark]

My guess is actual physical survival of data > integrity > format issues, in terms of problems for "ancient" data.

>65,635 stories?

[Shakrai]

At least we know they used the right data type for the stories ;)

Oh thats why its been a downhill slope with /.

[Servaas]

After the first story post you thought, what the heck lets use fill up to get to 100.000. That explains some of the weird stuff that has been posted like: [Citation needed] Or for example [Citation needed] Fun stuff but really. What was the first story posted by the way?

Re:Oh thats why its been a downhill slope with /.

[jgrabell]

Hello World!

Re:Oh thats why its been a downhill slope with /.

[coastwalker]

Awesome! or happy 100k. keep up the good work, I cant get such a good argument for free anywhere else.

Re:Oh thats why its been a downhill slope with /.

[inode_buddha]

hello.jpg

100,001st post!

[bennomatic]

Somehow, it doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:100,001st post!

[Shakrai]

Post != story

Yeah, yeah, I know, *whoosh*

Re:100,001st post!

[bennomatic]

Clearly you weren't the only one who didn't find it amusing. Not even a single "funny" mod point. Sigh.

However

[SnarfQuest]

If you strip out the duplicates, it's about half that.

not to toot my own horn

[Trailer Trash]

It's been 10 years this month since we saved Hotmail, on Dec. 25 1999.

Re:not to toot my own horn

[Valdrax]

What, were you waiting for the statute of limitations to run out before confessing or something?

12 Years?!?

[Monkeedude1212]

It's shocking to know this site was up before I had my own email account.

I will proceed with getting off of CmdrTaco's Lawn.

Re:12 Years?!?

[bennomatic]

Kids these days! This last August, I celebrated 20 years since my first Internet access account. Pre-web, we used things like "tin", "nn" and "rn" to get our "newsgroups", and "Gopher" to gain access to all sorts of amazing data worldwide via links rather than that outdated FTP system. Oh, and we had IM; we just called it IRC. In a way, IRC was a lot like a stateless version of Twitter, too.

Sigh.

Re:12 Years?!?

[bennomatic]

Oh, and back then, Internet email wasn't always easy to send. I had a friend at Mt. Holyoke, and to email her, I had to send to [her_name]%holyoke.edu@gateway.riverside.edu.

And if you wanted to email someone who was on a BBS (say, 'BBS-X') which wasn't connected directly to the Internet, but got their feed through another BBS (say, 'BBS-Y'), the address would look like: BBS-Y!BBS-X!user@somerandomgateway.com.

Back then, you had to EARN your email.

Re:12 Years?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought "talk" was our version of IM. :) And MUDs were our MORPGs.

CmdrTaco

[dancingmad]

I'm curious about CmdrTaco saying the site isn't always what he wants it to be; care to elaborate?

I'm seriously not trying to start a flame war or anything like that; just curious as to how the site has differed from your vision for it.

Re:CmdrTaco

[Monkeedude1212]

He probably didn't want it to have that "Slashdot" reputation associated to it.

You know the one, where if you read this site you probably have a Linux homebrew in your parents basement where you live and host D&D parties regularily. You also don't have a girlfriend, or have the confidence to speak to a girl, or even meet girls in your daily life, and are still a virgin. You know a zillion internet memes and are constantly trying to condense them into a single post that makes sense to increase your status with other readers of the site.

Yeah - we poke fun at ourselves every time we make those jokes, but in all honesty it doesn't help our image.

Re:CmdrTaco

[RobotRunAmok]

I'm curious about CmdrTaco saying the site isn't always what he wants it to be; care to elaborate?

I think he was referring to the decided lack of tentacle hentai. I'm pretty sure slashdot-as-tentacle-hentai-hub was part of the original prospectus.

Re:CmdrTaco

[Ethanol-fueled]

I was also thinking about that, and I suppose that his lament is the mainstreaming of Slashdot. In other words, he may want your version of Slashdot

It's the same kind of dilemma rock stars face: whoring oneself out for more fame and fortune (and of course money) at the expense of credibility. Ideally, everybody would have a 4 or 5 digit id and there would be no need to acommodate the laymen and other lowest common denominators. Political discussions would stay compartmentalized and not spill into every damn discussion across the board. There would be no idle chatter (and no idle section, either) and every comment would count.

But those are just guesses. Any thoughts?

Re:CmdrTaco

[juuri]

Think it was pretty obvious, he was speaking to the forced "mainstream" links and articles which were foisted upon Slashdot a few years back.

For some examples see the entire "Idle" section.

Re:CmdrTaco

[Kingrames]

Well there's still time, dudes!

Re:CmdrTaco

[Hurricane78]

Well, his fault for not adding a image embedding function and calling it 4chan. :P

Re:CmdrTaco

[u38cg]

Slashdot has been forced to "monetize" itself over the last few years (see troll stories, the addition of "Politics", the entire Idle section, etc). Obviously he can't complain publicly, but he does occasionally drop a few hints here and there. The best one was after someone posted the hypothesis that Idle was a place to put crap to troll for page views: the entire slashdot staff posted replies within about two minutes of the comment being made.

Plus or minus one?

[mfnickster]

Does that 100,000 include the Star Wars Christmas Special story which mysteriously disappeared yesterday?

Re:Plus or minus one?

[teko_teko]

Does that 100,000 include the Star Wars Christmas Special story which mysteriously disappeared yesterday?

It's been fixed, says Soulskill:

Something broke it temporarily. It should be fixed now: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/12/10/1333202/The-Star-Wars-Christmas-Special-Still-Exists

100,000 is not a round number...

[Stephen Williams]

...to a geek. We should hold off celebrating until the next power of two. Looking forward to the 131,072nd story!

