11 ms·

Thanks For Reading: 15 Years of News For Nerds

211 points by thenextcorner 14y ago

Zenst 14y ago
I recall slashdot back in the early days, very shortly afterwards a small company called google was also formed. Even though I'm approaching 50 years myself it is stories like this that makes me feel old.
- digitalsushi 14y ago
  It's easy to allow this 15 year anniversary to shock the system by number alone. The real testament is to consider how visually similar slashdot is from iteration 1. http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.or... How fascinating is it for something to work as well as it has, for so long.
  - jeza 14y ago
    I noticed that as well, though they no longer have the image of Bill Gates with fire (I think?) coming out the side of his face for all Microsoft related stories. E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/19990209091342/http://www.slashdot.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/19990209091342/http://www.slashdo...
    - sgift 14y ago
      That is Bill Gates as a Borg - see first image here: http://www.startrek.com/database_article/borg http://www.startrek.com/database_article/borg A pun on the Borg motto "resistance is futile" with regard to Microsofts dominance in pc space at the time.
      - jeza 14y ago
        Ah yeah, that makes sense. Thanks. I remember those days all too clearly. Everyone assumed that because Microsoft dominated Desktop computing that they would be able to leverage that into any future platforms. Even then, the higher usage of Apache over IIS offered some hope.
    - lmm 14y ago
      It's a "borg gates" picture, and I remember the post where they talked about getting rid of it - basically, there's no longer any fear of MS assimilating all computing diversity.
      - nacker 14y ago
        I remember pranking a colleague's computer after a Linux advocacy rant so that that Bill-Borg picture came up on her PC's splashscreen, with the message "You WILL be assimilated". As it happened, that morning, she had just had a meeting with the boss about turning up late too frequently, and was thrown into a momentary paranoid panic, before she figured out that I was the culprit! Heh. Those were the days.
spodek 14y ago
I joined Hacker News relatively recently, 514 days ago (not sure when I joined Slashdot, but my ID has five digits). I remember finding it more adult than Slashdot and appreciated its maturity, figuring I would leave Slashdot. Most posts here that mention Slashdot talk about its immaturity, superficiality, or something like that. After not reading it for a while, I went back to check it out. Upon further review, I don't find Slashdot inferior to Hacker News. Obviously they're different so you can't compare them directly. Still, I find Slashdot, at least reading at +5, which is where I read it, funnier, no less insightful, and less self-important than Hacker News. I don't see evidence supporting the denigration, which I now consider unsupported snobbery. Do the posts below +5 bring Slashdot down? That said, I post more here, but I read both.
- randallsquared 14y ago
  I also have a five digit UID over there, but stopped going for the most part five or six years ago. The UI of reddit and then HN was so superior that it almost makes the quality argument moot. Also, reading at +5 meant, at the time, that I mostly got highly-rated replies to questions or points I didn't see, which meant I then had to do a lot of clicking just to understand what was being said. Combine that with the constant clicking to get more comments or get rid of "helpful" bars that hang out in the middle of the screen, and I gave up, and would have even if I'd had no where else to go.
  - mhurron 14y ago
    > The UI of reddit ... was so superior You can't be serious. Reddit is horrible to get around and horrible to read. It looks like a mass of disorganized text. Slashdot is far easier to understand how the flow of comments go and what is a new story and what isn't. I can't find anything on Reddit.
    - praptak 14y ago
      Note that GP said 'was'. I cannot tell how it is now, but there definitely was a point in time when Slashdot went for a dumb JS-enabled-dynamic-interactive fad and totally screwed the usability of their comments section. This is what made me stop participating.
five18pm 14y ago
Happy Birthday Slashdot! It still has some of the best discussions in tech world.
etfb 14y ago
Wow - it's now older than most of the people who were commenting on it the last time I went there.
jacques_chester 14y ago
It's weird to realise that site you were on as a teenager has been around for literally half your life time.
- staunch 14y ago
  Seriously. I was ~13 when I created my /. account, reading about Linux and running my first servers. Now I'm almost 30 and doing the same kind of stuff and loving it just as much.
  - crusso 14y ago
