Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's 20th Anniversary: History of Slashdot
Slashdot turned 20 this month, which is ancient in internet years. How far have we come?
Also, we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups around the world to celebrate. Read on for the full 20-year history of Slashdot.
Site Development
Slashdot started in 1997 as Chips and Dips by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. He posted links to news articles that interested him, mostly on open-source software and tech news. Between working as an ad programmer and going to college, he ran it off of a single server. In October of 1997, he registered it (with financial backing from Jeff "Hemos" Bates) as Slashdot.org.
It exploded in 1998. After adding new servers, Slashdot added Web forms for story submissions, as opposed to sending them directly to Malda's email. In March of that year, Malda rewrote the old website, introducing the "New Slashdot" on the 28th.
Slashdot introduced user accounts in the summer of 1998. "Ask Slashdot" debuted on May 13 of that year, with a question on potential ways to convince hardware manufacturers to be more compatible with Linux.
In 1999, moderation broadened from 25 editors to a rotating pool of more than 400 users. It was followed by metamoderation in September, which let the older user accounts on the site rate moderations as fair or unfair.
Slashdot introduced subscriptions in March of 2002. For every 1,000 pages, $5 bought users a no-ad experience. In 2003, subscribers were allowed to view articles 10-20 minutes before they were published.
For April Fool's Day 2006, Malda announced that Slashdot didn't have enough female readers. Accompanying this announcement was a hot pink layout that replaced the familiar "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" with "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" It lasted for only a day, but the comments ranged from "This. Is. Sooo awesome! You guys are totally invited to my sleepover" to "April Fools. Haha. Now PUT IT BACK. My eyes are bleeding already." For another April Fool's Day in 2009, Slashdot introduced User Achievements. There were a few joke ones, but the feature does actually exist.
In June of 2006, Alex Bendiken won the Slashdot CSS Redesign Contest, prompting Slashdot's first permanent layout change since 1998. The second site redesign happened in January of 2011.
On August 25, 2011, Malda dropped a bomb on the community by announcing his resignation from Slashdot. He had posted more than 15,000 stories to Slashdot in his 14-year tenure. "For me," he wrote in his final post, "Slashdot of today is fused to the Slashdot of the past. This makes it really hard to objectively consider the future of the site." He did not list any plans for the future, but in March of 2012, he found a new home as Chief Strategist and Editor-at-Large for WaPo Labs at the Washington Post.
Slashdot launched Slashdot TV on March 28, 2012. In 2016, Slashdot TV was shut down by popular demand.
Corporate
To support its growing readership (and time-consuming nature), Slashdot went into business. In 1998, the editors formed Blockstackers to become the "corporate shell" for Slashdot, said Malda. The site began selling advertisements. The first few, with Herman Miller and Penguin Mints, were barter ads that resulted in furniture and caffeinated mints for the, according to Slashdot editor Rob "samzenpus" Rozeboom.
On June 29, 1999, Slashdot was sold to Andover.net, with the stipulation that creative control remained with the Slashdot editors. Malda reported it was the best way they could think of to support operating costs. And Andover.net was happy to let them keep on doing what they were doing.
Andover.net embarked on a path riddled with name changes. In February of 2000, it merged with VA Linux. Slashdot became a part of their subgroup, Open Source Development Network (OSDN), said Timothy "timothy" Lord. VA Linux became VA Software in December 2001. In 2004, OSDN renamed itself the Open Source Technology Group (OSTG), which changed in 2007 to SourceForge, Inc. The organization changed names yet again in 2009 adopting the brand Geeknet Inc.
In January of 2016, Slashdot was acquired by BIZX, and new editors included msmash, BeauHD, and EditorDavid, along with whipslash overseeing operations.
Slashdot and the News
Slashdot is well-known for its users. They might not be the first to break the news, but they are the first to go at it--fact checking, discussing, and debating. Sometimes, though, they make the news.
On October 4, 1999, Johan Ingles, the deputy editor of Jane's Intelligence Review, reached out to Slashdot concerning an article on cyber terrorism he had received. He wanted readers to go over the piece and answer some questions. After compiling the comments, Ingles decided he could not run the original article. Instead, he wrote a new one based on interviews with the Slashdot community.
In early March of 2001, an anonymous user posted a comment that contained the whole text of OT III, which was copyright material of the Church of Scientology. The church contacted the editors, threatening legal action if the content was not removed. Slashdot conceded, at the advice of their lawyers, but posted links to the copyrighted material that was located in other places on the web.
Milestones
The oldest article in Slashdot's archives, "Become 007 on The Internet" from 1997, is not its first one. Rob Rozeboom estimated about 1,000 earlier articles were lost in a database migration.