-Stephen

Re:100,000 is not a round number...

[Beardo the Bearded]

It's 100 kibistories. Lighten up fr

(The ancis is gone because I'm using a kibipost)

Re:100,000 is not a round number...

[geekoid]

I don't understand why 32 stories is worth noting.

Re:100,000 is not a round number...

[steelfood]

And immediately afterwards, the editors won't be able to post any more stories for the next day due to yet another unforseen database error.

oblig toast

[pak9rabid]

To slashdot..the most informed way to be unproductive at work!

From one of the faceless lurkers

[Hecubas]

Thanks for the good work over the years, keep it up.

Re:From one of the faceless lurkers

[Anonymous Coward]

manos?

Re:From one of the faceless lurkers

[Hecubas]

Yes. :)

I've been a slashdot fan long before I joined other online communities and games. In fact, this site has probably lead to a lot of the things I delve into online.

An order of magnitude

[valderost]

Happy order of magnitude! May you see many more!

Cocktail moment?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I think so. Slashdot's slow on the uptake sometimes on stories, but it's the user comments and the user community that makes slashdot worth while. Before boingboing and digg, Slashdot's been there and probably will be there until 2015 when angels merge with Adam. I mean. Yeah.

Congrats

[palpatine]

It seems like only yesterday I noticed the story that /. was gonna start implementing user accounts (1998?) and I picked one up on the first day... been lurking ever since!

Re:Congrats

[Beardo the Bearded]

Holy FUCK. You know, you could probably auction that number off on eBay.

I got my account in 2000 as a condition of employment. Yes, you read that correctly.

Re:Congrats

[Pathwalker]

I did like the system they had in place before that, where the name was just another field you filled out when making a comment, but it really wasn't sustainable in the long run.

I guess you got up a few minutes earlier than me back in 1997.

Anyone out there have any of the mugs that Rob made in an art class, and was selling?

That makes about 35.000 unique stories, then?

[blind biker]

Taking into consideration dupes and tripes (or whatever it's called a dupe of a dupe ;)

Re:That makes about 35.000 unique stories, then?

[drpimp]

Tripe ??? YUK!

Re:That makes about 35.000 unique stories, then?

[PopeRatzo]

Taking into consideration dupes and tripes (or whatever it's called a dupe of a dupe ;)

I believe the technical term for "dupe of a dupe" is a "pupe".

Re:That makes about 35.000 unique stories, then?

[shish]

Personally I'd say most of the stories were tripe the first time they were posted...

Re:That makes about 35.000 unique stories, then?

[blind biker]

Hahah, glad at least one person got the joke ;o)

Crunching the numbers

[AlexLibman]

That's 1 new story every 1.07 hours since September 1997.

the days of old

[Phantom of the Opera]

I remember reading posts like yours in the days of old, decrying the decline of /.

Re:the days of old

[Mister Whirly]

Everybody thinks everything is getting worse, since the dawn of man. Every generation thinks the one after it is far less worthwhile then their own. It is the oldest cliche in the book. But really it is just getting old. The times change faster than you do.

Re:the days of old

[juuri]

... before or after the uid wipe?

Re:the days of old

[Phantom of the Opera]

Late 90s sometime. There were a few years I skipped. When was the uid wipe? Wondering if that is what changed my name from 'Phantom of the Operating System'

Re:the days of old

[_Sprocket_]

I remember reading posts like yours in the days of old, decrying the decline of /.

Back in those days, people really knew how to decry the decline of /.

Re:the days of old

[dancingmad]

I'm not saying it's better or worse or anything. Just that it seems to have changed and I'm sure it's changed between the start and the days of old when others were decrying the decline. My original point was only really that it's changed; I wonder if we can reasonably say slashdot has "retained" its audience.

Re:the days of old

[jeffstar]

hilarious

Re:the days of old

[Wonko the Sane]

I've been kicking myself for years because I read Slashdot for about 6 months before I bothered to register an account. At least I got a palindrome instead of just a regular, run of the mill UID.

Re:the days of old

[Lije Baley]

"Decreeing" might be the word or spelling you were looking for.

Re:the days of old

[chromas]

That book's really not as good as it used to be.

Re:the days of old

[conureman]

But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ye'.

Re:the days of old

[splutty]

Funnilly enough, I'm quite curious as to how many of the 'old guard', say 5-digit and lower, are actually still active.

And yes. I realize I'm one of them, so this might just have a self-serving sort of purpose ;)

Premature.

[Rufty]

It's only about 30,000 once you discount the dupes.

Re:Premature.

[ShatteredArm]

Duplicate posts about duplicate stories...

That's deep.

Doesn't look a day over 99,999

[smitty777]

Congrats /. ! Keep up the great work.
 
Note to haters: get a life. No one is forcing you to read this site.

94 !!!

[axjms]

There really is great power in the dark side of the force!

Re:94 !!!

[Hurricane78]

Interestingly, 94 is also his age. And the year he started to read Chips & Dips’ precursor. :P

12 Years, 100k stories.

[SilverHatHacker]

Adding my congratulations to the pile.
Sure, we may poke of fun at kdawson; complain about dupes, javascript, and stupid memes; go off on all sorts of irrelevant tangents about OS choice, porn habits, and government decisions; but really, were would any of us be without Slashdot?
And please don't anyone say 4chan.

Re:12 Years, 100k stories.

[Arthur Grumbine]

but really, were would any of us be without Slashdot?

Working?

Congrats and thanks

[Sebilrazen]

/. keeps me from productively working myself out of a job.

Why am I not getting mod points any more?

[microbee]

Really, what's up? I remember last year I was getting like 3 points every week.

well

[Phantom of the Opera]

that woke me up, but I think I saw someone in double digits somewhere around here.

