Slashdot Mirror
So Long, CmdrTaco, and Thanks For All The Posts
With CmdrTaco moving on to his temporary retirement home, the Slashdot editors who will continue to poke and prod at reader submissions (the heart and soul of this site: without readers, there'd be nothing to talk about as well as no one to talk about it) would like to offer an extended 'Thank You' to Rob, and offer some thoughts on the years so far, as well as what comes next. (Of late, though, we're lucky to have the growing contributions of Clinton Ebadi, aka Unknown Lamer, who got an oddball start on the Slashdot page a long time back.) Read on for a few words from Samzenpus, timothy, and Soulskill.
From Samzenpus:
I first met Rob Malda about 12 years ago while he was living in what we affectionately called The Geek House. At that time, Rob was just one of a motley crew of nerds who would assemble in the living room every night. They could usually be found sitting in foof chairs bathed in computer screen light. What made Rob different was how passionate he was about a website he made, something called Slashdot. Before I knew it, Slashdot had grown and I was working as user support. A few years later I was posting stories and Slashdot was a geeky household name. In that span Rob changed a lot. His Foof chair morphed into an Aeron, tubes of Pringles became business lunches, and we convinced him to embrace the wonders of natural light. He proposed to his wife and now has two kids. What didn't change in all that time was his passion for making Slashdot a great site. In the FAQ, Rob says that Slashdot is like an omelette: a combination of important news, interesting discussions, and fun stuff. What makes it great is the variety of ingredients. Rob may have started the omelette, but we'll keep it cooking and make it bigger and better with the stuff that matters.
From timothy:
In 1998 or 1999, my housemates Alvin and Dan (both of them Comp-Sci students at UT-Austin, where I'd been a lowly advertising major) pointed out to me a little site called "Slashdot.org." A strange name, and a page that seemed to be nothing but black text over an assault of white and green. It took a minute or two to parse what was going on, but then — Whoah! Smart people were discussing (and arguing about!) Linux, The GIMP, patents, and Neal Stephenson: I was hooked instantly. I've been posting stories to the site since early 2000, and in that role I've gotten to know CmdrTaco a bit. I didn't realize beforehand just how much effort can go into a simple-looking web page, and how hard it is to decide how many people to please at any given time.
Rob — CmdrTaco — has that whole span of time never wavered in his dedication to the site, and to the readers. A small example, but one that has always impressed me given what's at stake: as banner ads have infested the Web, Rob has fought for modesty and sanity rather than some of the intrusive pop-ups, interstitials, autoplaying videos and other discourtesies of modern online advertising. (We'd probably all like it if the site could exist with no ads at all, but in an imperfect world keeping them tolerable rather than obnoxious is a respectable stance, even if it means disappointing some advertisers.) And while we've been through plenty of experiments with user interface elements, new sections, and allocation of the moderator points that make the whole thing go, Rob's also taken a hard line about distracting features that don't speak to the site's core: News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters (and building conversations around those things). It's notable that Slashdot is one place where the marketplace of ideas is encouraged to bloom more than it is at many newspapers' sites, and even our friend "Anonymous Coward" can freely have his say. We like that, though it gets messy sometimes. It's meant a lot of sleepless nights for Rob and his shifting corps of engineers, trying to figure out ways to let readers help algorithmically bat down the trolls and flamebait, and to give some recognition to readers who contribute their insightful or funny comments.
It's very strange to think of reading Slashdot without CmdrTaco in the lead — even when I've disagreed with him on some particular design issue, I've never doubted his sincere belief that the readers come first. Rob isn't being frozen in carbonite, though — despite his claim of "no plans," he's got his own maker-style projects to work on, a few kids to take care of, and probably about 15 years of sleep deprivation to start chipping away at. He promises to remain part of the Slashdot community (he's still user No. 1, after all), and I expect will be a sort of unofficial Editor Emeritus for the foreseeable future. And that's good, because we'll keep working on ways to make the site friendlier and easier to use, but still dedicated to the same News for Nerds.