In April 2001, Slashdot Japan launched, publishing its first article on the 5th of that month.
Slashdot's 10,000th article was published on February 24, 2000 and the 100,000th story was published on December 11, 2009.
On November 3, 2004, Slashdot published the article "Kerry Concedes Election to Bush." The piece generated more than 5,600 comments, making it the most discussed submission in Slashdot history. That August, Slashdot's most visited submission, "ISP Owner Who Fought FBI Spying Freed From Gag Order" was posted, which has generated more than 1.2 million hits.
2008 saw a new president elected in the United States, and "Barack Obama Wins US Presidency" became the third most discussed story in Slashdot history. In the last 12 months, the election of Donald Trump gave rise to the most discussed story of the past year. Google firing James Damore was also one of the most discussed and visited stories of 2017.
Featured Interviews
In July 1999, a flipside of "Ask Slashdot" was introduced where users could pose questions for a guest, and the highest-rated questions were answered. Bruce Perens, a big name in the Linux/Open Source Movement, was their first interview.
Slashdot Interviews are conducted regularly. Some star interviewees include: Bruce Sterling, the sci-fi author who helped shape the cyberpunk genre, William Shatner, Neil Gaiman, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and author Neal Stephenson.
Onward!
So where does Slashdot go from 20? Well in a world where the internet is always changing, Slashdot stands almost alone in that it boasts a site and community that have remained quite consistent over two decades. Slashdot is News for Nerds,
Stuff that Matters because of the people who have contributed their knowledge, humor, opinions, expertise, and experiences day in and day out in discussions spanning so many different topics including science, open source software, hardware, politics, hate of Beta, and so many more over the past two decades. Thank you all.
CmdrTaco, for posting No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
#DeleteFacebook
Damn I'm old.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
Slashdot has been almost run into the ground, with a large number of the stories having little to do with technology, and instead raising divisive political and social issues.
And the user interface is stuck somewhere in the previous decade.
that greased up yoda dolls and Natalie Portman's hot grits has been on topic. Thank you, 20th year anniversary!
Also, great googly moogly I'm old.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It *was* lame. They had to release better versions later because it was so lame.
Not sure he was actually wrong though... In many ways the iPod did suck much worse than the competition, it just had better marketing. And yes, I bought one, complete with Firewire connectivity and really crap LCD.
I think the iPod took everyone by surprise. Apple computers were at least quite functional, but the iPod was a fashion accessory and sold as such, with the iconic white earbuds. Being nerds most of us probably weren't used to that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Ya'll need to start taking the foreign shitposting on this site seriously. Even reddit is getting investigated for the volumes of Russian propaganda pouring unfettered through their community. Every vaguely political thread on Slashdot is now a hotbed of whataboutism and "muh Hillary Clinton!" conspiracies .... in late 2017. Worse, they're clearly using maybe a Discord or an off-site platform to coordinate because the most ridiculous Alex Jones bullshit is getting deluged to +5 Insightful immediately. By the time "real" users get it down to troll and defuse it as bullshit, the damage is done: the casual reader has already ingested that the community's opinion lies with Kremlin/RT talking points.
Get your goddamned act together. It's embarrassing how easily tech companies and techies fall for this shit.
In before the battle of the ultra-low UIDs.
Beware of the Leopard.
Yet truer words were never spoken.
But Apple was then and still is about fashion, not technical merit.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I've been here at least 18 years.
I have changed so much over that period of time that I feel nostalgic when I look back at some those old discussions.
I remember non-ironic mentions of Beowulf clusters.
I remember the kinship I felt during the Hellmouth discussions.
I remember being thrilled when I learned that I could filter out Katz's posts.
I've been here for a long time and I plan to be here for a long time to come.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Ahhh... I missed the first 3 years of Slashdot's existence. By the time I first started logging on Slashdot was already a toddler and using a big-boy toilet.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Remember when the site went down because the database had an integer overflow on the comment index number?
Or when they first introduced the [domain.tld] after links to protect users for goats.cx bombs?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Happy Birthday Slashdot: I've been following you for most (all?) of those twenty years. Even with your ups and downs you still hold a dear place in my heart...
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
Having a reasonable way to navigate the music library didn't hurt, either. *Snark*
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
My 15 year anniversary /. t-shirt has a hole growing under the left arm. Will there be a replacement?
I don't buy this at all. The best thing about Slashdot in its early years was the rather specific focus it had on actual technology, computing, science and math topics.
It was easy to come here and spend hours discussing open source software, Linux, math, compilers, programming, programming languages, and science with others who shared those interests.
These days most of the topics are totally political, but they just happen to involve technology in some way, since pretty much everything these days involves technology.
