A Conversation with Rob Malda - Part One of Three (Video)

Slashdot's Glorious 15th Anniversary (link to bad fireworks video) is coming up in October, so Jeff 'Soulskill' Boehm and Rob 'samzenpus' Rozeboom decided to have a chat with Rob Malda. Back in 1997 Rob founded a website named Chips & Dips that later morphed into something called Slashdot, which has been (as the saying goes) "often imitated but never duplicated." Since leaving Slashdot, Rob has been doing this, that, and the other, but we'll let him tell you what he's doing in his own words. Note: This is an audio interview with some semi-interesting photos laid over it as a slide show, so you might want to listen to it rather than watch it. Parts Two and Three of the interview will be along in the next few days.

Comments

Questions to Rob Malda (anyone can answer)

[drinkydoh]

Why you proposed your wife via Slashdot?

Read all about how governments use brain pattern matching abusively.

Re:Questions to Rob Malda (anyone can answer)

[Halo1]

Why you proposed your wife via Slashdot?

Read all about how governments use brain pattern matching abusively.

Just ask the government.

Re:Questions to Rob Malda (anyone can answer)

[dkleinsc]

Because it was Valentine's Day, he wanted to do something both geeky and romantic, he knew Kathleen would see it, and she said "yes".

Re:Questions to Rob Malda (anyone can answer)

[Meski]

Just as well she didn't have mod points.

Sorry, Did Not Listen

[Anonymous Coward]

Why post an audio interview without a transcript? Way to know your audience.

Re:Sorry, Did Not Listen

[avandesande]

RTFA == WTFV

Re:Sorry, Did Not Listen

[Anonymous Coward]

They know nobody will RTFA, so probably they know their audience very well.

Re:Sorry, Did Not Listen

[lorenlal]

Plus, I'm pretty sure a transcript would result in a TL;DR, so I'm concurring.

can't watch vid (Linux Mint)

[Penurious Penguin]

Running Linux Mint 13 (Mate ed.) and it plays neither on firefox or midori. Is there another source to watch this? wget -O taco http://player.ooyala.com/static/cacheable/444fd7076af0334709af3684f7f0e127/player_v2.swf -- (fail). Any suggestions?

Re:can't watch vid (Linux Mint)

[jones_supa]

Here we talk all day long about open formats but even Slashdot shows that at the end of the day Flash is the bees knees.

Re:can't watch vid (Linux Mint)

[Penurious Penguin]

Might just be an awkwardly configured system on my part, but youtube and even vimeo work well enough. I'd never heard of ooyala before posting the parent.

Who?

[jfengel]

Oh, it's all so 2011.

Re:Who?

[jokkebk]

I have to say I'm not certain why all these "Rob Malda gets a job" and "Rob Malda discusses Reddit" articles that have appeared since he resigned from Slashdot are relevant news for nerds. I've been following the site since the nineties, and with the exception of few posts (like the proposal mentioned earlier), the editors were never a focus in the posts, but the news instead.

I would assume the people who wanted to follow CmdrTaco more carefully could, like, follow his personal website or something. At least to me, the Slashdot culture has never centered around any figureheads, but the community and commenters (and of course Rob Malda was an integral part of both for a long time).

At least this three-part interview series could've been timed to occur more closely with the 15 year anniversary, now it just feels like free PR push.

Transcript, please.

[heptapod]

Enough with the video.

Re:Transcript, please.

[avandesande]

Yeah, like you were going to RTFA anyway ;-)

Will there be meetups like we did for 10?

[Chas]

Just checking.

Had a blast at the last one.

Re:Will there be meetups like we did for 10?

[clovis]

And should it be limited to people with slashdot ID's of 4 digits or fewer?

Re:Will there be meetups like we did for 10?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Yes.

Re:Will there be meetups like we did for 10?

[Fnord666]

And should it be limited to people with slashdot ID's of 4 digits or fewer?

Yes it should. Just be sure to schedule it in time for the early bird specials and wrap it up before 8pm so everyone can get to bed on time.

Re:Will there be meetups like we did for 10?

[TheRaven64]

Thanks for that one /sarcasm ...from now until the end of time, Google is going to be aware I searched the android market place for 'grindr' and think I'm a queermo.

So, which of the following are the reasons that this worries you?

• You're in the closet and don't want to be accidentally outed by Google.
• You're violently homophobic and frightened of anyone thinking you might be gay.
• You are worried by the thought that Google's database about you may contain errors making it less valuable when they sell the use of your personal information to advertisers.

Re:Will there be meetups like we did for 10?

[sandman71]

Way to discriminate against people with 5 digits. sheesh! :P

Re:Will there be meetups like we did for 10?

[Chas]

Well SOMEONE needs to call you people out on your conspicuous consumption of extra digits!

Re:Will there be meetups like we did for 10?

[Anthony]

Naturally yes. I like the early-bed time, but the sun never sets on Slashdot.

I know we should not RTFA.....

[tanveer1979]

But I guess we slashdotted google+ anyways
Chips and dips AKA https://plus.google.com/photos/105030465637303791249/albums/5645165571128591969 brings up a blank page

What does it mean 'what would it become'?

[roman_mir]

I mean what do you think /. is? Maybe it's something that I don't understand at all, it's a forum, it's an advertising platform, it has themes that are supposedly geared towards technology (but also plenty of flaming... well, that's an advertising technique).

But I don't get it probably, what does Malda mean by 'what it will become'? What could it become, except diluted over time? It's like a newsgroup, maybe it's IRC with memory, but what is he talking about?

Re:What does it mean 'what would it become'?

[TaoPhoenix]

He got a class on "Business Speak" somewhere. When you leave a major undertaking, presuming it's not a sinking ship, you speak of it in multi-tenses.

Slashdot's decline and irrelivancy

[Anonymous Coward]

They should ask him what he thinks of Slashdot's decline due to an increasing moronic userbase. This site used to be about open source advocacy, yet now half the people on here are using closed source Apple products. Will Slashdot even be around in a year or two?

Compressed SWF format not supported

[dgharmon]

It plays here OK on Firefox/Chrome under Ubuntu 12.04. When I try and play in in xine/vlc/mplayer I get "Compressed SWF format not supported".

Re:No One Give a Shit

[Quiet_Desperation]

"That's why Slytherins all sing, Malda is our king"

Re:Mod parent down!

[avandesande]

Get out much?

Low comment count explained

[Anonymous Coward]

Three hours after this is posted and there's still less than 40 comments, half of them are trolls or off topic. Kinda makes you think that no one really cares about Taco... and that Slashdot is falling apart due to techno-political ramblings that only get comments from fanatics so they can pound their chests.
 
But, hey, it's all about page hits anyway anymore. I guess Slashdot found it's bread and butter.

Re:Mod parent down!

[Chelloveck]

No, the use of == is correct here. He's certainly not assigning the value of WTFV to RTFA. He's stating the equivalence of RTFA and WTFV. Since the article is in video form, the only way to read the article is to watch the video. If you've watched the video, you've read the article. If you haven't watched, you haven't read. They can both be true, or they can both be false. Either way, (RTFA == WTFV) evaluates to true.

It would be better to write RTFA â WTFV, of course, but slashdot doesn't believe in unicode and mangles the three-bar STRICTLY EQUIVALENT TO glyph I put between RTFA and WTFV.

Re:Mod parent down!

[avandesande]

Wet?

Dumb and dumber

[damn_registrars]

Malda left after destroying what used to be a good website. Now, we let the resident king of editorial failure go and interview him. What, exactly, do we expect to be learned from this? Or is samzenpus just trying to get interview tips from Rob so he has a chance at a job after this site finally dies?

Re:Dumb and dumber

[FatAlb3rt]

And yet... here you are.

Re:Ah, 1997.

[Kaz Kylheku]

Whoa, quite the early adopter of that particular oath! :)

Re:Do you support the constitution

[denvergeek]

Although Nixon gave us the EPA and the Clean Water Act...

Re:IDIOT.

[dotbot]

The GP already made it CLEAR that the == operator is not a statement of equivalence.

The particular choice of operator for equality in a predicate cannot influence whether the predicate is being logically asserted, i.e. holds for all valuations, or is just a free-standing formula. To make it clear that it was an assertion, it should have been written with a turnstile in front:

|- RTFA == WTFV

The tyrant will

[FrontDoors]

The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny. - The right words, yeah!