RIP Kuro5hin (kuro5hin.org)

themusicgod1 writes: Can we please get a moment of silence? Long-time sister site to Slashdot, Kuro5hin has finally gone offline.

Comments

Article on "The greatest program ever written"

[lobiusmoop]

Kuro5hin article from 2001 on 1K Chess for the ZX81 (mirror of text)

I remember that site

[MAXOMENOS]

I remember it was hot in 2001. I remember visiting again in 2004 and it was desolate. I'm surprised it lasted this long.

You know what site I really miss? Segfault.org. That was seriously funny stuff, and ahead of its time. Too bad the hard drive on which it ran crashed and left an unrecoverable mess.

Re: never heard of it

[fustakrakich]

Browse through the archives. There's 17 years worth. Very interesting stuff that reveals how little anything has changed.. In fact old fires are rekindled... Here's hoping they remain intact, and accessible for many more years, and that they are backed up! Being a text forum, without that silly unicode nonsense, It shouldn't occupy that much space

Re: never heard of it

[B'Trey]

Not sure when I started following Slashdot but it was back when your had a numerical karma score and it was a game to try to get it as high as possible. My Ars Technica account was created April of '99, so Slashdot would have been around the same time. I was quite familiar with Kuro5hin (pronounced like "Corrosion," for those not familiar with it, a sort of play on the name of Rusty, who was to Kuro5hin what Cmdr Taco was to /.) but it had a much wider focus than /., and I always felt it was a bit stuffier than here. It hasn't been relevant for a long time but it does make me feel old to know it's been taken off life support.

Re: never heard of it

[mysidia]

In some ways, it was better than Slashdot and had features that Slashdot still doesn't have.

Yeah, but for some reason a few years back the activity level seemed to have suddenly dropped to nearly zero as far as new articles were concerned (Not counting the Diaries section).

I think it was a great website that suddenly stopped producing content, for some reason?

I guess I had forgotten they existed years ago...... I'm not sure exactly at what point I stopped visiting K5 and come back to Slashdot, but I guess the writing has been on the wall for K5 for a long time

It's just a real shame to see such a disappointing final outcome of permanent death, rather than a rennaissance.....

RIP Kuro5hin *and* my world-famous chili recipe

[Mr Foobar]

Well damn, that's a real shame. When that site was up 'n running, it was such a great site. Yea, a lot of trolling on the front end, but behind that, there were some great technical posters that kept me coming back. Sadly, that death of that site means my world-famous chili recipe may also be gone. There was a call for chili recipes, I posted mine. Meat steamed in beer, no beans, and let the chili stew (ie ferment) overnight. Gawd-dam! was it good.

It was especially good, as I made it all completely up. Loosely based on my mom's recipe, but mostly a total fake-er-roo. Yet people made it, a lot of them. And they all loved it. Yep, I trolled K5 with a bogus chili recipe.

Then Rusty kept doing shit that made it no so much fun to visit as often. Then kept doing more of that shit that made it even less fun to visit. So I quit visiting. Other favorite sites have also disappeared: fuckedcompany.com and stilenetwork.com among them. At least http://everything2.com/ is still going, kind of.

In a lot of ways it was very annoying

[jd]

Anyone could post anything, it was Rational Anarchism in the mould of Heinlein's philosophies, and I found most of the content ended up being drivel as a consequence. Still, diaries were a lot more successful than the Slashdot journals ever were, so it had something going for it.

The source, Scoop, was maintained for a long time and that probably contributed to its demise. However, there were some interesting ideas in the code and I hope someone uploads a copy somewhere. I far prefer the cleaner interface to the one Slashdot uses, heavy interfaces aren't portable and the decreasing support for web standards by the major browsers isn't helping. A major reversion to lighter footprint pages will be necessary at some point.

Going back to the philosophy of Rational Anarchism, K5's failure to survive shows that said philosophy has limits. It has been out-competed. Slashdot is closer to the Benign Dictator philosophy that has served Open Source so well. Slashdot suffered heavily from an excessive of business involvement and loss of focus, but has partially recovered. As long as Slashdot works hard to rebuild the number of active users (even passive users), the trolls will fade to black and Slashdot will survive into the future.

Slashdot, at one point, had a couple of thousand active users and over a hundred thousand passive readers - figures that national newspapers would struggle to compete with. It's a total comparable to the best The Guardian ever managed. That proves the impact these sorts of sites can have. The heaviest threads here have had more warranted +5 content than a BBC Horizon documentary, Question Time and "I'm Sorry, I haven't a clue" combined.

But precisely because these sorts of site have such a large potential market, they should not go extinct. Rusty gave up, for whatever reason, and the lack of maintenance is likely a major factor. Slashdot isn't exactly thriving, but it is surviving.

The two attempts by Bruce Perens to run a Technocrat website shows that maintenance alone is also not a factor. A site has to have good quality content, adequate security, adequate bandwidth and a feel of involvement. There were some... problems with some of the stories posted, almost certainly not intended, but the underlying Zope had problems and the Technocrat software wasn't brilliant at checking input for errors.

But, yes, this is a sad day.

Talking of sites that are dead, I would dearly love to revive Freshmeat/Freecode. I have no objection to writing my own software, I know that the maintainers were concerned about the underlying software entering circulation and I want to reassure the current owners that if they were willing to let me take over, I would be willing to write my own versions of anything considered proprietary.

I think the site was shut down in error, but I would not ask others to invest time and effort simply because I think something. I expect to be expected to show that I'm right, on my own dime, on my own time. And, should I do so, if whoever currently owns it wants it back then I'd respect that wish. That's the whole point of this "community" thing, in my opinion. Nobody else has to believe that, how can you possibly lose by me believing it?

The same would be true for Kuro5hin. If Rusty wants to let me have a go at getting Scoop up to scratch and running Kuro5hin, on the understanding that if they want it back if I succeed then I'd not be predatory about it. I'd rather have the community functioning and to hell with who runs it.

Re: never heard of it

[Threni]

It was like Slashdot; a mixture of interesting stuff and total shit. In the end the balance shifted too far in the wrong direction. But I'll always remember it as the place I first heard about the 9/11 attacks.