    That's one of the great things about this industry. What other everyday profession is so interesting to pick up as a teenager and so amenable to learning professional-level skills without ever leaving your house? Sure, you could start studying medicine or the law at an early age, but no one will let you practice those things without a degree. You can't get experience operating on a cadaver when you're 12 like you can putting together some arduino circuits or a Node.js web site. I always found it amusing how much emphasis recruiters placed on where I went to school in my first couple of jobs after college when so little of what I felt I brought to the job I actually learned at the University level.
- lmm 14y ago
  To me /. feels like it's been around forever. Partly that's because I was on it when I was a kid, but it felt old even then, I think possibly because its great rival (adequacy) had already died (since when K5 and Plastic are also basically dead). I get a weird feeling when I think that it's less than twice the age of 4chan, which still feels new and exciting (possibly because I was there in its first year and have watched it grow).
cowmix 14y ago
Number 10566 speakin' here. /. to me is like a bad marriage. I can't stand it in general, constantly I complain about it, but for some reason I can't leave it.
Alex3917 14y ago
I find it bizarre that Slashdot still exists. It was essentially founded on the principles that: - Technology can make society a better place - Open source is the best way to make good technology Yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia? It's been almost ten years. And to the extent that most people are optimistic about technology in general today, it's a very cynical sort of optimism. I think these things are probably cyclical, but at least for right now how many people would actually want to live in a world where every morning the latest Eric S. Raymond essay was splashed across their homepage? Slashdot was great in the late 90s, and pretty good in the early 2000s. But right now it just seems like an anachronistic holdout from a different time, a place where people still define their lives by the Columbine shooting and the year of Linux on the desktop is forever just around the corner.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Obviously Linux on the desktop will never happen for mainstream people, but I can imagine a future where people use tablets to such a degree that the average person never interacts with a Windows PC (except, ironically enough, for iCloud). As for belief that technology can make society a better place, that was never universual on /. (or the YRO section wouldn't exist) and I for one absolutely still believe it. In many ways hn is a much more grown up version of /. we recognize that communism isn't a workable philosophy, that money can be pretty sweet and there is nothing wrong with making them so long that you provide real value for it. Oh, and that AB tests are like printing money, once you have users. But in the end, and even considering that my /. user id is much more than a few digits, I am pretty happy that it exist. The teenage me would not have been so into tech if it hadn't been for /. So a happy birthday from me.
  - cooldeal 14y ago
    >I can imagine a future where people use tablets to such a degree that the average person never interacts with a Windows PC (except, ironically enough, for iCloud). How does replacing the Windows PC with an iPad(70% of tablets sold are iPads) lead to a better future? If anything, it makes it a lot worse, locked down single hardware vendor, 30% cut of app price, 30% cut of in-app purchases etc. This reflects the problem with many on Slashdot and even HN to some extent, the unhealthy fixation on beating MS (see Ubuntu bug #1) rather than promoting better and open software. MS is always seen dying by the next quarter from the 15 years that Slashdot has been in existence. The amount of misinformation,knee jerk FUD, slanted coverage and story selection just gets annoying and repulsive after a while. For a small example see the summary and comments on this story from 2009 about Windows 7. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-drm-revealed-in-windows-7 http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-dr... The lesser said about the DRM FUD spread about Windows Vista, the better. And I see much of the same on HN too, articles not negative about Windows 8 are flagged off the front page quickly even if they ever reach it and all we ever seem to see are the negative ones. This kind of insularity causes broadminded folks to leave the site(s) and makes the problem worse with the echo chamber.
parasubvert 14y ago