// fomerly - Phantom of the Operating System

// curse you shrinking varchar!

Re:well

[Anonymous Coward]

I am technically lower. AC is 666.

Re:well

[chris mazuc]

The lowest I've seen in a very long time is a three digit UID.

Re:well

[chris mazuc]

Nevermind

Re:well

[awyeah]

Holy hell, a 4-digit UID! I didn't even know you people still existed.

Re:well

[jeffstar]

it seems that most of the posts I see from people with low UID these days are mostly about how low their UID is.

Re:well

[Owyn]

Like this one? I only post in low id threads these days, if I stumble across one. Ha.

I still read slashdot, I just don't really have time to moderate/post comments...

Re:well

[u38cg]

When we first started having low UID wars a few years ago we had this guy. Taco has occasionally jumped in as well...

Re:well

[osu-neko]

Holy hell, a 4-digit UID! I didn't even know you people still existed.

They don't. It's all a figment of your imagination.

fnord

Re:well

[jeffstar]

as far as I can remember slashdot was the first site (that I became a member of) with
- rounded corners on images! web2.0!
- user contributed content as the main attraction! web2.0!
- advantages to creating an account: saving your comment viewing preferences (why i signed up), and accumulating karma
- a concept of karma for contributing, this is everywhere now,accumulate points, merit badges etc

was slashdot the first web2.0 site!

yay!

[pertelote]

Congratulations!

Gratis on 100,000

[relaxinparadise]

Congratulations to /. for getting this far, good luck to many more posts in the future.

Special edition

[DrYak]

Don't worry : The story will be back soon as soon as Georges Lucas finishes editing a "Special edition" of the story, now featuring more comments by Jar-Jar.
And more hot grits on Natalie Portman.

Will posting in this thread get me an achievement?

[dingen]

I really hope so *fingers crossed*

Amazing Work!

[Dr. Eggman]

I feel just a twinge of pride knowing that I help contribute a tiny handful of those stories. Here's too you, Slashdot, and all the editors, contributors, moderators, users, and cowards that helped make you what you are!

Twelve years...

[caferace]

... and my options still haven't vested. Feh. :)

-jim

not much have changed

[bjoeg]

using Wayback Machine to read their first edition of /., not much have changed, more or less the same articles

Re:not much have changed

[MichaelSmith]

Taco:

If people continue to abuse this feature, I will have to remove it.

Yet it is still here....

Or no Javascript at all...

[Valdrax]

The UI would be fine if a) it worked correctly cross-browser, or at least among standards-compliant browsers and b) the javascript that powers most of it wasn't some of the slowest ever written.

I liked the site better when it didn't rely on Javascript at all: back when all the comment boxes worked without a hitch, and there weren't so many clever little popups that don't work half the time. Plus, I used to be able to see icons for friend/foe markers. Even with everything turned on in NoScript (save DoubleClick), the site doesn't completely work, and it's maddening.

I haven't seen ANY value added by ANY of the UI changes to Slashdot in the past couple of years. All they've done is make the site harder to use and less attractive. I always get the feeling no matter what browser I use that the site was coded for some other browser. And that's just terrible.

Re:Or no Javascript at all...

[Raptor851]

I'll second this, at home I keep an install of chromium just for slashdot because the new interface doesn't work with the security settings I have in firefox, and even with exceptions in place it's maddeningly slow. C'mon slashdot...you didn't have this problem a year or two ago..

Re:Or no Javascript at all...

[mobby_6kl]

I think there is an option for this that I probably opted out from when the new JS system was being tested. Basically, once I log in, Slashdot works exactly the way it has since the original CSS redesign, that is to say it works just like it has since before the redesign as well. To check this, I just completely turned off JavaScript and browed around for a bit. I didn't see any change in functionality except perhaps for tagging, which hasn't worked for me in Opera for a while now anyway.

Browsing without logging in, and thus with the new JS comment system, is indeed quite a pain. It's kind of neat, really, in the way you can adjust the moderation level by sliding the bar and do some other things, but ultimately seems pointless when the normal system works just fine and is much more reliable.

TL;DR: there should be an option somewhere to turn on the old JS-free system

Re:Or no Javascript at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

It got a lot faster for me with the update a while ago that stripped out the whole left side.

The comment filter still feels broken, sometimes I'll have the dropdown, sometimes I'll have the slider, sometimes the slider is on the left instead of the top (not so much any more, though).

Honestly though, since the last update, I don't mind. It's fine.

Re:Or no Javascript at all...

[swiftx05]

The option is under "Discussion Style" here: http://meta.slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm

Re:Or no Javascript at all...

[vitaflo]

"I liked the site better when it didn't rely on Javascript at all: back when all the comment boxes worked without a hitch, and there weren't so many clever little popups that don't work half the time."

Given your UID you've been around almost as long as I have. There is the option of using the Classic Discussion System in your preferences. I find it does a decent job of being old school enough for us "get off my lawn" types. In fact, this is the one thing I like about /. and why I continue to read it. It hasn't changed a ton in the last 11 years I've been reading it. Yes they've added things like moderation (good) and tags (ugh), but with the Classic layout settings it feels mostly the same as it ever did, which I like.

I agree though, when I look at the site with the new bells and whistles I cringe. It's absolutely unusable for me.

Re:Or no Javascript at all...

[Critical_]

Yup... I prefer that system. I'm glad the site hasn't changed much in all these years.

I can't believe

[geekoid]

no one has made a joke about dupes~

Memorable trolls

[oldhack]

It's quite interesting. I remember this site was a ham-fisted, testosterone-overloaded, obssessive-compulsive, uber-pedantic nerd rage fest. (You're welcome :-).