From Soulskill:
So, what changes from here on out for You, The Reader? Well, surprisingly little. Rob has always been clear and vociferous in defining what makes a story appropriate for Slashdot, and those standards have become deeply ingrained in the rest of the editorial staff. Slashdot won't be the same for us, but we’ll work hard to make sure the content we run continues to educate, inform, entertain, or some combination thereof. As always, feedback is welcome, and you can head over to /recent to have a direct impact on the submissions process. The engineering team continues to streamline the site’s layout and add useful functionality in order to facilitate what matters most to us: giving you folks a place to read and talk about news that matters to you.
From Samzenpus:
I first met Rob Malda about 12 years ago while he was living in what we affectionately called The Geek House. At that time, Rob was just one of a motley crew of nerds who would assemble in the living room every night. They could usually be found sitting in foof chairs bathed in computer screen light. What made Rob different was how passionate he was about a website he made, something called Slashdot. Before I knew it, Slashdot had grown and I was working as user support. A few years later I was posting stories and Slashdot was a geeky household name. In that span Rob changed a lot. His Foof chair morphed into an Aeron, tubes of Pringles became business lunches, and we convinced him to embrace the wonders of natural light. He proposed to his wife and now has two kids. What didn't change in all that time was his passion for making Slashdot a great site. In the FAQ, Rob says that Slashdot is like an omelette: a combination of important news, interesting discussions, and fun stuff. What makes it great is the variety of ingredients. Rob may have started the omelette, but we'll keep it cooking and make it bigger and better with the stuff that matters.
From timothy:
In 1998 or 1999, my housemates Alvin and Dan (both of them Comp-Sci students at UT-Austin, where I'd been a lowly advertising major) pointed out to me a little site called "Slashdot.org." A strange name, and a page that seemed to be nothing but black text over an assault of white and green. It took a minute or two to parse what was going on, but then — Whoah! Smart people were discussing (and arguing about!) Linux, The GIMP, patents, and Neal Stephenson: I was hooked instantly. I've been posting stories to the site since early 2000, and in that role I've gotten to know CmdrTaco a bit. I didn't realize beforehand just how much effort can go into a simple-looking web page, and how hard it is to decide how many people to please at any given time.
Rob — CmdrTaco — has that whole span of time never wavered in his dedication to the site, and to the readers. A small example, but one that has always impressed me given what's at stake: as banner ads have infested the Web, Rob has fought for modesty and sanity rather than some of the intrusive pop-ups, interstitials, autoplaying videos and other discourtesies of modern online advertising. (We'd probably all like it if the site could exist with no ads at all, but in an imperfect world keeping them tolerable rather than obnoxious is a respectable stance, even if it means disappointing some advertisers.) And while we've been through plenty of experiments with user interface elements, new sections, and allocation of the moderator points that make the whole thing go, Rob's also taken a hard line about distracting features that don't speak to the site's core: News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters (and building conversations around those things). It's notable that Slashdot is one place where the marketplace of ideas is encouraged to bloom more than it is at many newspapers' sites, and even our friend "Anonymous Coward" can freely have his say. We like that, though it gets messy sometimes. It's meant a lot of sleepless nights for Rob and his shifting corps of engineers, trying to figure out ways to let readers help algorithmically bat down the trolls and flamebait, and to give some recognition to readers who contribute their insightful or funny comments.
It's very strange to think of reading Slashdot without CmdrTaco in the lead — even when I've disagreed with him on some particular design issue, I've never doubted his sincere belief that the readers come first. Rob isn't being frozen in carbonite, though — despite his claim of "no plans," he's got his own maker-style projects to work on, a few kids to take care of, and probably about 15 years of sleep deprivation to start chipping away at. He promises to remain part of the Slashdot community (he's still user No. 1, after all), and I expect will be a sort of unofficial Editor Emeritus for the foreseeable future. And that's good, because we'll keep working on ways to make the site friendlier and easier to use, but still dedicated to the same News for Nerds.