I was an early Slashdot guy (# 1311), haven't posted in a year, but it was my top-3 tech news/opinion place for over 12 years. I still remember the (pointless) KDE vs. Gnome wars, the Microsoft Halloween memo, etc. I held the Toronto area Slashdot 10th anniversary party back in 2007 at a pub near U of T. After Rob left last year, though, I felt the community shrunk a lot, and it doesn't quite have the character it used to have. Hacker news does have a similar vibe to 1998-2002 Slashdot... instead of Microsoft vs. Linux being the dominant meme, it's Apple vs. Android. Though there are way more Apple supporters hanging here than MS supporters in the late 90's. Generally HN is more adult due to the moderation approach, but lots of posts degenerate into slug fests anyway.
- joeyo 14y ago
  Another similarity between Hacker News and early Slashdot (I'm user #173) is that both, despite being link aggregators, felt like primary sources due to the commentators. For a time Slashdot was read and commented on by all of the primary Open Source figures and and Linux contributors (Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, ESR, Miguel de Icaza, to name a few) and a lot of other random technical people (I seem to recall John Carmack would occasionally post). For pretty much any technical story there would be someone relevant on-hand to comment. Of course, at the time there was not really a well-developed online technology press and there was minimal blogging, so that degree of centralization can probably never be recreated. Still, Hacker Hews has a bit of this--certainly for anything relevant to startups or Silicon Valley. To some extent reddit does too vis-a-vis their IAmA threads.
  - erik 14y ago
    John Carmack did post there somewhat regularly. http://slashdot.org/~John+Carmack/firehose http://slashdot.org/~John+Carmack/firehose Paul Graham used to be a regular user as well. http://slashdot.org/~bugbear/firehose http://slashdot.org/~bugbear/firehose
  - bootload 14y ago
    "... For a time Slashdot was read and commented on by all of the primary Open Source figures and and Linux contributors (Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, ESR, Miguel de Icaza, to name a few) and a lot of other random technical people (I seem to recall John Carmack would occasionally post). For pretty much any technical story there would be someone relevant on-hand to comment. ..." #2774 here, I remember this well and it had a great effect. Every comment I was ask myself to think real hard, "is that worth posting". As for /. this is what I wrote about 6/7 years ago, sound familiar? /. gone to seed Since 1996 I`ve been making crappy comments and observations on slashdot. And I must say while I still like to frequently check the stories. I find them less interesting. The comments are less informative. Innovation less than inspiring. Its not just the dilution of smart readers that is a problem. ~ http://slashdot.org/journal/123931/-gone-2-seed-37 http://slashdot.org/journal/123931/-gone-2-seed-37
bernardom 14y ago
For everyone trying to figure out when they signed up: a poster named MyLongNickName linked to some research he did showing which UIDs correlate to which years. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
- mschaef 14y ago
  To take it back a bit further than he goes, I'm 31494 and registered sometime in late 97, early 98. What's interesting about the numbers he presents is that there's a definite increase in growth rate (~2x) around 2008-2009.
pohl 14y ago
Happy 15th birthday from user #872. Back when Rob Malda started you, it was such a thrill to read the posts of far-flung techies whose interests went beyond what the real "tech news" press was covering. It's almost painful to go back now and read what has become of you. There are only so many racist trolls one can encounter before it ruins the whole experience.
- kyrra 14y ago
  That can be said about any public forum. Once a group gets large enough you start to get noise that needs to be filtered out. As long as you browse comments at +4 or +5 its not bad. If you play the moderator roll you have to expect crap. Immature people will fill and forum they can find with crap. It's just something we have to deal with as users of the Internet.
bstar77 14y ago
I have found that I have outgrown the cranky, uncompromising userbase of that site. HN users (despite being extremely divisive at times), seem to be much more accepting of disruptive technological changes.
tehwebguy 14y ago
There has been a place in my heart for Slashdot since maybe 2004 or 2005, when I started reading it. Over time I completely stopped reading the comments, but the front page has been a decent indicator of medium to big tech news, plus lots of niche stuff that I likely would never have known about otherwise!
Aardwolf 14y ago
I only recently started visiting hacker news more often than slashdot. I love slashdot because of the interesting discussions. I think the comments on slashdot are still the best. But the problem that started to annoy me more and more is the articles themselves, which are often 3 days late, often too political, often plain advertising, and sometimes have a summary including something everyone knows like "WWW, which means World Wide Web", baffling the commentators. And that's why I like hacker news now: more technical, less political.