Somehow, though, decent comments were thrown in now and then, modded up, people who've got older and mellow still hanging on (on and off), more people from fields other than computer nerddom came on, and it became whole new mess of a beast.

I'd like to conclude this remark with a goatse link, but I can't be bothered - type in the link yourself.

Oh, reply with some good trolls that visited slashdot, from Soviet Russia or whatever.

Re:65,635 stories?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to make a joke about bit sizes, at least use the correct value: 65535 (16 bits set).

High karma, but stopped getting mod points

[Pausanias]

I used to get mod points all the time (once a week or so), then it suddenly stopped. My karma is still excellent, and I still have the option to turn off advertising. Is it waiting for me to turn ads off before it gives me my mod points again? Is it detecting adblock? Anyone have an explanation?

Re:High karma, but stopped getting mod points

[somersault]

Isn't that what happens if you get ranked badly in metamoderation? I'm not going to RTFMMM just now.

Re:High karma, but stopped getting mod points

[Pausanias]

No... none of my moderations have been metamoderated. When you get metamodded down, your karma suffers. It seems that I've been purged from the moderation lists.

Funny thing is, I used to be able to mod until 2007. The only references I could find to a blacklist (rtbl flag purge) was way back in 2002. So there must be further blacklisting of mods going on. I just wonder what I did to get on the blacklist.

Groan

[Smivs]

Tragically this is because the degradation is instead shifted to the editors.

And the fact that there have now been 100,000 First Posts!

Re:Groan

[emilper]

How many "soviet russia" and "overlord" jokes ? I would scrape the site and find out for myself, but don't want to slashdot slashdot.

Re:Groan

[piripiri]

Yeah it would be cool to have some sort of linux kernel swear counts but with /. stories, which matches some patterns like:

• in soviet russia * you
• i, for one, welcome our new * overlords
• but does it run linux
• imagine a beowulf cluster of those
• there. fixed that for you
• goatse
• [no carrier]
• you must be new here
• cowbowneal

Come on /. devs, bring us a xmas gift ! ;)

Re:Groan

[hjf]

# cowboyneal

there, fixed it for ya.
signed,
grammar nazi

Re:Groan

[portalcake625]

Correction to that: 100,000 actually First Post-First Posts. If we count all the comments that contain "first post", then we'd have around ~200-300,000 of them.

Re:Groan

[Vombatus]

You must be new here

Re:Groan

[badkarmadayaccount]

# cowboyneal

there, fixed it for ya.
signed, spelling Nazi

FTFY.
Signed,
semantics and spelling Nazi.

well well

[nitroyogi]

I was kind of expecting Natalie ... not Erik.
Anyways ... cheers Slashdot! Lets keep it going further!

100,000 includes the dups

[karnowski]

What CmdrTaco failed to mention is that when you remove all the duplicate articles they're only at 75,654.

Sloppy editing, but indispensable.

[Futurepower(R)]

I agree with you about the editors. It is amazing how little Slashdot editors seem to have learned about editing in the last 12 years. Sometimes stories have not even been spell-checked. It is very common that a Slashdot story is misleading in some way.

However, even with the sloppy editing, Slashdot is the best way of learning about computer and other technology events. It's indispensable in my life. Slashdot editors have been very good at choosing stories that are interesting to us.

The comments have often been valuable to me. For example, several years ago Slashdot ran a story I suggested about making international telephone calls. There were 880 comments. One of them mentioned BroadVoice, a company that provides unlimited calling to land lines in 57 countries (then 35 countries). Since we often call land line phones in other countries and talk for hours, that was a very valuable suggestion. (I'm only a customer. I have no other involvement with BroadVoice.)

It seems reasonable to mention also that editing is extremely mentally intensive. It is much more difficult than it appears to those with no editing experience.

We are lucky to have Slashdot. Where else could we go for these stories?

Re:Sloppy editing, but indispensable.

[Reaperducer]

I wonder how many of the 100,000 are dupes.

Re:Sloppy editing, but indispensable.

[Toonol]

I think there is some sort of sociological principle at play here... some sort of emergent property of systems. As the number of people frequenting the internet, and social networking sites, grow... there's an effect that both drives most sites toward absolute mediocrity, the most populated part of the bell curve... but if you are sufficiently above or below the middle, you may be pushed further to that extreme.

The smart people need a site, and there's more smart people than ever... so there is a demand for something on the high edge. But there's absolutely no need for a 'halfway smart' site, like, say, Digg... at that point, the site joins millions of others in vying for the attention at the populated middle. I THINK there might be something like that happening with slashdot... at least I hope.

I think something similar happens with movies and tv.

Re:Sloppy editing, but indispensable.

[hitmark]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law

specifically the second one...

Re:Sloppy editing, but indispensable.

[u38cg]

Seventeen. Yeah, it's less than you think. Confirmation bias or somesuch, I guess.

Not Losing Data

[pipingguy]

Congratulations on not having to say, "My dog ate my homework" too much. Apparently this has been happening a lot recently.

How to get the llowest account number

[tomhudson]

Keep registering accounts until it overflows - you'll then have the lowest number possible ... $MAX_NEGATIVE_VALUE.

At last!

[mr_lizard13]

A story that isn't a dupe.

Only one thing to say

[wampus]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAULIE

Must admit ...

[krou]

/. is about the only forum I take part in these days, mainly because of the mindset: people here generally try to use reason and logic, and like to learn. Most people here embody the ideals of science, logic, philosophy - such a wide range of thought that I sometimes catch myself thinking, "I'd never thought of that." It's the only forum I've seen where this actually happens on a regular basis. Not all the time, true, but still ...

