Slashdot Mirror
20 Years of Stuff That Matters
Read on for a trip down memory lane.
Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.
The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.
While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.
Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.
As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.
Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.
One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.
It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?
On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.
The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.
We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.
... or was forced out...
9/11. At the time, my habit was to login and go to sites like cnn.com for the morning's news. None of the normal news sites would come up. That is odd I thought. Continued onto /., where I first saw the post about it. I immediately went and turned on the TV. Crazy stuff.
Indeed, unfortunately only rarely news for nerds.
20th post!
I enjoy coming here.
Even if it has gotten worse (and that varies), Slashdot still has the best comment layout and system out of any news site I read
Who could ever forget The Glorious Meept!!?
In all seriousness:
But I must have been one of the first posters!
Where are mentions of OMG Ponies! and the Parrot runtime?
My one and only accepted story submission turned out to be the launch article for apple.slashdot.org
My little piece of Slashdot history .... otherwise, my comments have been consistently useless for 20 years now.
Only users with 4 digit IDs should be allowed to post in this thread.
I've wasted many hours here. The news coverage has changed over the years, not always for the better, but I still keep coming back.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
February 14, 2002 - The day that CmdrTaco's life changed forever: https://slashdot.org/story/02/...
This week also marks the 20th anniversary of Jakob Neilsen's article, How Users Read on the Web. (published Oct. 1, 1997)
Maybe the Slashdot editors should have a look at this article, given the tome that was included in today's post.
I didn't remember that it was 20 years. I would actually have guessed 21 years ago. All I know is I was sitting in my college dorm and a friend from across the hall mentioned that a site we had been reading had just gone live with user accounts and I should jump on it to get a low account ID. He had already signed up and has a 3 digit account. I didn't care enough at the time, so I waited an hour or two. By that time I got a high four digit ID since so many people had already signed up. That was the speed of how important these things were to people 20 years ago. There were two tech sites that I read all day every day at that point, because new articles were posted sporadically, and you wanted your FIRST PSOT! /. was by far the most relevant site to me at the time, but I also read Tweak3d. Stories on /. in the first few years were very entertaining. Most didn't get a ton of comments, and then you'd come across a story that was overwhelmed with comments and you'd go through and read every one, often posting a response or three in some of the more active threads - even if you were posting anonymously in order to not lose your editor points or whatever they called them back then. And then you'd come across the duplicate posts, probably by some editor who was drunk at the time and didn't remember the story having already been posted. Comments on those were brutal. A few years after that there was a new staff member (I don't recall the name) that had more blog style articles that weren't strictly in the same vein as the normal /. articles, and people hated him with a passion! He was more of a professional journalist than a techie that was writing news for their friends like the other editors. The point is that there was real atmosphere. There was a real sense of belonging to a site that mattered and was interesting and creative at the same time.
But things changed over the years. It was around 2010 or 2011 that the changes really took effect. The stories got less relevant, comments got less interesting, etc. Personally I still enjoy /. and read it every day, but I've probably only posted a dozen comments in the past 10 years, and it's rare that I even bother to look at the first few comments.
The mojo is gone. The excitement that used to surround each story, and the way the people commented (yes, even including a couple of the original trolls that would FILL the comment section with repeated random garbage) is just different. It's likely because the founders are gone, and /. has gone through multiple corporate overlords since those first few years. Stories are more boilerplate and more like the stories on other websites now.
There are likely still tens of thousands of lurkers like me from the early days that still read /. almost daily. Bring back the mojo and they'll start participating again.
Many articles are just reposts from arstechnica, engadget, current political news, and trending social media stories...in the next 2-4 years, that slashdot will be no more.
Its current state is far better than what would happen if it was bought out by Fusion/Kinja.
Though the threshold setting (now "abbreviated") setting isn't useful anymore, the breakthrough (now "full") setting is still useful. I have my account set to threshold -1 and breakthrough 1. That way, most of the comments show up in "nested" style when I open a story.