mdlthree 14y ago
Thats was a great Q/A article on fusion. That one deserves sticky.
starpilot 14y ago
Slashdot has stayed much more consistently tech than HN. That's partly by design; HN is meant for stories "deeply insightful" and apparently "good hackers aren't just interested in tech." pg submitted a story about his favorite restaurant, that's just a community aspect here (something Slashdot really lacks, especially since it's more anonymous than HN). On the other hand, a lot of it is due to their story selection relying on approval by a handful of editors, versus the anyone can upvote on most social news sites. This really anchored their content in tech. Digg rose and fell as a tech news site as its userbase drifted into shallow entertainment news, taking the top ten stories with them. Same with the Reddit frontpage, though many subreddits are still good. Slashdot has outlasted both of them, and even one-ups HN a bit at avoiding unimportant but drama-filled stories (SV journalists writing about each other, tweet wars, allegations of plagiarism etc.). If anything, the selective greenlighting of stories (versus redlighting through moderation) helps avoid gossipy "news" that evokes strong emotions in readers but are of little to no importance.
OldSchool 14y ago
I've only ever lurked on slashdot for many years. For me it's gotten too much political/legal and mega-corporation love/hate content. HN is very new to me, but I like the content since it's mostly technical and without much if any religious argument over various platforms, languages, and technologies. If I had to call out HN on something it's the somewhat naive "startup" vibe I get. There are many shades of success in business between cratering and being the next Facebook and they're the most likely place we all end up.
btilly 14y ago
Wow. I remember Slashdot. I was very active there before they had accounts. When they first introduced community moderation, I was one of the people chosen to be moderators. Then after the volume increased it lost all possibility for extended discussion, so I burned out on it. Years later they had a password compromise. So I changed my password, lost the new one, and of course it is tied to a no longer exising email address so I can't get my account back. If anyone is curious, I was once http://slashdot.org/~Tilly http://slashdot.org/~Tilly there. My last comment there was a dozen years ago. (I've commented as AC a few times since, but not much.)
- bernardom 14y ago
  Tilly, if it helps, the same thing happened to me. I contacted them a few months ago and they were kind enough to reset me based on knowing some information such as the old email.
  - btilly 14y ago
    That is good to know, but /. seems sufficiently dead for conversation that I see no point in going back. If there was a point, I'd not have left in the first place, or else I'd have created another account.
brindle 14y ago
Slashdot was one of the first weblog frameworks, written in Perl, and was very similar in the beginning to the vibe I get from Hacker News. It (slashcode) was also Open Source. These days I feel Hacker New has more of an edge and, like Slashdot used to be, is "right there" when it comes to technology. Slashdot was one of the few sites that could handle the load when 911 went down and it was my main source of information that day. About a week later they posted a detailed report on how they handled the load - It was excellent. Things have changed for them, they were bought out and the founders have moved on, but its still a decent site and I find it easier to use than HN.
arjn 14y ago
I've been following Slashdot for a long long time now, probably 12 years or more. Was an avid, daily reader. Recently of course its been proggit and HN and newer sites. Nostalgia ! I hope they stay around for a long long time. One complaint is that the rate of new articles/stories is slow when compared to the newer sites.
LVB 14y ago
The hook for me 15 years ago: seeing a Slashdot poll asking how many screws were actually screwed in on my computer case. I thought, "Wow... now these people are really on my wavelength."
mrbill 14y ago
No way of knowing when I signed up, but my ID is sub-5000.
Evbn 14y ago
Glad to see the 15th anniversary announcement has the sort of typo that made the editors famous &mdash they've still got it.
lbcadden3 14y ago
My biggest complaint about /. is through a combination of other sites it takes a half a day or more for stories I'm interested in to hit it, so by the time they are there I have already read them. The comments there add very little to the conversation imo.
chris_wot 14y ago
I'd have to say I migrated from slashdot to Kuro5hin (first place I made a name for myself), then on to Wikipedia where I really made a name for myself, then after being booted off Wikipedia I guess I found this place :-) I seem to have bypassed Reddit completely. Don't know how that happened...