For example, we've been subjected to a "Russia narrative" story about Kaspersky almost every day this month, and sometimes more than once a day, like on Oct. 16 or Oct. 11. While technology is involved, the real focus of those submissions is political in nature.
It's hard to have relevant discussions when the topics here are limited to politics, politics, and more politics. Politics always results in shitty discussion!
We also should ignore how the restrictive posting limits and the awful moderation also prevent high-quality discussion from happening here.
The posting limits are really bad. It means we can post maybe once or twice before long delays are introduced. That prevents anything resembling a real conversation from happening. It's not possible to have a back-and-forth discussion here lasting more than three or four comments in total. So what do we get? People using their one or two comments per hour to post their opinion and then leave, without any followup.
The awful moderation also makes it harder to see good comments. I have to always browse this site at -1 these days, because so much good content ends up at 0 or -1 for no reason at all. It totally defeats the purpose of the moderation system when we have to browse at -1 constantly!
It also doesn't help that we have to log in now to submit stories. That's idiotic. We should be able to submit stories without logging in.
To save Slashdot, this is what's needed:
1) Get rid of the posting limits. Keep the captchas, but let us post more than a few comments per hour.
2) Get rid of the moderation system. Just show all comments. We have to browse at -1 anyway these days, so it's like we've already disabled the moderation system.
3) Get rid of the political stories or the tech stories from mainstream news outlets. Go back to reporting on the more obscure stories that aren't found elsewhere, like those concerning open source software, programming languages, and so forth.
4) Allow stories to be submitted without having to log in.
I hear carnival music in my head when I read your posts.
Let's all celebrate by visiting our favorite site while pouring hot grits down our pants. Then we can look at Natalie Portman naked and petrified.
This is the first story for a while that I didn't read on Reddit first
It was a real chore for me, because everything had to be tagged. I was just organizing by directory structure and file name at that point.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Slashdot died and was bought up some years ago, never made it to 20
of your first webpage that was served on the first day slashdot went online??? i checked archive.org, they have one from 1998 but it was slow and timed out before my browser could load it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Dude, Slashdot was severely disrupted just a few weeks ago, for around a couple of days. SourceForge was also affected. The lack of transparency was terrible. All we got were some useless tweets about the disruptions, long after they had started. The editors couldn't even bother to add a submission or even a small notice on the front page mentioning that there were problems going on! All we got was a busted site.
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: /. is dying. Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered /. community when recently IDC confirmed that /. accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web traffic. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that /. has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. /. is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
Not sure what it is, I like the roots when it really was news for nerds, a little less on the social side of things. Or has just everyone gone to Reddit?
... but I rarely take the time to log-in.
happy birthday /. !
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
I would like to have a "party" in my hometown Örebro in Sweden, well actually I would just like to write
"I be in [some bar that also serves food] from 18:00, if you like slashdot please join up, you find me (hopefully us) by the penguin on the table"
Just an open invitation to meet random people with the same interest.
What if AC shows up? All of them? Good grief, the venues would experience the Slashdot effect in real life.
Moderators, gird your loins for that one!
I like the way the site was in the old days "News for Nerds", kind of sad to see the site seemingly wither over the last 5 or so years, but maybe everyone has migrated to Reddit, or just found other sources.
Slashdot was *way* in the news on 12/25/1999 when we saved Hotmail.
https://slashdot.org/story/99/...
And how about when we spammed millionaire spammer Alan Ralsky in real life?
https://slashdot.org/story/02/...
That was surely one of the most beautiful moments here.
Do you have ESP?
And that article about the iPod has over 1000 comments and doesn't even mention Trump or climate change hysteria.
Ah, the good old days before Slashdot turned into a clickbait farm.
goatse.cx
-- Cheers!
I vividly remember the Columbine shootings and the thread here on /. about it that went on and on. People posted in it how horribly they were treated at school because they were smarter than average and didn't care for fashion and being cool. I was pretty shocked by that. I never had problems like that.
-- Cheers!
w00t
What Slashdot looked like from 1998 to 2014
https://i.imgur.com/efMLCxJ.gif
I usually ignore AC posts, but here goes.
First off, Coward certainly fits. If you have such a high opinion of your opinions, log in or STFU.
When it comes to your points:
1) Higher limits, sure. No limits, no way in hell. Too much short, fast back-and-forth means no thought goes into the conversation. Wait 10 minutes between posts, max in a thread at 10 or so.
2) I use the mod system all the time. Some topics I skim, some I read deeply. -1 comments are (almost) all worthless. The only down-mods I give when I have points are for lewd insults and the stupid attacks on users like cremier (however it's spelled). Whether or not I like a given user, personal attacks are NOT something I want to see here, and the mod system helps get rid of them
3) Only point I can agree with.
