Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot
meta.slashdot.org
meta.slashdot.org
And hot grits aside, it really did set the bar for intelligent discussion. /. was the first site where the comments were always more valuable than the articles. RTFA's were common, sure, but so was incredible insight and inside knowledge. That's what made it all so addictive.
I remember hitting refresh constantly on /. during 911. Personally, I found it the best source of information anywhere, though you had to have your own sanity filter on as well.
Thanks cmdrtaco, and congratulations on a real legacy. For me at least, /. is mostly replaced now, but that doesn't diminish what it was.
PS: Ok, I admit it. I found the "you must be new here." reply really funny.
Slashdot will always be home to me. I haven't visited my real home town in over a decade, and sadly, /. is headed towards the same fate.
But, no one (in their right mind) is using Mac OS on the server, and any developer with a successful website has a lot more servers than they have laptops or desktops, so I reckon they're more of a "Linux user" than a "Mac user".
It seems important geek-culturally too, especially w.r.t. a certain kind of humor.
I, too, read /. in the late 90s and up to around 2005, when I became more interested in other things, and other sites began making the changes that /. (and presumably CmdrTaco) were resistant to.
I also remember trying to read the source and muttering over the innumerable lines of cryptic Perl.
It's a really dumb thing, but being able to type: http://slashdot.org/~blhack and see how my comments were doing karma wise was really important to me. For a young, budding geek, the karma was valuable feedback on how well I was contributing.
A tiny change to http://slashdot.org/~blhack/comments was just...annoying. Typing that first URL was something that I did probably 15 times a day; having it change was annoying. Like if for some ridiculous reason, gnu decided to change "ls" to "ks" or something. Tiny, but still annoying.
Then they kept screwing with the comments system. Reading the comments at "3" was part of my daily routine.
Yeah, I can change it back in preferences, but it feels like every time I try to get back into /., I have to spend 20 minutes hunting around for a way to get it back to usable.
To me, when slashdot started changing things, it felt like there is a bar that I've been going to for a decade, but the owner recently decided to change the interior design.
My bar is gone. The same people still go there, but the building has changed. It's not the same thing anymore.
Eventually, it seemed like a lot of the people left too.
For all its downsides, Slashdot is a quite interesting experiment imo.
In terms of form: It was one of the first (the first?) widely read tech blogs, in the sense of something that posted about technology in reverse chronological order, with a comments section below it (the comments section was even threaded). The idea of having users submit stories and write blurbs was also fairly novel, and has led to several different directions. Kuro5hin and MetaFilter took it in one direction, expanding from blurbs to more general kinds of article submissions (and Kuro5hin switched to voting rather than editorial curation), while Reddit/Digg/HN took it in the opposite direction, paring it down to link submissions with no blurb (again with voting).
In terms of content, imo it was a main way, especially in the late 90s, that a generation of tech people were introduced to things like the EFF, free software, problems of software patents, driver support for Linux, hardware hackability, and other such techno-liberty type things. Those predated Slashdot, of course, but it sort of crystallized a community on the web, alongside those that had previously been organized mainly around mailing lists, Usenet, etc. It also gained considerable mindshare for those ideas from a broader set of readers who weren't necessarily "activists".
Last time I went to the website I was surprised it was still online and I felt really sad when I realized the frontpage submissions were weeks old.
I feel old now, missing the 90s pre-bubble internet and I am sad I was just a few years too late to that party back then. sigh
Yep, I felt really great that day.
I was one of the "cool kids" who switched from Slashdot to K5 back when it started (back then we had 3 digit K5 id numbers, now we have Klout scores)
I stopped visiting it, but I am curious why it seems to have half died, but is still running. What's the story there?
I think it's a great compromise: Get karma, you get a slight, but not overpowering, visibility boost. Lose karma or post anonymous, and you get a slight, but not overpowering, visibility malus. Capping the range of post ratings at -1 and 5 ensures that nothing ever truly gets voted into oblivion. Oh yes, and you can post anonymous -- even when logged in! How cool is that.
Rob will be missed.
Reddit is a prime example of a simple karma system going off the deep end. Instead of reinforcing good behavior, the trend is now that a substantial majority of the community competes for karma score. The noise level has increased sharply over the previous years such that the "popular reddits" are now in the same domain as Digg or 4chan. (Thankfully subreddits such as proggit are still an excellent source of information.)
I think karma works here at HN because it is a hidden score (to avoid the Reddit scenario) and the community heavily discourages low-quality posts. In a sense it relies directly on the userbase mentality and could easily be negated by a change in demographics. (Hopefully we maintain a high signal:noise ratio...)
/. meta moderation rewards users for moderating "correctly" and it doesn't consider the sum input of all users. It's not something that every community could or should adopt, but it certainly seems to have prevented a large fluctuation in community quality for well over a decade. It's also really awesome that comments are not just quantitatively scored, but also have qualitative tags.
Both you and Rob have effected the evolution of the Web as well as how we consume our news in more ways than we'll ever know.
