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Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

I don't visit /. anymore, but definitely grew up on it. I don't think you can understate the impact it had on a generation of geeks. Especially when it comes to Open Source, I think /. was incredibly important in educating people on a concept, history and philosophy many of us take for granted now.

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.

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One of my favorite memories from /. was refreshing to see a new version of the kernel was available. You'd spend a few hours downloading it, compiling, and reboot. Usually there were no new features you wanted, no bugs fixed, just the idea of being on the bleeding edge was "cool" enough.

+1 this. remember doing this when i was 12 or 13 in late 90s/early 00s. /. made it exciting to be a geek.

being on a rolling release distro means you still get the thrill of running a bleeding-edge kernel :) and no, i never really outgrew that.

Now everyone uses macbooks... Oh how the times have changed.

Yeah, but most of us who grew up and started using MacBooks still run Linux on our servers, we still that bit of /. inside us :)

... and the same GNU tools on our MacBooks.

Wow, jesus, dammit.

Not everyone... ;-) Linux on the desktop since 97. I've tried Windows, OS X, and nothing can replace the productivity I get from Linux.

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.

I'd wager that more nerds run Linux on the desktop (or laptop) now than they did back when Slashdot was getting started. The biggest loser of developer mindshare in the years since has been Windows.

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".

One of the most amazing /. pieces ever: Neal Stephen's interview (http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/Neal-Stephenson-R...). And some of the comments are as hilarious as the interview.

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.

Thanks for the Stephenson link. Great reading.

Interestingly, it's those changes that eventually drove me away.

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.

Actually it was Hacker News that directed me away from /.

pg's essay on Slashdot -> reddit -> Hacker News.

I think a lot of people have a similar history with slashdot. I still ocationally go back but reading his fairwell and by his partner Hemos (2)'s reply reminded me of the best parts of Slashdot.

PS: Ok, I admit it. I found the "you must be new here." reply really funny.

Hell, it was targeted at me, and I found it hilarious.

Thanks for all that you have done as well Hemos. Slashdot was my home from about '98 to '03 and I have more cherished memories from it, than any site since.

> I think /. was incredibly important in educating people on a concept, history and philosophy many of us take for granted now.

It seems important geek-culturally too, especially w.r.t. a certain kind of humor.

Well put sir. I "grew up" on Slashdot as well (started reading circa 1998 as I recall) and although it's definitely declined, there was a "golden age" of Slashdot when the comments were far more interesting than the articles, which made the site worthwhile. Doesn't diminish what Slashdot was though.

Although it's been a while since I read /. regularly I did find myself being impressed by all the low UIDs in that discussion.

Saying that you can't understate its importance may be understating its importance.

Ya, missed that before the edit deadline went by. Whoops.

The comments were valuable in part because the moderation system was the first really good implementation... this was a huge win, and it's really sad that all other discussion sites haven't learned from it (slashcode is open source, so it's not a complete black-box).

slashcode is open source Perl, so it's not a complete black-box, but some might consider it an obfuscated-box.

The Slashcode book documented the moderation system and its design principles almost a decade ago.

Obfuscated because it's Perl?

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