4) Lazy coward. Login required keeps out a lot of bullshit. You want higher quality stories, then take away a major defense against bad submissions. Lazy thinking as well as lazy action. You don't like /. so much, go away.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Happy 10100-th birthday, /.! I'm glad to have been a part of almost all of it. I was here before you could log in. It's been great, and although /. has changed, I don't think it's better or worse than before. I hope to be here frequently for many years to come. Keep up the good work!
Cheers, tsa (I was here before the TSA!)
-- Cheers!
Wow, 20yrs ago I was in college, just switching over to Comp Sci and didn't join Slashdot until years later. It's always informative and hilarious here. Keep it up!
All I want is a single button that is labelled 'View All Comments'. When I click it, it causes all of the comments, including those at -1, to be loaded and displayed in one shot. I hate having to dick around with the awful sliders or popups, and then click the 'Load Comments' button just to see the comments I want to see! Get rid of those damn sliders, please!
I've been here since 1998, checking the site more or less regularly and more recently again daily when I'm at work for the last year or so.
While I sort of miss the early FOSS and Linux centered days of just a few thousand users and mostly sane discussion threads, things change and we have to accept that I guess.
Thanks for keeping /. alive, I'm looking forward to what the next 20 years (hopefully early retirement for me ;-) will bring.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
'spaceman123', or whatever your username is, is just as anonymous to me as 'Anonymous Coward' is. For all I know you could be posting using multiple accounts, or multiple people use this 'spaceman123' account.
And since you're so gung-ho about identity, you need to provide us with your full legal name, your home address, any government-issued ID numbers (passport, driver's license, tax numbers, etc), and all other similar information. We're waiting. Oh, what's that? You're too much of a coward to provide your identity to us, despite claiming identity is important here?
Here's an example of an excellent comment I saw today that was at -1 for no good reason. It's relevant and it's informative, yet it's at -1. Sometimes I think it's the editors or some automated process that's wrongly modding down these perfectly good comments, because I see enough good comments go directly to -1, with no Troll/Flamebait/whatever specifier. They also end up like that rather quickly, even when a submission already has a number of comments. It's even stupider when I read the comments a day later, and these formerly -1 comments have been modded up to +5! If the editors or some automated job is doing this awful modding, they/it should really stop. It hurts the discussion here when excellent comments are downmodded for no good reason.
Well, still no proper unicode support. Maybe in another 20 years?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I haven't confirmed this yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person on the planet who did not find the original iPod wheel to be intuitive or useful.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Being this is slashdot....I'm too lazy to click the link and go read it myself.
You should have quoted it if you wanted to make a point.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I did.
My first thought on receiving my Abitur diploma was "thank god I won't ever have to see these arseholes again". Last month was the first time in almost 20 years I wasn't able to evade one of them, the fucker recognized me when I was visiting my parents.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It's called reputation, dumbass. If someone likes my comments they can friend & follow me, if not, YOU can filter me out by username. You're probably too lazy to bother making an account at all, so you wouldn't know these simple things. The age of my account also makes it much more likely that I'm not using a "throw away" account.
That and not even bothering to get my username right is more proof that you really are too lazy to think before you post.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Geez, I'm bitchier than usual today. I'm gonna pay attention to my own sig and ignore this troll.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Without a doubt. Wow, how time has flown. Thank you Slashdot, you have some great stuff most of the time.
TLDR for the linked comment: I dumped Linux and went with macOS. It's a blatant troll post, since no one is doing that given how badly Apple has stagnated.
You're being given another chance.
Since you're so gung-ho about identity, you need to provide us with your full legal name, your home address, any government-issued ID numbers (passport, driver's license, tax numbers, etc), and all other similar information. We're waiting. Oh, what's that? You're too much of a coward to provide your identity to us, despite claiming identity is important here?
The thing about the Hellmouth discussion that drew me into it was the backlash against non-popular kids.
All of a sudden, if they wore all black or a trench coat, schools were treating them like the next mass shooter. Kids were being forced into counseling because of their fashion sense or choice in music.
School authorities had ignored the problem of bullying for decades and when the dam broke, the scrutiny was primarily on the victims and not the perpetrators.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This was a great disturbance. Slashdot acting as if we were beneath any understanding of what was going on. If Slashdot needed some help, there were many who would have kept this old moldy corpse of a Text-based Techy Forum alive.
Instead, Social Media wipeouts like BeauHD and Third-World incomprehensibles like manishs/msmash just blather away, without a single glimmer of what actually being an Editor really means. They are utterly clueless.
It is quite probable that the current Slashdot Staff is by current standards, technologically illiterate. Certainly, their common English literacy can be called into question. Can we have a meme? "msmash mangles yet again!"