211 points by thenextcorner 14y ago

Zenst 14y ago

I recall slashdot back in the early days, very shortly afterwards a small company called google was also formed. Even though I'm approaching 50 years myself it is stories like this that makes me feel old.

digitalsushi 14y ago
It's easy to allow this 15 year anniversary to shock the system by number alone. The real testament is to consider how visually similar slashdot is from iteration 1. http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.or... How fascinating is it for something to work as well as it has, for so long.
- jeza 14y ago
  I noticed that as well, though they no longer have the image of Bill Gates with fire (I think?) coming out the side of his face for all Microsoft related stories. E.g. http://web.archive.org/web/19990209091342/http://www.slashdot.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/19990209091342/http://www.slashdo...
  - sgift 14y ago
    That is Bill Gates as a Borg - see first image here: http://www.startrek.com/database_article/borg http://www.startrek.com/database_article/borg A pun on the Borg motto "resistance is futile" with regard to Microsofts dominance in pc space at the time.
    - jeza 14y ago
      Ah yeah, that makes sense. Thanks. I remember those days all too clearly. Everyone assumed that because Microsoft dominated Desktop computing that they would be able to leverage that into any future platforms. Even then, the higher usage of Apache over IIS offered some hope.
  - lmm 14y ago
    It's a "borg gates" picture, and I remember the post where they talked about getting rid of it - basically, there's no longer any fear of MS assimilating all computing diversity.
    - nacker 14y ago
      I remember pranking a colleague's computer after a Linux advocacy rant so that that Bill-Borg picture came up on her PC's splashscreen, with the message "You WILL be assimilated". As it happened, that morning, she had just had a meeting with the boss about turning up late too frequently, and was thrown into a momentary paranoid panic, before she figured out that I was the culprit! Heh. Those were the days.

spodek 14y ago

I joined Hacker News relatively recently, 514 days ago (not sure when I joined Slashdot, but my ID has five digits). I remember finding it more adult than Slashdot and appreciated its maturity, figuring I would leave Slashdot. Most posts here that mention Slashdot talk about its immaturity, superficiality, or something like that. After not reading it for a while, I went back to check it out. Upon further review, I don't find Slashdot inferior to Hacker News. Obviously they're different so you can't compare them directly. Still, I find Slashdot, at least reading at +5, which is where I read it, funnier, no less insightful, and less self-important than Hacker News. I don't see evidence supporting the denigration, which I now consider unsupported snobbery. Do the posts below +5 bring Slashdot down? That said, I post more here, but I read both.

randallsquared 14y ago
I also have a five digit UID over there, but stopped going for the most part five or six years ago. The UI of reddit and then HN was so superior that it almost makes the quality argument moot. Also, reading at +5 meant, at the time, that I mostly got highly-rated replies to questions or points I didn't see, which meant I then had to do a lot of clicking just to understand what was being said. Combine that with the constant clicking to get more comments or get rid of "helpful" bars that hang out in the middle of the screen, and I gave up, and would have even if I'd had no where else to go.
- mhurron 14y ago
  > The UI of reddit ... was so superior You can't be serious. Reddit is horrible to get around and horrible to read. It looks like a mass of disorganized text. Slashdot is far easier to understand how the flow of comments go and what is a new story and what isn't. I can't find anything on Reddit.
  - praptak 14y ago
    Note that GP said 'was'. I cannot tell how it is now, but there definitely was a point in time when Slashdot went for a dumb JS-enabled-dynamic-interactive fad and totally screwed the usability of their comments section. This is what made me stop participating.

five18pm 14y ago

Happy Birthday Slashdot! It still has some of the best discussions in tech world.

etfb 14y ago

Wow - it's now older than most of the people who were commenting on it the last time I went there.

jacques_chester 14y ago

It's weird to realise that site you were on as a teenager has been around for literally half your life time.