My vote: keep the moderation system, but expand it to a high score of 100, and a low score of -100. Let users set the default value penalty/bonus they want to apply to ACs, and what bonus/penalty they want to apply to UIDs with 6 digits or less (which should help weed out all the astroturfers).
Also, it would be nice to make EVERYONE a meta-moderator: allow users to see all the moderation on a comment, and if they notice a pattern (such as liberal or conservative shills downvoting things they don't like), allow users to decide to ignore moderation from specific users.
That should allow trolls to be downvoted to oblivion, while helping to nullify the effects of censorship from right/left wing idiots downvoting things they don't agree with.
-- Sent from a computer.
It's been a roller coaster ride for sure. Although the growing anti-science in the latter half of the site's existence has made it difficult for the original highly technical population to continue participating, Slashdot still manages to hold its niche together.
I look forward to another 20 years. :-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Your comment reminded me of heroes. And there's one Slashdot Hero that I'd like to thank for his fantastic contributions over the years: John C. Randolph, also known as "jcr".
There are few users here whose comments I look forward to reading. John is among those commenters. When I'm scrolling through the comments rapidly and "~jcr" catches my eye, I stop and read the comment every time.
John embodies the original spirit of Slashdot. Unlike so many here, he has a huge amount of hands-on industry experience working on important computing systems. Yet at the same time he has such a strong understanding of politics, economics, and so many other fields.
He brings important insight and wisdom to the discussion here, and he has helped expand my understanding of the world far beyond what it otherwise would have been. In many ways he has become an indirect mentor to me. As I've read his comments over the years I have grown intellectually.
And before anyone wrongly claims that I'm John posting this, let me assure you that I'm not. I could never achieve even a fraction of what John has achieved.
Thank you, John, for all of your comments. They truly are the hidden gems of this website.
Happy Birthday, Slashdot!
For all your cruftiness, and all the complaints, you're still also the source of some of the most interesting discussions I run across on a day-to-day basis.
-- Sent from a computer.
Unicode won't happen until two problems are solved.
Bidirectionality override characters ("erocS") The first attempt to introduce Unicode on Slashdot led to what I've referred to as the "erocS" problem, in which vandals posted subjects comments containing bidirectionality override characters, which made others' comments illegible and spoofed moderation scores. Though the software could strip out currently known control characters, new control characters in a later version of Unicode may gain operating system support before Slashdot's software can be updated to handle them. ASCII art It used to be common on Slashdot to post a fairly large (49 by 25 character) ASCII art rendering of the NSFW photo on the front page of Goatse.info (formerly Goatse.cx). It depicts a man stretching his anus wide. It somewhat resembles the September 20, 2004, cover of Time (safe for work). It also used to be common to put a small (5 column by 4 row) ASCII rendering of the photo "The Incident with the Bird", which depicted a parrot perched on an erect penis. This led to a policy decision to use the "lameness filter" to reject posts consisting primarily of ASCII art. The larger character repertoire of Unicode would make this harder to maintain.The Voices from the Hellmouth series seemed like one of the most important stories on /. as enabled the masses of readers to express their own experiences of being bullied or treated by others within school. It seemed to be one of the first articles about us rather than about some technology or company.
Recall that this story was from back in '99, way before being in IT/computers was cool or mainstream.
Slashdot is still great. Happy birthday, and congratulations on finally implementing unicode.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention him. He was quite a prolific and controversial poster here.
I've always been the go-to person for information, opinions, and guidance in my social group. When people ask where I get news and ideas, Slashdot is always at/near the top. It's a variety of related news plus some incredibly insightful comments. The value in my life has been thus far immeasurable.
Especially in the wake of the Columbine shooting. The Jon Katz post "Voices from the Hellmouth" (https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth) helped me understand that what I was experiencing wasn't abnormal. Nerds, geeks, gamers, goths, loners, introverts -- they were all being profiled as potential mass-murderers. Many were treated as suspects in thought crime. Many were forced into counseling out of such fear. And still the worst was that it was so extremely taboo to say, "While I don't condone what they did, I completely understand why they did it." And that taboo prevented any real reduction in pain for those "at risk" social rejects.