There was a time before Slashdot. There was a time even before Linux, which pretty much launched Slashdot. It was the time of Us vs. Them. We were Berkeley, with our BSD, and they were AT&T, with their rubbish Sys V.
Hippies vs. the Suits.
And then some silly Finn thought: "Screw all of you, I'm simply going to reverse engineer what it took you three decades to come up with, and I shall call it "Linux". Oh, it has to have my name in it, somehow."
Linux was our Darling, utterly free of Parental obligations. Too bad it is still a petulant Child. We have since moved on.
The origins of Slashdot, something that even Google sought to bury, is in the old "comp.sys..." hierarchy of USENET.
Too bad that all of those wonderful discussions, of the principles of Operating Systems, are now lost in time, like tears in the rain.
I read for the insightful comments, not who wrote them and rarely look at the author.
So much of my life has been wasted online.
Ah, at the time iPod owners were respected, they were "Apple Fanatics", now they're just fanbois.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
https://slashdot.org/~zephc "5 GB still is more than my whole mp3 collection"
I used the original Nomad and still have the Zen in working condition. Its way of navigating the music library with the jog dial is perfectly fine.
Now that you mention it, I was a Mac guy back then. My primary computer was a Performa 6400/200 and my secondary was a Pentium 200/MMX for gaming.
My exodus came shortly thereafter.
Ahh... memories.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
because everything had to be tagged
No it had not.
I(t?) was just organizing by directory structure and file name at that point.
Exactly! And how else would you organize albums?
Looking at your previous post: everyone I know who bought an iPod loved it ... fastest most intuitive interface ever.
I don't know anyone wo ever tagged anything in his iTunes library, why would you when everything is already perfectly laouted?
Sure ... Prince is and TAFKAP (or how he actually called himself) are not in the same directory ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
#5 Don't let AC's comment :)
I once linked goatse in a context where it should've been clear it's goatse (it was a related discussion about shock sites or something), but without explicitly mentioning it by name. Somebody tracked me down on ICQ and asked me "why would you do that???" Still warms my heart to this day.
I browse at 2 or 3 .... ... I actually can not remember when I saw a -1 post that was worth reading.
I metamod
And ... your name seems to ring a bell, I guess I have read about 10,000 -1 posts of you.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
See subject: You ought to get that checked out you know - when it comes to you unidentifiable trolls I hear a circus calliope & picture you as "pennywise the clown" saying "want some candy, little girl?"
* RoTfLmAo...
APK
P.S.=> Of course, you ARE the fool who downmodded my post (it's what you "registered 'lusers'" do + immediately 'troll' me by ANONYMOUS posts (do you think you FOOL anyone but yourselves? Guess again), & it's about all you CAN do since I'm just going to repost what I did yet again, running you DRY of your effete useless 'downmod' points)... apk
My site turned 20 earlier this year, and when I saw the earlier anniversary story it took me a moment to realize hey, my site is older! Slashdot is a little better known than mine, though. :-) (And this is just the domain names -- "chips & dips" was a thing before I had my site, so they win there.)
$ whois pixelcity.com | grep Creation
Creation Date: 1997-07-27T04:00:00Z
So anyway, Slashdot -- rich-text editor coming any time soon? Support for curly quotes in pasted text? No rush, just curious. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'm not the same AC. I think you are being a little immature. The value of a comment depends on it's content. If the content depends on the reputation of the person to be credible, then yes, it matters who posted it. Most of the time, that's not the case, and there isn't a meaningful distinction in the implicit value of logged-in versus anonymous posts. You are welcome to your opinion, but I think it's short-sighted.
My biggest problem with Slashdot is the type of stories that it posts. The editors decide which stories they consider interesting, and those are the stories that get posted. There were plenty of stories about social issues 10 or 15 years ago, but Slashdot didn't post them nearly as much. There have always been political stories, but Slashdot rarely posted them. You'll also find lots of other sites that post those types of stories, so there really isn't all that much special about Slashdot now.
The stories define the type of audience that reads and posts on the site. The editors define this by choosing the stories of interest to them, and that they think will be of interest to the readers. Malda's Slashdot posted a lot more stories that were of interest to programmers and people who used open source software. Many of the topics were also relevant to people working in IT. Those types of stories are much less frequent now. Stories about social issues and politics attract a different audience than stories about open source software. I'd be much more interested in the types of stories Malda's Slashdot used to post rather than what gets posted now. Stories about open source software interest me because I can download the software, try it out, and tinker with it. Political and social issue stories aren't as interesting because it simply doesn't affect me in the same way. There's nothing for me to download, try out, and be creative with. It's just less interesting to me.
