Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
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.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
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.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
In the middle of a long dry spell myself
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
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.
which is totally what she said
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?
I'm curious, how do you determine your meta-mod status?
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.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
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...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Wow, you definitely win there. :)
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.