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.

[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.

[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.

[maxume]

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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[_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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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. :)

From one of the faceless lurkers

[Hecubas]

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

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: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.

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: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.

./ 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!

Re:Sloppy editing, but indispensable.

[Reaperducer]

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

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.