Happy 100,000, /.

Re:Must admit ...

[Corporate Troll]

I have been spending too much time on facebook. I looked for the "like" button. :-/

Congrats

[rossdee]

Congratulations!

But whats so special about the number 100000 anyway? Shouldn't we be celebrating powers of two rather than ten?

Lookingforward to a dupe of this story at 131072

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

No don't!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No don't!... that anonymous coward thing has been around like forever... you don't want to wake it up!... uh... wait...

I get far too many mod points

[n00btastic]

It seems like I have a continuous stream of mod points and usually receive more points the day after I finish spending the last bunch. After awhile it begins to feel like a responsibility. I am a fairly ignorant person and as such do not have anything productive to contribute towards most discussions, so do not mind helping moderate...but is it possible that some individuals are in the same boat as me, and are just negging people because it is fun?

I think you should only begin receiving mod points after a couple weeks of browsing, but not be given points with such a high frequency until you fulfill some sort of karma/time requirement.

Re:I get far too many mod points

[heffel]

I get a lot too. I hardly ever use them up.

I moderate the occasional insightful or informative comment I run into as I browse the comments , but I don't go looking for comments to moderate.

A day or two after my mod points expire I get 15 more, and I go through the cycle of using a couple of them again.

Rinse, lather, repeat

Thats ok ...

[nitroyogi]

But where are my mod points man? :(

Still here after all these years

[jgerry]

I don't post nearly as much as I used to, and I don't get mod points as much as I used to either. But I'm always scanning the RSS feed and checking out stories, because I value the discussion here more than anywhere else. The quality of discourse here remains high, which is almost an anomaly in this age of Digg & Facebook, but it's that anomaly that keeps me coming back.

I can't even remember how I found Slashdot

[heffel]

I stumbled upon Slashdot many, may years ago.

I was amazed at all the quality links and informative comments.

For whatever reason, I didn't bookmark the site after I visited for the first time, then for the life of me I couldn't remember the URL.

I kept searching for "news for geeks" (which I swore was the tagline of that awesome site I stumbled upon) in Yahoo (this was before Google rose to the top of the search engines) but didn't get any good results.

After a while I somehow found Slashdot again, and had a "do'h" moment when I saw that the tagline was "News for nerds", not "News for geeks" as I remembered it.

It took me a while to actually create an account, oh, how I wish my account number was even lower.

In any case, I'm glad to have been a part of the Slashdot community for the most part of my professional life.

Thanks Slashdot, for keeping us all in the loop of the latest happenings in the technology world.

Re:I can't even remember how I found Slashdot

[phantomlord]

Digging through an old bookmarks.html from Netscape, I added Slashdot to my bookmarks at 923516156 (04/07/1999 8:15pm GMT). I know it wasn't my first visit here, but that was the point when I finally decided to keep it.

Speaking of 4/7/1999 it was an interesting day. Headlines include ATI Releasing Specs for TV Tuner, Debian Logo Continues, Everyone and Their Brother Opens a Linux Site, "Intel Inside" campaign shackles OEMs, FSF updates Free Software definition, Al Gore Goes "Open Source", Salon buys The Well, SoundBlaster Live! under Linux?, and Using FAT32 with Linux.

Looking back, I realize what makes me nostalgic about the old days of Slashdot. Almost every story was related to tech somehow, whereas these days, there's a ton of general interest stories, slashvertisements and stories that are intended mostly to generate flame wars to increase page views.

Anyway, I don't remember exactly what brought me to Slashdot, or which of those stories it was that made me bookmark the site that day... I left for a while when kdawson and the politics section appeared (and kdawson still makes me miss jon katz in comparison), but I couldn't stay away for more than a couple months.

It took me a while to actually create an account, oh, how I wish my account number was even lower.

I say the same thing... I think it might be pervasive enough that we'd all probably have the same account numbers, or close to them, if we had signed up when we first got here.

Re:I can't even remember how I found Slashdot

[heffel]

I don't know how you still have your bookmarks from 1999, but your comment made me curious.

I googled my username with results limited to http://slashdot.org/ and the oldest comment I could find was from October 15th, 1999.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/15/1224252

That day (http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=19991015)

We were:

Asking people to donate spare cycles to climate prediction

Talking about some Cyberprivacy prevention Act

Talking about Sun an Open source (boy we've been discussing that one for a long time haven't we)

Letting everyone know that the FCC would leave broadband alone

Talking about a major Star Wars character that was about to die in a book.

Gasping in horror when we learned that Microsoft was lobbying to cut the DOJ antitrust budget

Discussing that Debian was going to be available through retail channels, and how "newbies" would never be able to install it.

Talking about Open Source Poster Boys

Announcing two brand new Slashdot sections, Apache and BSD

Reviewing a commercial IDE for Linux (Codewarrior)

Discussing advances in nanotech

Reviewing John Carmack's answers to his questions

Drooling over IBM's huge 73 GB hard drive

Discussing a BBC interview with Bill Gates

Celebrating that there was going to be free general admission at FreeBSD Con

Talking about a review of "that half Palm III half Cell Phone mutant thing".

Wondering why there were no widescreen TV's in the US.

Announcing the Li18nux effort

Making fun of online language translation tools

Unsurprisingly, most of the links the sources of that day's stories are now 404.

Re: +8, Bill!

[ArundelCastle]

I think you have some terrific ideas there, and yes I think I get it. As a long time anon coward, I've never even tried to analyse the system. It's just amazing to see the diversity of opinions, both brilliant and troglodyte, that will be generated on every topic imaginable.

So it almost pains me to suggest that the next iteration of the mod system should use the AI Director from Left 4 Dead. ;)
Any time the story or comment quality drops, it automatically provides positive karma and painkillers for all active readers to balance out.