staunch 14y ago
Seriously. I was ~13 when I created my /. account, reading about Linux and running my first servers. Now I'm almost 30 and doing the same kind of stuff and loving it just as much.
- crusso 14y ago
  That's one of the great things about this industry. What other everyday profession is so interesting to pick up as a teenager and so amenable to learning professional-level skills without ever leaving your house? Sure, you could start studying medicine or the law at an early age, but no one will let you practice those things without a degree. You can't get experience operating on a cadaver when you're 12 like you can putting together some arduino circuits or a Node.js web site. I always found it amusing how much emphasis recruiters placed on where I went to school in my first couple of jobs after college when so little of what I felt I brought to the job I actually learned at the University level.
lmm 14y ago
To me /. feels like it's been around forever. Partly that's because I was on it when I was a kid, but it felt old even then, I think possibly because its great rival (adequacy) had already died (since when K5 and Plastic are also basically dead). I get a weird feeling when I think that it's less than twice the age of 4chan, which still feels new and exciting (possibly because I was there in its first year and have watched it grow).

cowmix 14y ago

Number 10566 speakin' here. /. to me is like a bad marriage. I can't stand it in general, constantly I complain about it, but for some reason I can't leave it.

Alex3917 14y ago

I find it bizarre that Slashdot still exists. It was essentially founded on the principles that: - Technology can make society a better place - Open source is the best way to make good technology Yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia? It's been almost ten years. And to the extent that most people are optimistic about technology in general today, it's a very cynical sort of optimism. I think these things are probably cyclical, but at least for right now how many people would actually want to live in a world where every morning the latest Eric S. Raymond essay was splashed across their homepage? Slashdot was great in the late 90s, and pretty good in the early 2000s. But right now it just seems like an anachronistic holdout from a different time, a place where people still define their lives by the Columbine shooting and the year of Linux on the desktop is forever just around the corner.

tomjen3 14y ago
Obviously Linux on the desktop will never happen for mainstream people, but I can imagine a future where people use tablets to such a degree that the average person never interacts with a Windows PC (except, ironically enough, for iCloud). As for belief that technology can make society a better place, that was never universual on /. (or the YRO section wouldn't exist) and I for one absolutely still believe it. In many ways hn is a much more grown up version of /. we recognize that communism isn't a workable philosophy, that money can be pretty sweet and there is nothing wrong with making them so long that you provide real value for it. Oh, and that AB tests are like printing money, once you have users. But in the end, and even considering that my /. user id is much more than a few digits, I am pretty happy that it exist. The teenage me would not have been so into tech if it hadn't been for /. So a happy birthday from me.
- cooldeal 14y ago
  >I can imagine a future where people use tablets to such a degree that the average person never interacts with a Windows PC (except, ironically enough, for iCloud). How does replacing the Windows PC with an iPad(70% of tablets sold are iPads) lead to a better future? If anything, it makes it a lot worse, locked down single hardware vendor, 30% cut of app price, 30% cut of in-app purchases etc. This reflects the problem with many on Slashdot and even HN to some extent, the unhealthy fixation on beating MS (see Ubuntu bug #1) rather than promoting better and open software. MS is always seen dying by the next quarter from the 15 years that Slashdot has been in existence. The amount of misinformation,knee jerk FUD, slanted coverage and story selection just gets annoying and repulsive after a while. For a small example see the summary and comments on this story from 2009 about Windows 7. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-drm-revealed-in-windows-7 http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-dr... The lesser said about the DRM FUD spread about Windows Vista, the better. And I see much of the same on HN too, articles not negative about Windows 8 are flagged off the front page quickly even if they ever reach it and all we ever seem to see are the negative ones. This kind of insularity causes broadminded folks to leave the site(s) and makes the problem worse with the echo chamber.

parasubvert 14y ago

I was an early Slashdot guy (# 1311), haven't posted in a year, but it was my top-3 tech news/opinion place for over 12 years. I still remember the (pointless) KDE vs. Gnome wars, the Microsoft Halloween memo, etc. I held the Toronto area Slashdot 10th anniversary party back in 2007 at a pub near U of T. After Rob left last year, though, I felt the community shrunk a lot, and it doesn't quite have the character it used to have. Hacker news does have a similar vibe to 1998-2002 Slashdot... instead of Microsoft vs. Linux being the dominant meme, it's Apple vs. Android. Though there are way more Apple supporters hanging here than MS supporters in the late 90's. Generally HN is more adult due to the moderation approach, but lots of posts degenerate into slug fests anyway.