From Soulskill:
So, what changes from here on out for You, The Reader? Well, surprisingly little. Rob has always been clear and vociferous in defining what makes a story appropriate for Slashdot, and those standards have become deeply ingrained in the rest of the editorial staff. Slashdot won't be the same for us, but we’ll work hard to make sure the content we run continues to educate, inform, entertain, or some combination thereof. As always, feedback is welcome, and you can head over to /recent to have a direct impact on the submissions process. The engineering team continues to streamline the site’s layout and add useful functionality in order to facilitate what matters most to us: giving you folks a place to read and talk about news that matters to you.
He's great, but he's not dead!
He'll be back.
I stole his spacebar.
I can't say as much the original post, but am sure I speak for many /. readers throughout the years when I also say thank you for all the posts Rob.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
...it tolls for Rob.
Yup, 11 years later and he's still true to his name.
Also, do you think Taco was pretty annoyed that Jobs had to go and preemptively one-up him?
Don't forget your towel. Thanks for all the fish.
Sadly, yet another nail in the coffin for /.
Thanks so much for your reflections, everyone. I've been coming here since 1998 (and, like many, registered far too late to get a cool, low UID). What's amazed me is the nature of the community and the discussion that happens here. Certainly, there are the usual trolls but more often than not I see really good, even deep discussion on here. This is a testament to the people who come here and - especially - to the great moderation and meta-mod system that's encourages that type of discussion. When I compare the discourse here to that on most news sites, /. is consistently far ahead of what exists elsewhere.
So thanks for that, Rob! We'll miss you. And I saw that you were musing about writing a book. Please do so! I, for one, would be very interested to read about your time in /. from your own perspective.
No, not Web 2.0's social media, but Web 1.0's social media: a place that was pseudonymous, but still reputation-based. A place where pseudonyms stood alone - no "like" or "+1" buttons. Not a place for 140-character tweets, but a place for paragraph- and essay-length commentary.
To stretch the analogy, in the first incarnation of Jobs' Apple, users bought Macintoshes not to show off their respective bling, but to get work done. (No, not coding work, office work - but it was work nonetheless, and it was work that couldn't be done nearly as easily, nor as well, under the Wintel equivalents of the mid-80s.)
Likewise, Slashdot - and the rest of Social Media 1.0 - were not built so much as place in which to speak, but as place in which to listen. I've learned far more in the comments from the past 12 years of Slashdot posts than I could ever have learned from the agglomerated mewlings of marketroids and demagogues alike.
At any rate, so long, CmdrTaco, and thanks for all the fish.
And thanks for having what was by far the coolest booth at the 1999 LinuxWorld Conference and Expo at Javits/NYC.
I had the pleasure of meeting Rob at ALS 2000 (I *still* have the tshirt from that somewhere!) I hope all goes well for you & yours from here on out!
You don't post much?!
You magnificent bastard! You post all the best stuff!
blah blah blah
Similar story appears only five stories down. The editing on this site SUCKS!
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
No one says a website is "yahooed" or "googled" or "Drudged" if it's been hit by a enmass of visitors after being posted on slashdot or any other site.
It's only on slashdot.org that when a link is posted and it's visited by a ton of people that their server simply acts like it's been DoS attacked, we say the site has been "slashdotted" or /.ed ;-).
Slashdot still continues on making little known websites temporarily 404 on visitors even while you're gone...
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Token post from low ID user here...
I started reading this site back in 1999, and I can honestly say that this is the first site I read almost every day. Although I don't post a lot, I learn something almost every day here, and your dedication to the community has always shown. Thank you for that!
-- Sent from a computer.
Having also been a longtime reader here, I owe a lot of the success in my career to both the posts that made it to slashdot as well as the comments (parrot'ing that information in meetings and sales calls has always made me look smarter and more in the know). Even today, I can reference my low user id at slashdot and gain immediate street cred with a lot of very technical people. Thanks rob for putting this place together.