A kinder, gentler, undeader Slashdot.^TM

Re: Memes

[TaoPhoenix]

Really though, I haven't seen Hot Grits or Natalie Portman in years.
Their age may be passing.

./ made me smarter

[toopok4k3]

Congrats are in order. I have been here for at least 5 years now. I can say all the comments and the way people discuss things here changed the way I see/understand the world and people. Big kudos to all of you!

Interesting Stories

[MrKaos]

I have noticed in recent times that there are a lot of TV shows picking up stories from /. - so much so that it seems really obvious. To me /. is my main source of useful news which I supplement with the (hard to find) quality journalism of Lateline - who don't seem to source stories from slashdot.

I wonder how long it is before many news sources get more news from /.

Congratulations.

Re:Interesting Stories

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? Do you understand that Slashdot doesn't write their own stories? Do you understand that news teams have entire departments that do nothing but crawl the web and read RSS feeds? They're not taking stories from Slashdot. I'm sure some stop by but most of them cruise the same sites that Slashdotters do and they get the same news from the same sources.

Jesus. Talk about naive.

Re:Interesting Stories

[MrKaos]

WTF? Do you understand that the media is owned by only 6 conglomerates? Do you understand that news teams have entire departments that due to cost cutting measures journalists don't have time to even verify stories let alone those on the web and read RSS feeds? It's just easier to let that happen at Slashdot. I'm sure they would like to but most of them are under such time constraints and editorial deadlines that it's easier to let Slashdotters filter the stories of interest from the same sources they would.

Jesus. Talk about unaware.

Re:Will posting in this thread get me an achieveme

[mister_playboy]

posting in epic thread! XD

Duplicates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just waiting for the duplicate story for hitting 100,000 stories when they subtract all the duplicates

Congrats Taco, thanks everyone else

[Maow]

Can only reiterate what's been said before:

I've learned more from +5 comments than anywhere else.

Re:Congrats Taco, thanks everyone else

[shutdown -p now]

I've learned more from +5 comments than anywhere else.

What more, the most informative ones tend to be +5 Funny...

Ask Google

[tepples]

things in "ask slashdot" that should instead get someone redirected to google

Not everybody is an expert at formulating search engine queries. In these Ask Slashdot articles, I take the question to be the following: "To answer this question, what words should I have typed into a search engine?" Even a "Let me Google that for you" response can be informative if it reveals keywords that the submitter couldn't think to use.

Re:Ask Google

[Akira Kogami]

http://tinyurl.com/yc4rghl

Re:Ask Google

[i-like-burritos]

Not everybody is an expert at formulating search engine queries.

That is very true. Search engine queries are a suprisingly subtle exercise in language. I never really appreciated this until I tried searching for something in a different language. I have a reasonably good command of that language, and yet I could not form a decent query to save my life.

Since I was a teenager!

[awyeah]

I'm pretty sure that I created my account here 10 years ago or more... when I was a teenager.

That being said, this is one of the few things that I did then and still do now.

Go /.!

BTW, is there a way to figure out your actual registration date?

Re:Since I was a teenager!

[symbolset]

You can review your comments. Just go back to your first comment. Was that about the right time?

So now, what would any home user need 128MB of RAM on their graphics card for, at this point? Are the games really going to become so complex in the next couple of years that they would require that much RAM on board? I can understand why, in a professional/commercial environment, one might need a really high-powered video card... for special effects in movies, or just general professional graphics/video work. But how much RAM do you *really* need in your video card?

Ah, nostalgia, what would we do without you?

Re:Since I was a teenager!

[awyeah]

Ah, that would do it! Yeah, that was probably not too long after I registered.

Wow. I was a senior in high school at that point! And judging by the time of that post, I was probably actually posting from school.

I guess if there's one thing I have to anchor to in my life, it's slacking on /.

I'm not really sure if that's a fail or a win... although, I'd say I made it through the last ten years in one piece, so... epic win, Slashdot!

Re:Since I was a teenager!

[symbolset]

Since over the last decade I've managed to convince my employers that my /. addiction was a large part of my value add, I'm going to have to agree with you. /. rocks. I was a lurker for a few years before I got a registered account.

I make my living by being able to solve problems, fix problems, architect solutions and educate staff engineers and customers about classic and emerging information technologies. Though I have a firm education foundation, over the years the tips for further study I've found through /. have become an ever larger fraction of the value I provide. It's not my only source, but it's a catchall for stuff I would otherwise miss in my more focused studies. Quite a few times breaking news on /. has saved my bacon, and several times it's helped me steer customers away from toxic products. Checking /. every morning and evening gives me the opportunity to allstaff breaking events that impact operations and give an opportunity to provide customer guidance on a regular basis and frankly that's a large part of why I continue to be employed in IT at the level I enjoy.

I used to buy stuff for personal use from random vendors on pricewatch.com and recommend that even though fulfillment was spotty, but years ago Newegg advertised here and I went there and now I'm a big Newegg fan. They'll continue to be my preferred online vendor until they let me down, which hasn't happened yet and seems less likely every year. I've probably spent $50K with them, and referred 20X as much. Today I recommend about $40M a year of IT spend ($400K today, but today was a good day) and of that my company's customers buy much more than half.

So yeah, Slashdot rocks.

I still wish they'd fix browser detection and give me a thin home page so I could get my /. on on my blackberry, but that's a small thing compared to what I get for what I pay.

I subscribe, and the subscription cost is ridiculously small. The minimum subscription can last almost forever. They should jack that up a bit. The plums (like being able to pull up your first comment for you) are worth far more..

Re:Since I was a teenager!