joeyo 14y ago
Another similarity between Hacker News and early Slashdot (I'm user #173) is that both, despite being link aggregators, felt like primary sources due to the commentators. For a time Slashdot was read and commented on by all of the primary Open Source figures and and Linux contributors (Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, ESR, Miguel de Icaza, to name a few) and a lot of other random technical people (I seem to recall John Carmack would occasionally post). For pretty much any technical story there would be someone relevant on-hand to comment. Of course, at the time there was not really a well-developed online technology press and there was minimal blogging, so that degree of centralization can probably never be recreated. Still, Hacker Hews has a bit of this--certainly for anything relevant to startups or Silicon Valley. To some extent reddit does too vis-a-vis their IAmA threads.
- erik 14y ago
  John Carmack did post there somewhat regularly. http://slashdot.org/~John+Carmack/firehose http://slashdot.org/~John+Carmack/firehose Paul Graham used to be a regular user as well. http://slashdot.org/~bugbear/firehose http://slashdot.org/~bugbear/firehose
- bootload 14y ago
  "... For a time Slashdot was read and commented on by all of the primary Open Source figures and and Linux contributors (Alan Cox, Bruce Perens, ESR, Miguel de Icaza, to name a few) and a lot of other random technical people (I seem to recall John Carmack would occasionally post). For pretty much any technical story there would be someone relevant on-hand to comment. ..." #2774 here, I remember this well and it had a great effect. Every comment I was ask myself to think real hard, "is that worth posting". As for /. this is what I wrote about 6/7 years ago, sound familiar? /. gone to seed Since 1996 I`ve been making crappy comments and observations on slashdot. And I must say while I still like to frequently check the stories. I find them less interesting. The comments are less informative. Innovation less than inspiring. Its not just the dilution of smart readers that is a problem. ~ http://slashdot.org/journal/123931/-gone-2-seed-37 http://slashdot.org/journal/123931/-gone-2-seed-37

bernardom 14y ago

For everyone trying to figure out when they signed up: a poster named MyLongNickName linked to some research he did showing which UIDs correlate to which years. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year

mschaef 14y ago
To take it back a bit further than he goes, I'm 31494 and registered sometime in late 97, early 98. What's interesting about the numbers he presents is that there's a definite increase in growth rate (~2x) around 2008-2009.

pohl 14y ago

Happy 15th birthday from user #872. Back when Rob Malda started you, it was such a thrill to read the posts of far-flung techies whose interests went beyond what the real "tech news" press was covering. It's almost painful to go back now and read what has become of you. There are only so many racist trolls one can encounter before it ruins the whole experience.

kyrra 14y ago
That can be said about any public forum. Once a group gets large enough you start to get noise that needs to be filtered out. As long as you browse comments at +4 or +5 its not bad. If you play the moderator roll you have to expect crap. Immature people will fill and forum they can find with crap. It's just something we have to deal with as users of the Internet.

bstar77 14y ago

I have found that I have outgrown the cranky, uncompromising userbase of that site. HN users (despite being extremely divisive at times), seem to be much more accepting of disruptive technological changes.

tehwebguy 14y ago

There has been a place in my heart for Slashdot since maybe 2004 or 2005, when I started reading it. Over time I completely stopped reading the comments, but the front page has been a decent indicator of medium to big tech news, plus lots of niche stuff that I likely would never have known about otherwise!