An audience that's there to discuss politics and social issues tends to particularly frown upon views they disagree with. They're particularly likely to view comments they disagree with as being posted in bad faith rather than recognizing them as possibly insightful or interesting. This is probably why moderation isn't doing a good job of promoting good comments. With those types of stories and the audience here, moderation effectively becomes an agree/disagree button because people view comments they disagree with as being harmful. Moderation is far from perfect, but it worked pretty well in the past. I suspect that was a result of the types of stories posted and the audience they attracted. The stories posted on Malda's Slashdot just weren't as divisive as the stories that are posted now.
Stories are archived back to 1998 and comments are archived back into 1999. If you go back and look at them, you will see a significant difference compared to what gets posted now. The audience Slashdot attracts now isn't as interested in those types of stories because Slashdot has been posting political and social issue stories for so long. Purely tech stories just don't attract as much traffic, and I suspect that moving away from the political and social issue stories would result in a temporary decrease in traffic. Longer term, it might well work out to Slashdot's benefit, but I suspect the management might either hadn't considered that or they're unwilling to take the risk.
Regardless, Slashdot just isn't all that interesting to me now. I still come here because I have fond memories with what the site was 15-20 years ago.
See subject: & the /. world would NEVER ever be the same, again!" - me having radically improved it just by being here!
* Consider yourselves FORTUNATE to have been blessed w/ the likes of "yours truly" gracing you w/ my presence!
APK
P.S.=> Per tradition? Let TROLLING of my post begin (you KNOW you're going to) - UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous cowards will no doubt be the bulk of those trolling me of course & UNJUSTIFIABLY DOWNMODDING MY POSTS via their many sockpuppet alternate accounts they use, proof's when I posted this last time https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11188221&cid=55396125/ until I RUN THEM DRY of their effete ineffective 'downmodpoints' by reposting as I have now lol!
They do it as I have what some here call 'dossiers' of your numerous defeats vs. me behind your FAKE NAMES for your FAKE LIVES!
However? I expect SOME trolls will maintain having a pair of balls & will troll me by "Registered 'luser'" name FAKE accounts also, hahahaha... apk
Don't be so quick to judge the "attacks" on creimer, you'll find creimer richly deserves being piled on and insulted. I'd like to remind you he also signed up a dozen "Cashew" accounts (very mature), and desperately tried to monetize Slashdot by polluting with his affiliate links. His rambling, irrelevant stories, his off-topic navel-gazing shitposting, etc..
I had a 3rd gen iPod. The only way iTunes could organize music was by tag, it didn't care at all about directory structure. Same with the iPod itself, all the files were just renamed to numbers and thrown in a random directory structure, with metadata copied to a special file.
At first WinAMP could create that file too, but later Apple encrypted it to lock out everything except iTunes. In the end I installed Rockbox.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So.. is there any way to find out your join date? I've looked into this before and as far as I can tell I joined sometime in 1999... but it would be nice to confirm that somehow.
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
Slashdot will turn 20 again next month.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yeah, I remember Slashdot being announced on Chips n' Dips. I had a sub three digit ID that was lost in a database mishap... or am I getting senile and that was somewhere else? I have been a very regular visitor since the start, but never really started taking part until a few years ago, so I have a few lost accounts with much lower IDs.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I have enjoyed visiting this site which I first found around 2000 I think. I have always found it to be a great community with some people posting really interesting stuff in the comments. I remember one thread had an astronaut posting on it and someone worked out he was and outed him (in a good way) and seemed pretty cool at the time. If anyone can find that thread or remembers this incident that would be awesome would like to read it again. Reading this site inspired me to run Mandrake and then Ubuntu Linux as my main OS for quite a few years although like so many others I eventually caved in and just bought a Mac to run Unix at home. I also think the American can-do spirit of so many posters and tech guys inspired me to start my own company www.myhealthscan.co.uk - 10% discount on whole body MR scanning just for mentioning Slashdot.org!
You mean, like getting out Mom's basement are interacting with real people? Wow, that sounds complicated :)
On a serious note, Happy Birthday Slashdot! I've been around like 13 years now, and all I have to say is thank you, fellow slashdotters. Thank you for all these well-spent hours. I've learned a lot from you, and I've tried to give something in return every time I could.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
I'd like to see posts tagged when they've been modded by an editor, since they have unlimited mod points. I'm interested in fair debate among peers where posts are up modded for their own merits, rather than merely conforming to whatever editorial bias there may be. Slashdot as an ideological echo chamber is of no interest to me.
there was a time when it wasn't
Depends on it is content? WTF is that supposed to mean?
