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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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
probably why its dead
Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead!
[A large man appears with a (seemingly) dead Kuro5hin over his shoulder]
Large Man: Here's one.
Dead Collector: Nine pence.
"Dead" Kuro5hin: I'm not dead.
Dead Collector: What?
Large Man: Nothing. [hands the collector his money] There's your nine pence.
"Dead" Kuro5hin: I'm not dead!
Dead Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Large Man: Yes he is.
"Dead" Kuro5hin: I'm not.
Dead Collector: He isn't.
Large Man: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
"Dead" Kuro5hin: I'm getting better.
Large Man: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Dead Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
"Dead" Kuro5hin: I don't want to go on the cart.
Large Man:' Oh, don't be such a baby.
Dead Collector: I can't take him.
"Dead" Kuro5hin: I feel fine.
Large Man with Dead Body: Oh, do me a favor.
Dead Collector: I can't.
Large Man: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
Dead Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
Large Man: Well, when's your next round?
Dead Collector: Thursday.
"Dead" Kuro5hin: I think I'll go for a walk.
Large Man: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
"Dead" Kuro5hin: I feel happy! I feel happy!
[The collecter paces for an idea, then whacks Kuro5hin with his club, solving the problem]
Large Man: Ah, thank you very much.
Dead Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Large Man: Right.
A few of us from the first days are still around but I now only check maybe once a week. Story quality is in the toilet, and the discussions are no longer entertaining or enlightening but instead just hatefests that feel like twitter and youtube comments.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Kuro5hin article from 2001 on 1K Chess for the ZX81 (mirror of text)
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
If that's really intentional on Rusty's part, I would have liked to have some sort of announcement, and some sort of goodbye. Perhaps a post-mortem analysis. And ideally, have it remain online frozen, as an archive, because in the past there have been many very good articles on it, before it went to shit.
Of course, the site has already been effectively dead for what, more than a decade now, I think? It's a real pity, because it used to be a really cool place where interesting, and sometimes important (Wikipedia, OpenNIC, etc) discussions took place.
The place was unique enough that it took me years to find a suitable replacement for it.
Anybody else getting a Les Nessman "WKRP is not on the air" vibe from Slashdot posting a link to a site that's no longer there?
for posting a link to a site that has gone off line.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This was the site where someone debunked the "Windows just copied its TCP/IP stack from the BSDs" and now that source is gone thanks to a robots.txt wiping out the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/*/... .
It is the way of things. *checks his uid* yeah, /. Has changed, kuro5hin changed, it's part of the gig.
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.
Finding God in a Dog
The legend lives on from trolltalk on down
Of the big net they call Intar Webby
The net, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the posts of October turn gloomy.
With a load of whiny diaries - 26,000 tons more
Than the Edmund Kuro5hin weighed empty
That good site and true was a bone to be chewed
When the trolls of October came early
The ship was the pride of the USian side
Coming back from some server in Wisconson
As the big Scoop sites go it was bigger than most
With a crew and the Captain well seasoned.
Concluding some terms with a couple of sponsors
When they left fully loaded for Peaks Island
And later that night when the site's bell rang
Could it be the North Wind they'd been feeling.
The packets in the wires made a tattletale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the Captain did, too,
T'was the witch of October come stealing.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of October came slashdotting
When afternoon came it was rebuilding
In the face of a hurricane db problem
When supper time came the old kook came on deck
Saying fellows it's too rough to bug ya
At 7PM a main web box caved in
He said fellas it's been good to know ya.
The Captain wired in he had crapfloods coming in
And the good site and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went out of sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Kuro5hin.
Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the posts turn the minutes to hours
The searchers all say they'd have made SoS Bay
If they'd fifteen more routers behind her.
They might have split up or they might have crashed
They may have broke deep and took disk corruption
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the posters.
Ars Technica rolls, Slashdot sings
In the ruins of her geek compound mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young geek's dreams,
Usenet and blogs are for sportsmen.
And farther below Everything2
Takes in what Something Awful can send her
And the big iron boxen go as the admins all know
With the gales of October remembered.
In a musty old hall in UKia they prayed
In the Intarweb Admins' Cathedral
The ^G bell chimed, 'til it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Kuro5hin.
The legend lives on from trolltalk on down
Of the big net they call Intar Webby
The net, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the posts of October come early.
Slashdot was on the decline, but I'm actually optimistic about the new owner's chances of succeeding at turning the ship around because of their commitment to listening to the community for the first time in far too long.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I remember registering on it way back, but I never really read it like I did slashdot.
In fact, for the last decade it's really only existed in my mind as an entry in my password manager. Guess I can delete that now.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
My first real Unix jobs, and writing perl late into the night, killing time on Slashdot, and Kuro5hin. It's a shame it faltered, I'd check in every so often to see if it had resurrected itself. Much like perl, it never did.
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.
-> I dislike sigs...
I wasn't a K5 account holder or poster but I read it infrequently and thought that it was likely to give visitors a more mature discussion than what one would find elsewhere (Twitter, Slashdot, Digg, and so many other current and former discussion websites). Sort of like when Slashdot was new and not yet populated by shills and people who reflexively accept whatever the corporate-run tech press says is worthwhile. I didn't get the impression that K5 gave as much heed to the "firehose" headline publishing approach Slashdot brags about (which I think is a big part of the reason people are discouraged from thinking critically and seriously about corporate repeater sites like Slashdot's narrow scope of allowable debate): if there's not enough time to digest something before being cut off from an audience (whether through the site shutting off comments or visitors being steered toward newer stories), there's only enough time to echo familiar tropes. This is much like what Noam Chomsky identified in "Manufacturing Consent" regarding the tyranny of concision.
Digital Citizen
True. Some of the best fiction I've read was first published on that site.
There was another one about the corpse of an angel, found floating in space, hooked up to play a perfect allegorical game of Go to solve political and economic puzzles for its masters.
Very few things stick with me for this long, but K5's fiction did.
Last post!
And I just found it on Google cache. Glad I could grab it before it disappears forever:
http://webcache.googleusercont...
Last post!
I did not come here to praise Kuro5hin but to bury it.
Rusty Foster was an absentee landlord who neglected it while he worked for Newsweek writing Today in Tabs until he got fired. Everyone remembers the CMF that never existed but Rusty raised a lot of money with it to promise to fix Scoop and improve Kuro5hin, but the money went to fix his house and buy a yacht instead.
Rusty helped Howard Dean's campaign use Scoop to connect with voters, but the Dean Scream ruined that. That was before social networks too off and people use Wordpress now instead of Scoop.
Just about everyone who made Kuro5hin great had left, Rusty put up a $5 paywall for new accounts, when that failed to stop trolls, Rusty deleted the login form and new user page. After that didn't work Rusty moved his DNS to Ghandi in France and the site was down for a few days until this new landing page was used.
Rusty's Twitter page: http://www.twitter.com/rustyk5 but he made it private so only his followers can see it.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wrote a k5 screen scraper, and have 95% of k5 diaries, unfortunately I don't have any stories.
Date range for my archive is: 2001-1-4 to 2015-7-22
For a total of 161,942 diaries.
Here is a summary of what I have in my archive.
Here are some tables showing which kurons had the highest number of posts over the lifetime of k5.