That's only recently been the case, and the majority of the HN community still seems to be against it. If anything I've noticed more low-quality comments that haven't been downvoted lately, but that could easily, as you suggest, be a result of changing demographics and not connected with hidden karma. Unfortunately, as any community grows larger there will be a lowering of overall quality, though the number of high-quality comments may remain the same. It's the perception of lower quality that drives away the best members, so a preponderance of low-quality comments obscuring a number of very good ones can have a disastrous feedback effect.
I recall reading that part of pg's decision to start HN was as an experiment in entropy-avoidance. To that end, he has never sought to grow HN's traffic beyond that which the community could absorb. Now that HN is constantly mentioned in blogs, techcrunch, on facebook and g+, that might not be a viable strategy anymore. I eagerly await the changes he has in store for HN.
As for reddit's karma system being broken: that's not the problem. It's the demographic. The karma system works great in subreddits with a good community, and terribly in some of the larger subreddits with more of a 4chan/facebook crowd. Determining visibility by voting is only a problem when the voters are idiots. Also, as much as the HN community (many of them current and former redditors) may decry the devolution of reddit's overall quality, we really aren't the target audience. Reddit is a business that makes money through growth, and the overall reduction in quality has coincided with a huge surge in popularity and profitability. That's no accident. We may not like it anymore, but that's not an indictment of their business model or strategy.
Taco's farewell (and Hemos' reply in comments) really brought to me back why I liked Slashdot in the first place back in 1998- an editorial voice curating interesting tech stories.
That editorial voice was important to me in 1998, as I was in college for CS and was really uninformed about things like (as _delirium notes in this thread) the EFF, the RIAA, open source software, The Many Uses of Linux, etc. I compare that to today when I just scan lists of links on reddit or HN and pick out the items that interest me. The editorial voice was a good starting point for me- it directed me to interesting things that I couldn't have fathomed. As I grew into my techy career and interests, I needed it less and less.
I hope it's not viewed as complaining or whatnot, but I do wonder if anyone else avoids Slashdot in 2011 almost purely because of the commenters' obnoxiousness. I always get a picture of sysadmin-like greybeards pounding away furiously at their keyboards the moment anyone suggests that some software, somewhere be written in something other than C or perl. Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was (and "-5, Troll"? shudder.) And for that I thank you.
In a lot of interesting varieties! Some even sort of artistic, and some precursors of later SomethingAwful/4chan/internet-meme types of things.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Slashdot editor Rob Malda resigned from his editorship this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the HN community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to geek culture. Truly an internet icon.
I do as well, but I also keep reminding myself "This is Hacker News, not Slashdot." And so I down-vote people who post memes and the typical /. off-topic crap. I just always take comfort in knowing that, when I want that stuff, Slashdot is still around.
On the very few occasions when I've returned, I've also really, really disliked the adjustments to the comment filtering and viewing - looks ugly and seems quite confusing. Like others, I do think they had an excellent moderation system that no one else seems to have matched since.
With you on the switch to HN as well. I deleted /. from my bookmarks a few years back and have probably visited twice in the last year just to see if it's still alive.
I'll be impressed if Hacker News can avoid the problems popularity seems to bring.
In the last 14 years, Slashdot has covered so many amazing events: The explosion of Linux. The rise of Google. The return of Apple. The Dot Com Bubble. The DMCA. 9/11. Wars. Elections. Numerous successful Shuttle Launches and one Disaster. Scientific Breakthroughs galore. Cool toys. Web2.0! Social Networking. Blogging! Podcasting! Micro-Blogging! The Lord of the Rings being filmed and an entire trilogy of new Star Wars. OMG Ponies!! So many moments that I could run this paragraph for hours with moments where we shared something important, meaningful, or just stupid. But the most important to me was my marriage proposal to Kathleen. Slashdot has posted Over 114,000 stories so far. And there will be many more to come. I just won't be the one picking them.
So it's really the opposite: Slashdot was unprepared for bursting of this magnitude, but able to react reasonably quickly to combat the unpreparedness. Other sites were probably more prepared (CNN.com) but once the load exceeded their preparations, it took them a while to, you know, get permission from the big boss to make the site static and otherwise react. CNN and other major sites did get their act together in fairly short order, actually - it's not at all the case that they were down for an extended period - they figured things out pretty quickly, just not quite as quickly as Slashdot.
Slashdot was a blog before the word 'blog' was coined. A universal shared experience, in my case for literally half a lifetime.
I think the high point of that period was the announcement of the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base. Nowadays, itt is hard to imagine the need for all the stories on how to convince your boss to use this software some dude in Finland wrote.
Slashdot also championed everything2.com, kind of a proto-wiki.
The low point was all the trolling in the article about death of W. Richard Stevens, which lead to much of the moderation code that needed to be put in place.
Rob's run at slashdot was pioneering and hugely influential. I look forward to his next project.
I disagree. It has a fundamental problem of earlier posts having far more chances to go +5 than those posted later. Something that is handled far better on HN that starts newer posts at the top of the comment page and lets them sink down.