[awyeah]

Oh yes. Definitely worth subscribing to. The cost is ridiculously low. And I've actually selected to turn of Ads on all pages, and I have set my limit of ad-free pages to zero.

Well worth supporting /.

And a good walk down memory lane.

Re: Memes

[Wonko the Sane]

Funny that slashdot trolls have existed long enough to be a source of nostalgia. Somebody should post the "nullo" troll for old time's sake.

Ctrl+F and only one overlord, in a reference?!

[ZirconCode]

I for one Welcome our New Slashdot Overlords!

Roland Piquepaille

[maotx]

I'm surprised that there hasn't been a mention of rpiquepa

Or does one not live on after death?

Probably not

[Anonymous Coward]

Minus the dupes and slashvertisements and I bet we're not there yet

Congratulations

[Wintywasthere]

I'm a long time lurker, and this is one one of the most informative sites I visit. Despite the odd troll, the discussions are usually thought provoking (even if the thought is NSFW). Good work guys and roll on 200k.

Does this count reposts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the "unique story" count is closer to 20,000.

a reply

[MacII]

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

Re:Will posting in this thread get me an achieveme

[indi0144]

inb4 x is toasting in epic brea^b^b^b^b^long /. story count is looooooooooooong XD

No really, thanks to /. I can keep up my daily dose of reading my second language, and I'm learning stuff from +5 and -1 posts in the meantime. I may be geeky on the inside but coming from a totally different field of knowledge (1) I've found this site and their people to be really smart and full of insight about IT, something that lacks on my field.

(1)An advertising guy now passionate for IT? Did /. conversed me? I wouldn't know but it helped a lot. :-)

Binary Adieu!

[nanospook]

CmdrTaco, it would have meant more to me if you had waited to reach a power of 2! oh never mind..

Wow, 12 years, huh? So how's that /. user manual.

[RevWaldo]

...coming along? You know, that one concise document explaining how the site works? You got a... got a bunch of screen prints there? Sitting in a folder, huh? Got a... got a outline of a single document distilling all the help pages into a easy-to-read format? Explaining how karma points work? That whole red-to-black filtering thing? Huh? You got a.. got a diagram showing how to navigate the site, huh? How to, uh, how to use the tags, huh? Been working on that for quite some time, yeah? Twelve years, yeah? Something readable and straightforward so that even longtime visitors can understand and take advantage of all the features, yeah? So they, uh, so they don't have to click through all those big long help pages? Maybe as a PDF? Huh? Yeah? Huh? No, no, you deserve some time off... (pats knee.)

No, seriously, congrats.

Cheers!

[chucklebutte]

Cheers!

You lost touch...

[Anonymous Coward]

the site isn't always exactly what I want it to be

You lost touch with the users when:

1. You changed how the commenting thread system worked, because there was nothing wrong with it
2. You used stupid cheap javascript crappy menus for "get more comments". Again, you "fixed" something that wasn't broken.
3. You fucking crash the iPhone browser for fucks sake. You don't even have a mobile version of the site that's readable without crashing the iPhone. Are you kidding me?
4. You delete posts if they're even somewhat misogynistic.
5. You added the idiotic IDLE section, where you decided it was best to try to emulate "something awful" while doing it wrong, and making fun of your readers at the same time.

I'd be surprised if you're honestly here in another 12 years. You were once the best, but now you fucking suck.

HEY BUT NOT LIKE ANYONE WILL SEE THIS COMMENT, SINCE YOU HAVE TO REPLY TO THE TOP COMMENT FIVE MINUTES AFTER THE STORY IS OPEN FOR IT TO EVEN BE SEEN!

If you want to see a site that WORKS, and REALLY IS "news for nerds" and REALLY DOES have "stuff that matters", please visit http://reddit.com/

That's right, http://reddit.com/. It's absolutely what slashdot SHOULD have become, if they hadn't sat on their asses for 10 of the 12 years.

Congrats Rob and Slashdot

[javac]

I want to thank Rob for keeping this site going for so long. I have been here from the first couple of months. I first visited slashdot in the fall of 2007, it really has been 12 years. Slashdot was great because they were inclusive, most people were very intelligent and the discussions were great. The other reality is that it was the place to hang out if you liked linux.
Anyway, I don't frequent as often as I used to, but I love slashdot and still hope to meet Rob in person some day.

Jonathan

SQL

[daveime]

SELECT story FROM table WHERE dupe = TRUE
50,000 Rows Returned

Ooops, looks like that might only be the 50k milestone after all

I was there, too

[Metiu]

I was in California (Davis) at the time, and /. gave me good news, interesting thoughts, and showed a brand pre-pre-pre blogging way of handling news.

In 9/11/2001, you showed to the world how a good community site could be able to support a world which was trembling that day, and you gave a very interesting recount on how you did it.

Plus, you've always had a bigger, fatter pipe than everyone else!

Thank you again for still being here, and always getting better.

awesome

[CeramicNuts]

my number one stop on the net, every day for the last 12 years.

Keep it Up!

In b4 lock (:

[Genocaust]

Posting in an Epic thread...er...story...er...whatever you want to call this!

I'll probably get modded down for this, but

[WGFCrafty]

it seems some people use the previous phrase (title) as some form of reverse moderation psychology.

We need to fight this.

Re:I'll probably get modded down for this, but

[thetoadwarrior]

I agree which is why I will actually mod them down for using that phrase.

Congratulations!

[Fantastic Lad]

Just a chime-in.

You guys do a truly great job!