Aardwolf 14y ago

I only recently started visiting hacker news more often than slashdot. I love slashdot because of the interesting discussions. I think the comments on slashdot are still the best. But the problem that started to annoy me more and more is the articles themselves, which are often 3 days late, often too political, often plain advertising, and sometimes have a summary including something everyone knows like "WWW, which means World Wide Web", baffling the commentators. And that's why I like hacker news now: more technical, less political.

mdlthree 14y ago

Thats was a great Q/A article on fusion. That one deserves sticky.

starpilot 14y ago

Slashdot has stayed much more consistently tech than HN. That's partly by design; HN is meant for stories "deeply insightful" and apparently "good hackers aren't just interested in tech." pg submitted a story about his favorite restaurant, that's just a community aspect here (something Slashdot really lacks, especially since it's more anonymous than HN). On the other hand, a lot of it is due to their story selection relying on approval by a handful of editors, versus the anyone can upvote on most social news sites. This really anchored their content in tech. Digg rose and fell as a tech news site as its userbase drifted into shallow entertainment news, taking the top ten stories with them. Same with the Reddit frontpage, though many subreddits are still good. Slashdot has outlasted both of them, and even one-ups HN a bit at avoiding unimportant but drama-filled stories (SV journalists writing about each other, tweet wars, allegations of plagiarism etc.). If anything, the selective greenlighting of stories (versus redlighting through moderation) helps avoid gossipy "news" that evokes strong emotions in readers but are of little to no importance.

OldSchool 14y ago

I've only ever lurked on slashdot for many years. For me it's gotten too much political/legal and mega-corporation love/hate content. HN is very new to me, but I like the content since it's mostly technical and without much if any religious argument over various platforms, languages, and technologies. If I had to call out HN on something it's the somewhat naive "startup" vibe I get. There are many shades of success in business between cratering and being the next Facebook and they're the most likely place we all end up.

btilly 14y ago

Wow. I remember Slashdot. I was very active there before they had accounts. When they first introduced community moderation, I was one of the people chosen to be moderators. Then after the volume increased it lost all possibility for extended discussion, so I burned out on it. Years later they had a password compromise. So I changed my password, lost the new one, and of course it is tied to a no longer exising email address so I can't get my account back. If anyone is curious, I was once http://slashdot.org/~Tilly http://slashdot.org/~Tilly there. My last comment there was a dozen years ago. (I've commented as AC a few times since, but not much.)

bernardom 14y ago
Tilly, if it helps, the same thing happened to me. I contacted them a few months ago and they were kind enough to reset me based on knowing some information such as the old email.
- btilly 14y ago
  That is good to know, but /. seems sufficiently dead for conversation that I see no point in going back. If there was a point, I'd not have left in the first place, or else I'd have created another account.

brindle 14y ago

Slashdot was one of the first weblog frameworks, written in Perl, and was very similar in the beginning to the vibe I get from Hacker News. It (slashcode) was also Open Source. These days I feel Hacker New has more of an edge and, like Slashdot used to be, is "right there" when it comes to technology. Slashdot was one of the few sites that could handle the load when 911 went down and it was my main source of information that day. About a week later they posted a detailed report on how they handled the load - It was excellent. Things have changed for them, they were bought out and the founders have moved on, but its still a decent site and I find it easier to use than HN.

arjn 14y ago

I've been following Slashdot for a long long time now, probably 12 years or more. Was an avid, daily reader. Recently of course its been proggit and HN and newer sites. Nostalgia ! I hope they stay around for a long long time. One complaint is that the rate of new articles/stories is slow when compared to the newer sites.

LVB 14y ago

The hook for me 15 years ago: seeing a Slashdot poll asking how many screws were actually screwed in on my computer case. I thought, "Wow... now these people are really on my wavelength."

mrbill 14y ago

No way of knowing when I signed up, but my ID is sub-5000.

Evbn 14y ago

Glad to see the 15th anniversary announcement has the sort of typo that made the editors famous &mdash they've still got it.

lbcadden3 14y ago

My biggest complaint about /. is through a combination of other sites it takes a half a day or more for stories I'm interested in to hit it, so by the time they are there I have already read them. The comments there add very little to the conversation imo.

chris_wot 14y ago

I'd have to say I migrated from slashdot to Kuro5hin (first place I made a name for myself), then on to Wikipedia where I really made a name for myself, then after being booted off Wikipedia I guess I found this place :-) I seem to have bypassed Reddit completely. Don't know how that happened...