Yet, for all its failings, it was an impressive starting point that led the way for a lot of others, and was massively influential in a way no single site seems to have become since.
While Jobs' resignation is big corporate news, CmdrTaco's might be bigger community news - the guy was "one of us." His site was one of the first online communities and their slanted (according to some) point of view was what spun off other hacker/nerd sites.
I will admit that I'll miss Rob Malda at Slashdot - his name there on the posts made me feel at home, someplace familiar.
So long and thanks for all the fun.
I haven't seen him lately but CmdrTaco used to attend startup related events. One of the early Slashdot crew, Kurt DeMaagd, is now an assistant professor at Michigan State.
My world view has been shaken. Best of luck & thanks for the good times CmdrTaco. I wore out F5 keys on that site :)
user: cowboyneal pass: cowboyneal
Anyone else?
But the relevance of Slashdot as a site has been eclipsed, first by Digg, then by Reddit and HN. The network effect is part of it. The technology is part of it. There's some je ne sais quoi about these newer sites; maybe they'll be replaced by some other, more minimalist social news platform in the future.
I remember the episode of The Screen Savers when Kevin Rose did a segment about Slashdot - and even hinted at morphing the concept more toward what he created with Digg (giving users more power to source stories - voted up purely on their merits).
/. has definitely had a big impact in the way we obtain our news (more targeted, and with social interaction). But I, like most people here, I imagine, left it long ago in favor of Digg, Reddit, or HN.
Reddit seems to have been able to create many successful smaller communities around sub-reddits.
It's another lesson that trying to be all things to all people usually satisfies no one.
I was a voracious reader of Slashdot in the early years until I had an epiphany when reading the They Might Be Giants interview in 2000. I realized that the collective geek mindset was rooted more in fantasy than reality. Posters were so desperately wanting the TMBG guys to be off-the-wall wacky and absurdist, but really it was more that the two John's were just doing their own thing, and that thing was outside the realm of normal music. Yet no one picked up on it.
I couldn't read Slashdot after that. The geek fantasy fog was too thick and pervasive and self-referential.
I think there is a moral here about not resting on your laurels and never thinking no one can catch up with you.
Did he actually do that, or just told the only way he personally knew how to do it?
October 2004 for the interview and Digg launched in December.
I was in my friend's living room at the time, sitting near the laptop on the end of an ADSL connection that served his blog.
"Ummmm.... I think i've done a baaaaad thing."
That lil' ol' laptop was absolutely hammered for the next day, even after moving the images, etc., on to 'proper' servers and making the site static.
I had to groan a bit at this gratuitous reference in an otherwise tight novel. :)
Things I remember (most of these are pre-2000):
Netscape being open sourced (and the role Slashdot played in that)
Oracle shipping on Linux
The hidden Slashdot threads (wah_is_cool anyone?)
Discovering a input validation hole that let me post a "Powered by Windows NT" image in the middle of a thread about the original CERT XSS attack warning (http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html)
Signal11 vs CmdrTaco (http://www.kuro5hin.org/images/kuro5hin_Sig11_vs_Taco.html)
The K5 split
http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...;
Slashdot built the community that a lot of people still have close ties to. I'll always remember reading my first few Bruce Perens posts, and adding him (and a few others) to my 'Friends' List.
I'll also never forget listening to their marketing person talk about how they could 'bitchslap' negative comments (about the advertiser) to -2 so that nobody could see them.
Slashdot is a great place for the folks who have been in the industry for any amount of time. It was always a trusted and stable source of news, reposts, and April Fool's Pranks. I will continue to think that this is something that he did on his own free will and volition, and not something that was forced upon him by the powers that be at GeekNet.
Ann Arbor, MI isn't the Linux Hot-Spot -- nor is it a mecca for new and exciting technology jobs. I hope he enjoys his time off and finds something that gives him the love and satisfaction that slashdot gave him over the last decade.
Citation, please?
Rob Malda's oft-cited bitchslap comment was about a script he had written to deal with Slashdot's most annoying commenters (people who used their own scripts to submit thousands of duplicate comments simultaneously), and had nothing to do with advertisers or marketing or denigrating products. In fact at the time the comment was written, I don't believe Slashdot had a marketing person outside of Jeff Bates.
What are the underlying linchpins of the SlashDot community? How would you rebuild it? What steps would you take, what processes would you put in place, what technology would you use?
I would never want to create a SlashDot clone, nor would I expect anyone could clone SlashDot. However, there are very important lessons in community building, management and infrastructure planning that Rob is an expert at.
I've recently starting reading again after long time away. It's good again!
Well, this is going to be one short CV and cover letter... "I built slashdot" should be plenty enough, really.
He's comfortably well-off, but is looking for a change. 14 years is a lot of time to dedicate to one project, especially when it's mature and stable like Slashdot is. I imagine he's going to take a well-deserved break and then like a lot of tech entrepreneur's, come back for round two and start another company.
Unlike the hardware maker, I think I almost feel a tinge of emotion here.. think I'll go troll on slashdot a bit today, seems like the right thing to do.