RIP Robin “Roblimo” Miller | Hacker News Reader

RIP Robin “Roblimo” Miller

linuxjournal.com

154 pointszdw32 comments

I guess Hacker News is the "new Slashdot", but Slashdot really was much better in its peak years. It's not unreasonable to mark the downhill decline to beginning shortly after Roblimo's departure. I never met him, but I feel as if I've lost a compatriot. He will definitely be missed.

Do you mean Slashdot was better, in its peak, than HN is now? Maybe! In my rose-tinted glasses, I'd say, yes, definitely.

I joined /. in 2000; a lot of folks argue about when the peak was but 2000 either was it or was shortly thereafter.

I think that HN now is far better than /. was then. Like /. of old you have knowledgeable people contributing to conversations (a great example is Walter Bright contributing to the Digital Mars D and C++ conversations) but unlike those days HN has better curated discussions so we don't have to sift through as much noise and disruptions. (I'm sure someone is nostolgic for the page-widening antics of old. That wouldn't be me, however.)

I would swap HN with the /. of old any day of the week, personally speaking. And I was there!

I think I had a lot more tolerance for antics back then, thinking about it.

I think of HN as: slashdot meets kur5hin - its got the story volume and focus that reminds me of old slashdot, with the more thoughtful comment section of kuro5hin.

Having seen/participated in slashdot in the late 90s, kuro5hin in the early 2000s and HN for most of it, I agree that HN today is better.

I'm not sure I ever observed Slashdot at any particular peak, but I've been reading it weekly (if not daily) for something like the past 15 years, and it still serves a role that HN, due to its bubble-like nature, can never fill.

Slashdot is more general interest, and it sports a much healthier cross-section of the tech industry than HN at least presently does. Slashdot comments though, definitely not worth reading any more, if they ever were

How would you say the Slashdot and HN cross-sections differ?

HN tends more towards software and startups, everyone is an armchair CTO, Slashdot tends more towards tech, space and science. They both cover each other's topics, but there is a definite tendency on both sides.

You're unlikely to read about some venture capital gossip on the Slashdot side, while you're unlikely to read e.g. "Giant Predatory Worms Are Invading France" on the HN side.

The great thing about HN comments is that everyone is a smart ass, the bad thing about HN comments is that everyone is a smart ass. Slashdot comments are generally just toxic noise, dumb jokes and horrifically amateur analysis.

I'll add that Slashdot's user comment toxicity is a product of its founders' commitment to non-censorship and free speech.

Back in the day (what some here have referred to as Slashdot's "peak"), Slashdot commentary and trolling could be side-achingly hilarious, irreverent, profane, thought-provoking, insightful, silly, and humbling.

Slashdot's editorially permissive policy coupled with algorithmically assigned moderator points allowed "representative" Slashdot users to choose which trolls and provocateurs would be buried and which boosted.

As a result, Slashdot was renowned and reviled for its sometimes predictable and frequently appropriate inside jokes (e.g. "Had Netcraft confirmed it?", "Only old people ______", "IN SOVIET RUSSIA $NOUN $VERBs YOU", etc.) as well as for its sometimes intractable and iconoclastic user base.

The user base was in fact so intractable that a site-wide redesign was deployed and then retracted due to extraordinary complaints from the user base. Dice ended up throwing a lot of invested time and resources away to appease a user base determined to voice its displeasure with a Web 2.0 redesign.

Roblimo, CmdrTaco, and CowboyNeal were the ones who forged Slashdot's editorial policy and, by so doing, indelibly shaped the character of Slashdot at its peak.

Today, thoughtless shitposting and unoriginal trolling of anonymous (and some pseudonymous) Slashdot users has driven away all but the most hardy (or desperate) of Slashdot readers. Slashdot today seems to be an endlessly burning tire fire. I'm grateful the current /. thread for Roblimo is so far civil. [0]

But there was a time when its moderation policies and commitment to anonymity generated insight and humor. Even now, Slashdot has a hackerish mean streak that can yield endlessly entertaining threads full of puns, jokes, and in-jokes and if there is anything I wish HN had more of it is an understanding that iconoclastic juvenile humor can play an important discursive role in conversations of technology, society, and culture.

I only rarely visit Slashdot these days due to the toxicity of its users' comments (I can't bring myself to hide comments moderated to -1 for the same reasons that I "showdead" here on HN).

I am forever indebted to the original Slashdot team, the Slashdot community and, on this occasion, especially Robin Miller for providing a platform where I could learn from others, express my opinions, and keep abreast of geek culture.

Roblimo, you will be missed.

[0] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin-robl...

EDIT: typos and small changes here and there

"e.g. "Had Netcraft confirmed it?", "Only old people ______", "IN SOVIET RUSSIA $NOUN $VERBs YOU", etc."

Sorry to point out that you forgot grits and Natalie Portman, of whom some /. users seemed to have a not quite healthy obsession.

Else than that your comment is spot on.

I, for one, welcome our new inside-joke-forgetting overlords

I'd like to see a Beowolf cluster of those.

> As a result, Slashdot was renowned and reviled for its sometimes predictable and frequently appropriate inside jokes

One nice thing was Slashdot votes were categorized, and in your preferences you could add a negative modifier to "funny" comments and have all the repetitive meme stuff sorted to the bottom.

I don't know if it's true of current slashdot, but one aspect of "golden age" slashdot that I have found lacking in HN was the focus on software in terms of ethics.

This was probably because slashdot used to be very intertwined with the rise of open source and Linux. People were altruistic in discussions of these things. It's a big contrast here to see, for example, that references to someone like Stallman are usually mocking or prefaced with the idea that he's a nut.

But even there there was a bit of a break when Stallman insisted (does he still?) that Linux be referred to as GNU/Linux as its kernel would be worthless without the GNU userland. People in classic Slashdot were fans of Free/Open source, but in conflicts between Linus and others, Linus came first.

And Stallman is wrong in his GNU/Linux naming crusade, because it ignores a whole lot of non-GNU components in any modern Linux distro, even the fully-Free ones like gNewSense. X, for example, has never been a GNU project.

I scraped a representative set of Slashdot comments a few years ago and it was notable that only the users in the 100K to 300K UID block were very active with a progressive decline over the years. AC posts picked up as mobile became more common but that wasn't enough to compensate for the loss of logged in comments. Projecting forward, it was clear that the core commenters would age out completely by 2022-ish. That is when I expect Slashdot to go belly up.

When I referred to smart ass HN comments in my later reply, this is definitely one of the better examples :) Awesome stats and fabulous insight, thanks for sharing!

(And thanks for scraping Slashdot for inexplicable reasons)

Y Combinator used to ask for your Slashdot handle as part of your application for startup funding. Slashdot was assumed to be the place where technies chatted, taking over from Usenet before it. Interestingly, by 2010, Y Combinator had switched to asking for Facebook and Twitter IDs. I don't know what they ask for today.

For the younger of you here, think Slashdot.

Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008.

Suddenly, the Web feels older.

P.S. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin-robl...

It’s easy to forget both how small the Linux/open source world was back then and also how big a source of news, commentary and community Slashdot, NewsForge etc were.

Thanks roblimo.

Fun, crass, friendly. Met him at a Knight Foundation event in Miami. Kevin Marks, if you are reading this, you needed a ride to BarCamp and this is who we hitched a ride with.

Slashdot thread:

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin-robl...

This is sad news. However, on the flip side, finding out that Linux Journal is back from the dead is heartwarming. I hadn't caught that bit of news previously.

Sad news. I remember refreshing /. multiple times on 9/11, and also getting my first goatse link.

RIP Rob.

Roblimo, thank you for being a huge part of my introduction to geek culture. RIP

His byline accompanied many of my early adventures in Linux and Open Source.

Feel a bit like this deserves a Hacker News black bar. Reading Slashdot back in the day, Roblimo, CmdrTaco - those were good times. I was at the early bit of my career then, and being part of communities like Slashdot, Sourceforge, etc. were instrumental in helping me grow and more importantly learn about the constant changes in our field - so to me, these folks are also heroes of the Internet as much as some of the founders - for example, people like Vint Cerf, or Tim Berners Lee. Maybe in a slightly different way, but heroes of our communities none-the-less. RIP.

I find it unproductive to think about what HN should/should not do, but I just wanted to echo your sentiment. Roblimo, hemos, CmdrTac (who posts here sometimes... condolences if you're reading) had big and positive impacts on my personal professional development with software and open source. I am very grateful to them.

As crass as Rob was, he'd never get to post here on HN.

Keep that in mind while you get rich off the back of his work, YC.

???

I think he's pointing out that many (most? all?) unicorns are built atop open source software that only exists because of a significant counter-cultural struggle that happened in the 80s and 90s.

I still remember when the idea of running a free software stack was considered deeply weird.

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