When I went to college, I went in as "me". Long black hair, dark clothing, and chains. People were scared to be around me at first. One person asked me to play a game a gin rummy in my first week at the dorms. He used that game to inquire why "I was angry with life". (This is why I loved the first year of college. It was OK to ask awkward questions and get into deep discussions.) It was the first time someone had attempted that discussion with me. I told him that I wasn't angry with life, but that many things had happened in my life that made me feel contemplative and rebellious against certain ways of life. I continued and explained that I had decided that if "those people" looked like that, then I didn't want to identify is one of them by looking like them.
His eyes burst open like he just suddenly understood a massive part of his own high school experience 4 months too late. We continued to play cards, but I couldn't get the hang of gin rummy. We played poker instead.
In the following years, I decided to reinvent myself. The dark clothing went away. The hair went from long to short to long to short again. I got a bit athletic. I started learning about sports and held manly conversations with people about cars, football, and guns. (You know how it is... you learn one thing about at topic and suddenly you have to LEARN EVERYTHING.) Eventually, I discovered that I had become an undercover nerd. You wouldn't know it from looking at me, but half the time, I just want to go home and play Everquest. (Ya. I still play Everquest.) So when I break out my white-hot data skills, or legal knowledge, or when something at work requires me to learn a new vendor system and I master it in a couple days sufficient to send bug reports to the vendor, people flip out (with joy!).
In today's workplace, people LOVE to have a nerd on hand. They'll happily put up marginal social quirks to have nerd powers in the office across the way. The nation's most visible million/billionaires are nerds. People WANT to look nerdy to be hip. People are demanding that teachers make more FEMALE nerds so we can reach NERD EQUITY. And today, the discussion of the high school harassment is completely blown wide open. Bullying, cyber-bullying, sexual harassment, microaggressions, picoaggressions, quantumshade -- today, in many schools, being mean is bad.
It's not perfect. Your mileage may vary. But it's better.
Still, every 4/20, when people are joking about weed on campus, I'm solemn because I remember what happened with a couple of kids felt so rejected and so alone that they retreated into a cesspool of resentment and no one cared to notice until the violence came. (Seems similar to the building of a lot of white resentment building in the nation today.) I have to explain to people that the root of the problem wasn't simply mental illness or the existence of guns. A major part of the problem was that people felt that it was absolutely OK for kids to torture kids.
I've been part of higher education outreach into low-i
In the not-too-distant past the dominant voice on this site took a hard right turn. During the administration of Obama we saw a constant barrage of anti-Obama and anti-Clinton news bits on the front page, while simultaneously seeing articles that championed various right wing causes.
Sure, we see some front page articles now that point out a subset of the failings of the current POTUS, but regardless of how much someone loves him it would be nearly impossible to not have to come to face with his failings on at least a daily basis.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I don't see 3- and 4-digit user ids very often. Glad some are still around!
Some have accused Slashdot of forsaking its mantra in search of more hits. While it may have been diluted a bit over the years, this is still my go-to for the nerdiest news. Hope you'll be around for another 20!
I started reading in 1999 but didn't create an account until a year later or so. I got wind of the place through a college instructor who talked of things such as Linux Install Parties - which at the time was the nerdiest sounding thing I had ever heard. I remember people posting links to tiny grainy videos of the prequel Star Wars and Matrix trailers hosted on their personal servers. I remember waiting sometimes up to a day to visit sources linked in stories because they were "slashdotted". I remember spilling my guts and talking shit and having actual insightful conversations with people - or getting modded down and having to think about the dumb ass stuff I was talking about. That had a big effect about how I thought about online communication that I don't think my tiny brain had contemplated before.
I remember learning about new things, reading different points of view and growing up from a scraggly 20-something to a scraggly 40-something and watching my attitudes change over time (going back to old comments ... wow).
Slashdot was everything I loved about IRC at the time but with a moderation system and some really interesting people. It's still kinda this today. I mean I still read every damn day so there's gotta be something goin' on here right? RIGHT? Anyway, when Taco left it didn't feel the same, and certainly we've had a lot more political, and slashvertisement stories than outright nerdly or technical ones but still more sedate and varied than other sources that still somehow exist.
The only thing that has really left me with chills about this place is how people saw 15+ years ago how invasive technology would become and how much more difficult privacy would be to maintain and even how most people would likely give it up for nothin'... it seemed incredibly far-fetched at the time. Man...
Anyway Happy 20th /. Thanks for filling my compile time since 1999!
crazy dynamite monkey
For some reason, the full text triggers the lameness filter, but follow the link to the History of the World, where The Glorious MEEPT!! plays a role...
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=64664&cid=5990632
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Happy birthday /.
I started here after reading an interview with Dave Taylor, formerly of id Software. Stuck around for a while. Wandered to greener pastures and come back every once in a while to see how the old girl is doing.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Many of the comments I have read are lamenting that /. just ain't what it used to be. Kind of true, kind of not.
What keeps me coming back are the pure simplicity of the site and the opportunity to learn by having the more esoteric stories explained by truly knowledgeable people.
Happy bday Slashdot. May Cowboy Neal never die!
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
Now THAT was a great April fools prank.
Unfortunately, the Wayback machine doesn't have a copy of it (April 1, 2006).
OMG PONIES!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Despite the lows of the last years, still my favourite site. Congratulations to all involved in keeping this nerd temple.
Back in the beginning days of Slashdot, the changing state of the art in TECHNOLOGY was the driving force in our lives, and it was EXCITING to us nerds because we were the ones building our future. But nowadays, the masses have technology out the ass and much of what we were building has already come into fruition.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crash, technology has slowly been declining as the preeminent force in peoples' lives. Instead, overbearing government policies have been usurping that position, using technology today to spy on us, id/track us, and coordinate control over all under the guise of thwarting the next mass shooting, terrorist attack, or just maintaining status quo. Their programs have created a huge "brain drain" that has left technology mostly stagnating today. This is why "News for nerds" is taking a backseat, because there is too much "Stuff that [supposedly] matters" in the political realm.
I predict there will be a re-awakening eventually. It won't happen on a public site like Slashdot. There are too many lawyers, too much politics for anything meaningful to be born out in the public today. Only the huge technology companies like Google can make any meaningful progress forward under today's hostile environment, and they are struggling to do so, in my opinion.
I have some hope for the darknet, although so far nothing particularly wonderful and game changing has come out of there that I know of. And maybe nothing ever will. If the NSA can infiltrate everything, civilization may well be stuck working on political progress before technological progress can come back in vogue.
The only tweak it needs is to make down votes have half the weight of up votes. If there is disagreement it should err on the side of giving people a voice.
Real trolls will still get hammered down to -1, but controversial comments won't be censored.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I saw this posted in the morning when it only had a few comments. Most of them saying how bad the site is now compared to its glory days. And although I haven't logged in a quite some time to post, I must say I still ready daily and find the discourse fascinating. Sure, there's a lot of chaff to go through, but as others put it, that's true of any website.
/. has been through the hands of quite a few now, but the most important part remains: its users. I really enjoy finding that one post that goes into such extraneous detail that presents new to me information and concepts. Something I wouldn't have come across otherwise. And of course, you can usually find excellent lengthy posts - something that is sorely missed in typical social media websites.
So thank you, posters, editors, and owners. Here's to another 20 years!
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot celebrates you!
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
Sure, 9/11 was big. But JonKatz's Voices from the Hellmouth about Columbine was a big deal. Yes, we all grew tired of JonKatz eventually, but a lot of people opened up about their horrible experiences being bullied in high school. There's been a lot of improvements in schools recognizing bullying, though a lot of that has just moved online and gotten worse there. Still, for those of us who were here, that was a really memorable time. I'm surprised there was no mention.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Nostalgia? Pass the Gravol.
The only large parameter I've ever cared about here is whether sharp story submissions encourage sharp dialogue.
