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...
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
Where are mentions of OMG Ponies! and the Parrot runtime?
Not so fast, alanw!
Keep going
February 14, 2002 - The day that CmdrTaco's life changed forever: https://slashdot.org/story/02/...
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.
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. The only place where penis envy is about having the smaller one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Slashdot is still great. Happy birthday, and congratulations on finally implementing unicode.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, is there a separate thread for old timers?
Obviously a ton has changed, but I have fond memories of slashdot and credit it's consistent quality for a lot of my career progress!
Happy birthday slashdot!
Off-topic!? Natalie Portman is never off-topic on Slashdot - irrespective of her clothing, petrification, or hot cereal status.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Agreed. Anyone with less than a 4 digit ID is too old to post anything of value.
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
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 :) )