I have one of those things, still works too. I hated the jog dial with a passion though. I love its sound quality. Sounded much better to me than my daughters ipod. I took out the 40GB drive that came with it and put in a 120GB. That was when I bumped into the other limit on the damn thing. It would only see about 35K tracks.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
It's interesting that "spaceman375" brings up creimer without any prompting. Perhaps "spaceman375" is another one of what appear to be creimer's many accounts here?
This whole creimer debacle just goes to show how useless it is to sign up here. As creimer and what appear to be his numerous other accounts clearly show, having an account here doesn't somehow make one's contributions better than those from Anonymous Coward users. Some of the worst comments I've ever seen here have had "creimer" or "cdreimer" or one of his many other possible aliases on them. On top of that, we normal users can't even be sure that "spaceman375" isn't creimer!
"spaceman375" says "It's called reputation", but at this point the only assumption I can safely make is that "spaceman375" is in fact creimer, which means that I have to apply creimer's terrible reputation to "spaceman375", as well. As far as I'm concerned, any post labeled as being from "spaceman375" might as well be labeled "creimer".
One of the more significant events in recent Slashdot history was the bungling (and ultimate dismissal) of the failed Beta redesign project. A topic which, understandably, gets little further mention from the /. staff - but I'd love to see something of a postmortem of that project. Seems like it could be a useful parable for our audience.
How many slashes would a slashdot dot, if a slashdot could dot slashes?
I still remember the Slashdot party at 1998 or 1999 LinuxWorld or something in San Jose right after the Redhat IPO and right around the Andover thing. I still have the blue plastic cups!
Oh, That means I've been hitting refresh on this site almost daily for 20 years.... oh gosh...
This is what happens when your news source is bought out by a front for mainstream media and majority of the (fraction of the former readership) is left-leaning.
Seriously, every popular forum on the internet has been hostilely taken over and gutted as a safe space for leftists. Ever notice those "today on slashdot"s that have a thousand replies? No one comes here anymore.
Now there is particular censorship with the submissions and with the moderation system which feels compromised and unfair with gangs of idiots bombing down comments against the agenda.
Or is there some other reason that I have missed for the site losing like 75% of its users? What competing forums are there? Reddit? And why would anyone leave here for there unless the substance has changed in the way that I say? Because they want their forum dumbed down even more?
No, there is a concentrated effort to destroy free discourse, endlessly dividing the usersbases of forums, persecuting viewpoints opposed to the status quo of liberal insanity.
If you're one of the people who fondly remembers CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal, you might want to get your head checked, because near everything you liked about this place has evaporated and you don't seem to have noticed.
Contributors is what really set Slashdot apart in the old days (as any comment site), intelligent and whitty comments (In Soviet Russia, You must be new here) made a culture, and the low barrier to get to talk to Bruce Perens and the likes.
You'd know and learn something when reading comments or at least get a smile.
I guess it was the time when computing wasn't fully commercial combined with lots of adolescents just having fun hobbying and PDP get-off-my-lawn greybeards talking shop in one place.
I really miss those days, despite I know those aren't coming back, but they got me through heavy depression.
Thank you.
The value of a comment depends on it's content.
The value of an apostrophe depends on its placement. It's means it is.
Most of the time, autocorrect is beneficial to my typing. Sometimes it introduces errors that I don't catch while typing out posts. However, your comment and the other reply don't contribute to the substance of the discussion, which is how to improve Slashdot. I'm definitely interested in discussing the types of stories that are posted, the moderation system, and perhaps other issues with the site. However, grammar checking my phone's autocorrect doesn't further the discussion of any of those topics.
Today it would be Goat C.
Thank you for making the internet an interesting place.
It would have been quicker to type "Thanks."
It's because those non-popular trenchcoat-wearing kids went and shot up a school full of children. It is impossible to overstate the cultural effect of Columbine. It was HUGE. Wierd kids went from being strange to being outright deadly. The whole 'thing' was they wanted revenge and weren't going to flush people's heads down the toilet, they were going to murder.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-of-stuff-that-matters
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I found it much better with an amp. Until the 5th generation they used a crappy headphone driver that was okay with the little earbuds it came with but no good for anything larger. Then they switched to a direct push/pull transistor output and it finally had the power to drive decent cans.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Surprised not to see any mention of the term Slashdot effect on the history above.
/.?
Also, what about the list of brazen copycats that got *cough* "inspired" by
Fat fuck troll boy is whiny loser, pics at 11.
Actually I'm surprised to not see this referenced. That one URL and it's historical relevance in how it pushed the evolution of highlighting, link shorteners and the entire arms race around link bating is significant. Slashdot even gets reference in the Wikipedia page on the URL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx
It's at +2 now. The system works?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I think that AC's point is that it never should have been modded down to begin with?