Why so often—during various epochs—story submissions tapering off into a woolly final sentence? Is it an actually goal here (by some) to unleash an obligatory pocket-protector Olympics of beat-the-buzzer geek stereotypy?
Trolls, consider yourself trolled—for the extremely predictable lolz.
No, true nerd-hood is about going through life in the spirit that no consequential detail is ever too small to hold up to the tomographic megaphone—for as long as it takes. Wool is what other people like to pull over the fine technical fine print. I continue to celebrate every wool-free story submission that /. has ever run.
Blessed be the pinprick lightsaber that shears sheep.
I don't think there are many websites that have made such a big impact as this site has made. Even though I don't really have time to partake in the discussions here (or at other websites for that matter due to real life) I still visit slashdot more or less daily and I often find interesting news here. Lets hope the site continues to run for 20 more years (by that time we will all be highly paid consultants working to fix the imminent 2038 year bug :) )
I organised the 10 year party in Canberra, Australia, at the "Uni Pub". I organised a plasticised "attendance card" for those who came. I still carry my card in my wallet. So, I can be called a "card-carrying Slashdoter".
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
Slashdot had the best moderation system
It really still does. If I made a new forum web site, I would want to steal it. Most other moderation systems operate on the digg/reddit model of "everybody gets to moderate everything". This converges toward groupthink, suppressing ideas that don't line up with the majority. Sure, some obviously politically-influenced moderation happens on Slahshdot, but you have to read to get mod points, and you have to pick and choose where you spend them. And there is still a limit of -1 to +5, so any early mod-bombing of a post can be undone by later moderation. Then there is metamoderation to give a (hopefully) anonymized check on bad moderation, like a sort of QA sampling check.
There was one thing that they got wrong at the start, and that was letting people see exactly what moderation had been done. After a few incidents where a particular message got dozens of mods, some attracted just because there were already so many, it now only reports the top three categories, in percentages rounded to 10%. I was sad to see that and the visible karma point status go, but they encouraged gaming the system.
The only other user moderation model I saw was kuro5hin/scoop, where everybody got to vote, but it was only an averaged 0-3 rating. It also had a "users vote up the articles" mechanism. It may or may not have worked if there were more users to give it enough momentum, but kuro5hin was always a poor shadow of Slashdot, and eventually only the trolls, and one asperging blogger were left. There were even a few times when an article would successfully troll people from outside the site. I would still call it a failure, and blame it on the "everybody gets to vote on everything" thing, only instead of converging to groupthink it converged to trollthink.
Well, Slashdot's moderation is good except for that silly change to metamod many years ago. It used to have buttons that said "agree/disagree". At some point they must have hired someone to "improve" Slashdot, who then went nuts trying to change shit for the sake of changing shit to look like he was doing something. The metamoderation buttons were changed to "+" and "-". They FAQ was never updated to say exactly what this meant. The tooltips say "Vote this item up/down", without it being clear what "this item" means that you are voting for.
It's ambiguous whether +/- means the original message should have been modded up/down, or whether you are voting to agree or disagree with the moderation. Is "this item" the message or the moderation? What makes this so important is that if you misunderstand, you can kill that person's moderation karma and he might not get it again for months.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I have to admit, the layout does look a bit dated but in a retro/cool kind of way. It's still my go to site for tech news. And I love that it's build by geeks...for geeks.
Best comments section around. Some of them are funny, some of them are brilliant, some of them piss me off. But I still find myself spending more time on the reaction to the story than the story itself. Here's to another 20 years!
I found this place oh so long ago, all the other sites I was paying attention to then have mostly passed on.
Mostly lurking, looking for some tidbit of sanity not available anywhere else.
The Gates Borg icon was fun.
Keep paying the bills and doing what you do so well, or poorly or somewhere in between.
those days when a front page story caused the origin site to go down... that is something i will never forget.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
It would be interesting to understand the amount of bandwidth required to service a front page post in 24 hours historically and compared to today
now we find netflix is serving 100 Gbps from an Open Connect Appliance...
regards
John Jones
https://john.jones.name