Slashdot Mirror
CmdrTaco Looks Back on Fifteen Years of Slashdot
CmdrTaco sent in a link to his weblog post looking back on his experience running Slashdot for fifteen years: "For me the story of Slashdot is utterly inseparable from my own life. I built it while still in college: when normal people did their homework or had personal lives, I spent my evenings making icons in The Gimp, crafting perl in vim or writing a new story to share with my friends. I’ll never forget the nights spent tailing the access_log and celebrating a line from microsoft.com or mit.edu with friends like Jeff, Dave, Nate, and Kurt."
Over the last few years, my light hearted sarcasm was slowly replaced by bitterness. Somewhere along the line became unable to hide my feelings from my friends, family and finally even my co-workers.
Yeah, that's called "aging" and it's pretty common. Generally speaking, your chronological age bears a proportional relationship to the percentage of time you spend bitching about shit. By the time you're collecting Social Security, it's pretty much 95% bitching (the other 5% consisting mostly of bragging about your retarded grandkids, who you think are geniuses for some reason).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
We found one that could: Selling Slashdot was the right decision at the time: we never could have survived the growth, and the lean years after the bubble burst. However, the long term consequences of the decision wouldn’t be clear for years.
This is so obvious to me. It's like watching a band sign a big contract thinking it's the greatest thing to ever happen to them. Even with the latest move Slashdot editors think it's only a good thing. If you sell, you need to consider that you're selling your freedom, your control and your future. The bigger the company you're sold to, the most abstracted away from you all those things are. So consider all that and price it accordingly. I mean, now it'll probably go to the highest bidder ... what if a giant just wanted to buy Slashdot to shut it down because of the negative press it generates for them?
My work here is dung.
I've been here since the start, but I've never wanted or felt I needed to create an account.
In an age where we'll soon see sites require a facebook login for access (Or worse yet, a "like") despite all the "Natalie Portman, naked and petrified" and "Hot grits" and page widening trolls, thanks for keeping anonymous access an option.
AC- Anonymous before "Anonymous"
For spending that time to create this community. I've had many years of enjoyment from your work!
From an early admirer...
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
And one that any person who reads slashdot daily should take in.
Being slashdotted still means something to the people that were around when it happened daily...
The answer to all your problems
At least he recognizes that the site was in decline when it was sold. Some might criticize him for not doubling down and putting himself back in to it, but he made his choice.
Welcome to the new slashdot - facebook news for conservatives.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Thanks for creating slashdot, a place where I feel the most comfortable to read nerd news. Its clean, simple and is definitely by a team who understands the concept of a technology blog. Its really sad to leave something one has created and nurtured for so many years but I suppose that's the fact of quite a few products in the market now.
Never forget OMG Ponies!
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
BSD is dying
this
'nuff said
correlation != causation
epic fail
IANAL, but
ftw!
1. something something, 2. ???, 3. profit
RTFA
wtf?
I see what you did there
cool story, bro
Star Trek
That word does not mean what you think it means
Battlestar Galactica
It's a trap
Natalie Portman
This is the year of Linux. --posted from my iPhone 4S
your wrong
loose
lowest common denominator
lol lol looooool
i wRiTe LiKe tHiS cuZ iM a T00L. epic!
prolly
dunno
I think Microsoft (and now here's an unnecessarily long sentence inside a parenthesis to make you forget about the main sentence) sucks.
blame Micro$oft
Apple fanbois
Microsoft fanbois
in 3, 2, 1...
sarcasm tag
Nothing of value was lost
Bwahahaha
troll
+1
mod parent up
Slashdot members have little to no social skills
your mom's basement
Free as in beer. (Free as in prune juice for typical slashdot users)
Duke Nukem Forever
Bill Gates borg
Developers! Developers! Developers!
iPad/iPod killer. Lame.
Al Gore invented the internets
640k is all you'll ever need
Tomato and DD-WRT because I'm el33t haxor
you must be new here
All you base are belong to us
FUD
you typical American elitist
You insensitive clod
goatse
Imagine a beowulf cluster
good luck with that
I, for one, welcome our new overlords
netcraft confirms it
you + point = over your head. whooosh
tl;dr
My smug superiority usually prevents me from responding to an AC, but here goes
I am a know-it-all in my high horse
first post
citation?
fixed that for you
that's what she said
Orwellian 1984
RMS
thank you, captain obvious
Sports? Girls? Sex? This is slashdot hahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
Get off my lawn
what does this have to do with news for nerds?
Slashvertisement
dupe
slashdot has gone downhill recently im outta here
LAME FILTER -- IGNORE BELOW
A number of languages have been designed for the purpose of replacing application-specific scripting languages by being embeddable in application programs. The application programmer (working in C or another systems language) includes "hooks" where the scripting language can control the application. These languages may be technically equivalent to an application-specific extension language but when an application embeds a "common" language, the user gets the advantage of being able to transfer skills from application to application. JavaScript began as and primarily still is a language for scripting inside web browsers; however, the standardization of the language as ECMAScript has made it popular as a general purpose embeddable language. In particular, the Mozilla implementation SpiderMonkey is embedded in several environments such as the Yahoo! Widget Engine. Other applications embedding ECMAScript implementations include the Adobe products Adobe Flash (ActionScript) and Adobe Acrobat (for scripting PDF files).
If history is any indication, we'll see a dupe of this tomorrow. Probably posted by CmdrTaco himself!
CmdrTaco, a /. account was the first one I created on the Web proper when i returned from China. I lost that 4 digit userID then due to economic & geographic dislocations, to my ongoing regret now. But in the ensuing years I came to feel like you were a brother I had never met. When you left Slashdot, it felt like a death in the family.
I don't say that to be maudlin, but to mean your time at Slashdot was not just a chapter in your life and its, but in the lives of many. May we all do so well in life.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
"Before it was the famous nerd hub, Slashdot was simply my homepage. When I left, I was denied the right to continue to post on the page that I still called home".
Why?
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
what a dump.
reddit has destroyed you. please unplug your last server.
This is the phenomenon I wonder about. So many ACs moan about how bad /. is for whatever reason, yet they're still here. Why? Haters just gotta hate? Do you enjoy figuratively stirring entrails? You've nothing better to do than subject yourself to what you clearly see no need for?
That's just sad. That's a self-abusive personality. No, your character flaws have no effect on me, btw.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I'm sad to see the changes...and I will agree that SlashDot is not what it was. I've been considering frequenting it less. I seldom post, but I do read a lot of articles (and quite often commentary). :)
Course, I'm not what I was 15 years ago either
This was interesting reading. Bittersweet, because there's always doubt over a sale. No matter what anyone says, if you created it, it's yours and you have a moral right to it. In the hands of commerce however, others control it, and use facts/figures to justify actions based on knowledge from the past.
I think it makes sense instead for Slashdot to think of the future. There is always going to be room for a site that covers geek topics, and no one does it like Slashdot. It's a potent mix of technology, culture and politics that has always been at the forefront of changes in the technology field. If anything, it's time for Slashdot's "owners" (the community is the real owner) to re-invest in updating the site, and to stay the course. Don't try to make it into Facebook, because Slashdot and its appeal are fundamentally different.
What's dying is the internet as it has become in successive iterations: post-1996, post-2002, and whatever came after that. AOL wrecked the internet and died, Myspace died, Facebook is failing because the power users are leaving, since the site has become basically a work-day time-waster for cube slaves. The branching of the internet audience into niches is the real story here, not the attempt of a few people (even Wikipedia) to control what everyone is thinking.
If I had one suggestion, it would be to cover more of the underground. People are living outside the grid, even if from within the grid, in more ways and more interesting ways than ever before.