How about fixing it so that I do not have to turn on JavaScript just to moderate? In the past couple of weeks I noticed that I have to turn it on in order to moderate. The result? I don't moderate.
I prefer the old style discussion system because it didn't use JavaScript and I still don't want to use it. Thanks!
Sheet mang, I know that cat from back in the CALUG 2004-ish days! Hit me up man if you catch this.
Thank you CmdrTaco (Rob),
You have inspired countless tech freaks(geeks) over the years, and hopefully for years to come
You have created a great community here, even if there are a few trolls, you can't kill get them all. =D
Thanks again,
-- Rob aka Shifty0x88
Believe it or not, we do read and sign off on every story. Alas, when you've posted thousands upon thousands of stories, a dupe occasionally slips through the cracks.
Still, we try hard not to let it happen (and we do catch the vast, vast majority of duplicate submissions). When it does, we're usually aware of it within a couple minutes of the story going live. But, at that point, there are usually comments, and we're strongly against deleting or hiding what you folks write. So we leave them up, and the few thousand that see it quickly become a few tens of thousands, which inevitably brings a certain amount of disparaging comments. But that's ok.
For any of you who take a peek at the Firehose every so often, tagging things as a dupe there, or leaving a comment saying as much, certainly helps. We do look.
Editors, I am a long-time reader (like many, I lurked for years before signing up for an account), so I'm relatively used to /.'s somewhat quirky interface. But even I am often baffled. Do you ever just sit down with someone unfamiliar with Slashdot, and ask them to navigate around and accomplish certain tasks? Or explain to you, as best they understand, what certain things are, the logic behind the structure, etc?
Someday, I hope Slashdot adopts some kind of left-pane threaded view (like taking Google Group's "tree" view, or the one used Craigslist's help forum, and combining it with the rating and other things that make Slashdot good). In the short term, though, I think some simple usability testing could really help things out around here.
- Alaska Jack
Good to see you've stuck to the site all these years...
and made a difference. You should be proud. Good work.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Wow that is pretty cool. Do you know slashdot staff from IRC (or personally)? How did you hear about the site so early?
I got to meet Taco and Hemos at the Ann Arbor Slashdot tenth birthday party. What struck me, and what made slashdot that much cooler, was that they were *exactly* what I expected. Just a couple of genuine guys who did something that they liked, and didn't seem to care too much one way or the other.
Not that they were indifferent to slashdot, but that they weren't the slimy, indirectly self serving "we're so awesome that we're gonna change the world" blog-o-matic faux revolutionaries (See; that doctor fellow over at the site that goes "boing" a couple times) and they weren't the ultra-nerd, stereotype basement dweller elitists either. They were just, ya know, geeks. It made me feel just a bit geekier knowing that something like slashdot really and truly was put together by somebody sorta like me.
Well done and good luck.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
... it trolls for Rob.
Since well over 12 years on all the boxes I installed, and the 1000's I added to networks, I made sure they'd opened up a browser with at least a /. tab present. I hope it did help in making the user base grow and grow and grow. Kudos to you and thanks for all the...
A while back someone posted a link to a picture of his car. I think the context was his driveway was captured by Google street view. Anyway, the vanity plate on the car matched the user's /. nick name. Someone replied with surprise that this should be the case. I had always sorta assumed this is what every /. user (with a car) did.
Well, given the current swell of nostalgia prompted by recent events, any one else out there with vanity plates, tattoos, or other real world paraphernalia related to nicks or things slashdotian? Care to post pics?
Here's my contribution.
Yes, the birth certificates for your twins counts, if their names are Cowboy and Neal.
That's not kdawson anyway. All the editors have a little /. logo beside their name.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
makes you wonder what will happen next week... /. without Rob is like...
someone please come up with a car analogy
Its like lifting the bonnet of your Jag 150, and discovering that it is powered by Sir Peter Ustinov.