I really appreciate this site, as I know many people do. It draws a fantastic mix of knowledge/experience spheres from thousands of individuals, allowing us to collectively learn about the world and put all manner of current information through a tremendous crucible of cross-analysis from countless different perspectives so that we can quickly work out what is really going on out there in the big, ol' world, --and all with humor and zest. It makes learning FUN! I've learned SO many things here, both wonderful and painful lessons about the world and myself; The internet would be a far less grand place without Slashdot. And I'm not even exaggerating. You guys rock!

Thank-you!

-FL

People who do not participate also love /.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been reading /. for years and still haven't got myself an account. Not for any particular reason really -- never felt the need for it. I just read -- sometimes chuckle, sometimes curse and many times learn. This is my first post because I felt a moral obligation to congratulate a fantastic site. The reasons I think /. is great are:
1. The technology does not obscure the content. There is no flashy avatars, spinning buttons, multiple webparts... no Web x.0 bull crap
2. There is limited juvenile behavior on the site (no "lol", "whatever",...). People write their point of view in plan English -- something which everyone can understand and react to. It seems in today's day and age the power of rational debate is getting drowned in the omnipotent "whatever" comment.
3. /. is an excellent place to procrastinate. The dialogue is intelligent, the trivia is good and you may actually learn something useful
4. The moderation system obviously works because I haven't seen a better quality of comments anywhere else
5. It's actually a good place to keep tabs on what's happening in the technology space and hear the different points of view

Keep up the fantastic work guys ! I hope whatever form Slashdot is in 10 years from now, it stills retains its core essence.

Hmmmm... maybe I should sign up for that account or maybe I will procrastinate on that task by reading Slashdot !!??

Slasdot sucks out the wisdom of the crowd

[symbolset]

It's sad but true. If we stay here comfy in our /. home, /. becomes a parking space for what we know and outside of here ignorance reigns. In addition to being a troll magnet, /. becomes an ivory tower. That's bad. We need to go out from here and disabuse the idiots of ZDNET and CNET of their general idiocy. That we are smart here does no good if the common cause becomes "Up with dumb"! The only cure is for us to go out to all those other spaces and comment something other than "you're a 'tard", useful information for the common folk like "Don't drill for water in your neighbor's septic tank."

Meta conversation ahoy!

[randomsearch]

To quote one of my (vastly intellectually superior) colleagues:

"I've never met a meta that I couldn't meta more."

RS

Re:Meta conversation ahoy!

[maxume]

When people say things like that to me, I punch them right in the meta.

100,000 and still Web 0.5

[Rocketship Underpant]

Slashdot is now the only website on the Internet with 100,000 pages that are Unicode-incompatible.

congrats!

[Asaf.Zamir]

Congratulations! I've been surfing this website for about 6-7 years, my main resource for computer-news :)

What is with all the stars wars references?

[grandmofftarkin]

We have you with your two digit UID and Darth just above with his 5 digit UID. Who next?

Wikipedia calls it "Culture".

[Futurepower(R)]

Wikipedia has a list of Slashdot mannerisms. Wikipedia calls it "Culture", but that's disgusting.

Congrats /.!

[hoover]

Congrats guys, keep up the good work.

timothy

[wdr1]

timothy is one of the reasons I rarely come to slashdot anymore.

Re:timothy

[timothy]

Sorry for whatever it is that makes you say that. You can, though, change your prefs to block me (or any of the editors).

Cheers,

timothy

A brief shot of nostalgia and thanks

[timothy]

a) Slashdot has occupied many of my hours for the last decade-plus, and I get to read it at work, which is nicely circular. I've poked at the firehose (formerly "the bin") from more than half of the states of the union (often from within my car, though not while driving), as well as from at least three other countries, and gotten to meet a lot of very interesting people thereby, many of whom remind me of how smart I'm not.

b) Thanks to Dug Song for getting me interested, roundabout fashion, in computer software and licensing, and Alvin Richardson and Dan Jones (two of my housemates in Austin, long ago); one of them -- I think Alvin, but could have been either -- first pointed out Slashdot to me, probably because I was running Linux and burbling about computers, something they both knew and know far more about.

c) Thanks also to the readers who (somtimes even politely!) have pointed out my many shortcomings, suggested better links, added supplemental information, or just plain added comments to stories. Slashdot is about the conversation, and trying to coax the signal usefully above the noise.

timothy

2 Cents From A Nerd...

[jyuschak]

I hardly post here on /. that often, but seeing this post and the throngs of replies regarding quality of comments, I felt that I wanted to reply with my own experiences.

It was 10 years ago that I started my college career at Drexel University and I was the absolute loneliest kid you could find on that campus. I didn't know a soul and I had quite a hard time making friends. Now, I can't remember exactly how I found you, but after reading "News For Nerds" I felt at home. And after going through all the posts, news stories, fellow readers & posters, I felt better about myself. In a sea of unfamiliarity, there was Slashdot. It was my anchor, it was my warm blanket that make me comfortable. I can hardly describe how much better my freshman year felt having /. with me. It meant a lot to me 10 years ago, and it means a lot to me now.

There are those that will tell you things have changed, that /. isn't the same. But like anything, change is inevitable. And I definitely think the changes that /. have experienced are, for the most part, positive. The new Web 2.0 look, the comment filter bars, the pictures in the articles; I view them as welcomed additions.

Slashdot is something special. Of all the things I hold a special place for in my heart, I never thought I'd feel this way about a website. But I do. The people here are amazing. Without realizing it, you guys & girls here have helped me through some of the most difficult times in my life. I love Ask Slashdot. I love the book reviews. I love the news.

Over the past decade, Slashdot has definitely changed, but it still feels like home. It's still here. And for that, I thank all of you. The creators, the members, the anon cowards. Just... thank you, all of you. I sincerely hope you continue to exist right here for another decade. Regardless of whatever browsers come and go, you'll always be the first in my favorites.