I'm still using my 1st gen 4GB Nano (white). They were recalled years ago because of battery issues, but I always used mine for in-car audio, so the battery never got much use. I drove the same SUV for over 15 years until recently, using an adapter to make the iPod look like a CD changer, but my newer vehicle has USB iPod integration, so I just had to plug it in to the USB plug in the glove compartment.
The downside is that the head end doesn't support non-roman character sets, and I have a lot of song names in Japanese, so they show up as asterisks. It's not just Slashdot that doesn't support Unicode, it's also four-year-old vehicle entertainment systems!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
1) LOG IN ALREADY.
2) I still browse at 0/1, even during the past year or so when the ability to save your filter setting was broken, and I had to reset it Every. Fucking. Time.
3) Well, damn, you did have to say something I would agree with, didn't you?
4) They did that? If it was recent, then good for them, if not, then that would explain the enormous number of accounts created around the 39,000,000 range that kept dumping spam into the firehose. Also, LOG IN ALREADY.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I have a Nissan, a Japanese car, and the head unit doesn't support Japanese. Half the names in my phone's address book come up as squares.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So because one user is such an annoying asshole that his name gets brought up when talking about moderation, that means that logging in at all is useless? Sure, it's good to have the ability to post anonymously, but even in a world with logins, creimer/cdreimer is what 4chan calls a "namefag", because he thinks he's so important that you need to know it's him, and that you need to know what he thinks about everything. (So is Alpha-Papa-Kilo, at least about certain topics, but he actually manages to do it without logging in.)
Until a few months ago I had been clicking the "Post Anonymously" box a lot more, but I like being able to check back every now and then to see what replies I got, and you can't do that with an anonymous post.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I think that Pseudonym's point is that metamoderation is there to correct the down-mods that should never have been done? Initial bad mods are the way Slashdot has been forever, but both metamoderation and second-day moderation correct the problem. On "everybody mods everything" sites like Reddit, there is nothing to counteract the initial groupthink down-mods.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Remember when the suits thought they could leverage Slashdot into a "business intelligence" site, aka SlashBI? Remember how nobody fucking cared, even though they shilled it hard, because it was such a stupid application of the Slashdot brand? Those who read Slashdot didn't care about that shit, and those who would care didn't know what the fuck Slashdot was.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
It was right, and the first generation iPod did not sell well.
Two out of millions committed murder. Thousands who had done nothing other than be victims were targeted.
It might have been possible to prevent it if schools had taken bullying as seriously then as they do now.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It aint what it used to be but I still read it.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
Hello fellow 4-digit user. I got to me taco and the guys at LinuxWorld / Comdex 1999 I think as well. I remember they would all just hang out sitting in bean bag chairs in the middle of the conference on their fancy new sony laptops that the slashdot staff was so in love with at the time.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
I see you're talking about yourself again.
One of the most enduring features of /. is the lack of QA. Like how all the 20th anniversary parties are taking place in 2012:)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
This story prompted me to stop and realise that I've spent more than half my life reading Slashdot. The tech has changed, from early AMDs and Pentium 4s to 8-core mobile phones with data links I could only dream of as a youngster. I've learned more here than I can say, and it's almost all from the comments. This weird little corner of the internet has been a constant rock in the fast paced change if the internet, a tiny piece of consistency and calming green on white colours. Thanks for everything. I mean that. .rockwolf
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
Thanks. I got a bit curious about you. So I... um... stalked.
You and I should really get together some time somewhere quiet here, and yak. But for now, from one of your recent postings:
"'ll donate some slack to them.
Then I'll get back to waiting for the return of Kibo."
Perhaps you might remember some Dude who often teased poor old "Archimedes Plutonium" back when. An absolute Nutter... but the thing is this Nutter actually had a fair grasp of contemporary Nuclear Physics. He got Seaborg and Ghiorso dead right.
I'm some Dude.
By any chance, were you one of the original Sons Of Lucas? (The USENET Brit-Car fanatics.)
Kibo Parry quite behaved himself there.
original Sons Of Lucas?
Nope. No way can I handle anywhere near that much smoke escaping. And at 6 feet tall I'm a bit too big for those things anyhow. The closest I ever got to Brit cars was a (5'3" or so) cow-orker who imported a Mini back in '99, with obligatory union jack painted on its roof.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
My excuse is 2013 Chrysler, maybe they'll hear about Unicode one of these days. Your problem is that the Japanese are sufficiently xenophobic that the idea of a gaijin who can read Japanese scares them shitless.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Strange, they don't seem scared of me.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Wait, recent? I haven't posted there in over a decade, so that won't be me. I've barely even kept usenet up for a few binaries groups.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }